ABSTRACT
This essay examines the connections between folksongs and religious songs of several Turkic-speaking peoples living in a huge territory. The results can be summed up in short: folk Islam often borrows the melodies of folksongs. Its inverse is rarely seen, and was only observed among Karachay-Balkars.
As for folk religions, I discuss the ones about which I have the most extensive and detailed information, i.e., the music of Anatolian Sufi groups like Alevi, Bektashi, and Tahtadji. I also introduce some important events in these Sufi groups, the rituals, and also their most eminent poets. Besides songs in Sufi ceremonies, I also deal with melodies belonging to Sunni Turks, e.g., pre-Islamic melodies that have become secularized and were preserved by Sunni Turkmens, Ramadan melodies among Kyrgyz people, and the zikir songs of the Karachay-Balkars.
Apart from drawing comparisons between religious songs and folksongs, I also situate them within a musical background in order to highlight the ways in which the melodies find parallels within the musical world of the Turkic peoples. In the tradition of certain Turkic peoples, the songs in both folk and religious repertoires are relatively formulaic and repetitive (Azeri and Turkmen). In other cases, a folk repertoire that can be traced back to a few melodies exists alongside a rich religious repertoire (as in the case of the Tahtadji people), or both the folk and religious repertoire are very diverse and multicolored (as in the case of the Bektashi people).
