ABSTRACT
This chapter ought to begin with a disclaimer and a clarification: its title may be taken to suggest that there existed Mawlawiyya and Bektashiyya ṭarīqas in the thirteenth century, either in Anatolia, or elsewhere. That was not the case. For the thirteenth century, we cannot speak of Sufi ‘ṭarīqas’ in the same sense as the full-fledged ṭarīqas of the fifteenth century. It was the eponymous founders – Hacı Bektaş Veli (d. c.1271) and Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273) who lived during this period. 2 However, there were certainly powerful groups of individuals surrounding them who carried on their work. For example, in the case of Rūmī, the leadership of the Sufi congregation in Konya was passed on to his successor Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī, and Rūmī’s legacy as a poet was continued by his son, Sulṭān Walad (d. 1312), who composed three works in the style of his father’s famous Mathnawī. His Ibtidāʾ-nāma contains several hundred lines in Arabic, Greek, and Turkish in addition to Persian, which is worth mentioning as part of the setting of this chapter in a volume that seeks to shed light on the multi-lingual, religiously eclectic, and politically decentralised landscape of thirteenth-century Anatolia. Like his father Rūmī, Sulṭān Walad was close to the rulers. He composed panegyric poetry as well, and we shall return below to the relationship of these men to the political powers to be. They need to be taken into account as an important factor in the Islamisation of Anatolia, though, as we shall also see, their agency was only one among several factors in this process.
