CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Aksoy, Emine |
|---|---|
| Title | "WE WERE LEFTISTS ANYWAY"?: LEFT-WING POLITIZATION OF ALEVIS IN THE 1960s AND 1970s IN TURKEY |
| Summary | The primary aim of this thesis is to explore the strong left-wing tendency among Alevis during the left-right polarization in the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey. Additionally, this study examines how and why the Alevi youth devoted themselves to egalitarian revolutionary ideologies, took sides with the left, and became actively engaged in various leftist movements during this period. For this purpose, a qualitative study, through collecting memoirs and using semi structured in-depth interviews with eight Alevi people involved in the leftist movements during the 1960s and 1970s was conducted during my field research in Istanbul. Basically my interest during the interview was related to their socio-cultural background and how they encountered left propagandist materials, periodicals or literature with the intention of understanding how they were politicized within the left-wing. At the same time, Alevi religious poems and hymns, adapted to socialist class struggle, became common property of the left during these years. Re-interpretation of Alevi tradition and history was declared as the ideological source of the left. Therefore in this thesis, I seek not just to demonstrate this mutual relationship between the left and Alevis, but also to display how Alevism as a religious and traditional community politicized in the left by the1960s and 70s and how this politicized community transformed into an Alevi movement in the 1990s being based on religious differences. |
| Supervisor | Al-Bagdadi, Nadia; Trencsenyi, Balazs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/aksoy_emine.pdf |
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