From ‘yol’ to diasporic Alevism: migration and religious change among Alevis in Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how a religion ‘on the move’ responds to the challenges of diasporic conditions and provides an understanding of how migrant religions articulate and orient their ritual universe and social and organizational structures. Drawing on research using ethnographic fieldwork on the British Alevi community in London, the article examines how Alevism is lived, ritualized and practised in migration settings to explore the formation and experience of diasporic religion. The religious structures established through historical processes have encountered many challenges and have updated and re-oriented in new settings. Such structural changes, although first provoked by rural–urban migration, shifted and ripened in the diaspora. This migration-driven institutional development has emphasized an institutional and spatial shift since Alevism is now centred on cemevis (cem houses), a characteristic that substantially distinguishes post-migration Alevism from its old pre-migration form. The institutional and spatial transition has replaced spiritual charisma with bureaucratic power legitimized through cemevis. The article demonstrates that the migration and diaspora experience has profoundly transformed ritualized Alevi culture.