Abstract
Musahiplik is the tradition of fictive kinship which has long been practiced within both Turkish and Kurdish Alevi communities in Turkey. Musahip is a special term which means blood brother used in Alevi community. The tradition of Musahiplik may be defined as a religious fraternity between two men who are not relatives. And at the same time, if these two men marry their wives also have relation of Musahip. The fraternity is dedicated to a religious authority called Dede. It is an institution of social characteristic that is proper for originated from nomad or semi-nomad societies and of recent urban settlement. This custom is one of the most important religious practices of Alevis in Turkey. In a ceremony in the presence of a Dede, the two couples make a life-long commitment to care for the spiritual, emotional, and physical needs of each other and their children. The ties between couples who have made this commitment are at least as strong as it is for blood relatives. So much so, that Musahiplik is often called spiritual brotherhood (manevi kardeslik). In this article, drawing on my own research data, I shall first discuss how the Musahiplik is practiced in the field in Turkey, and provide a brief outline of their meaning in Alevi theology. I shall then present the current situation of Musahiplik and popular beliefs and discuss the underlying motives of the religious actors involved. Finally, I shall contextualize these cases within a broader theoretical and comparative perspective on fictive kinship from the point of view of Cultural Anthropology.
Highlights
The recent proliferation of television, radio, periodicals, and internet has provided a habitat for the evolution of native intellectuals
According to Mélikoff, müsahiplik is on the other word “the brotherhood of afterlife”
Every Alevi community has a hierarchical relationship composed of Dede (Master) and Talip (Disciple)
Summary
The recent proliferation of television, radio, periodicals, and internet has provided a habitat for the evolution of native intellectuals. Until a reliable survey has been conducted, all such Turkey’s population (in the region of 70 millions), even if the figure does turn out to be nearer 15 per cent, that would still mean that there are nine million Alevis in the Republic, a mass large enough to be of highly significant social and political importance [3] Both Kurdish and Turkish in terms of ethnic background, they are from the religious point of view markedly “heterodox”. They form sub-sections of the larger towns dominated by the Sunni form of mosque-worship, living in their own distinct parts of the community, in often rather uneasy relationship with the rest of the town [5] In this situation, when people begin to try to answer against questions such “what is Alevism?” or “who are the Alevis?” a lot of discourse and controversy concerning the Alevis or Alevism appears in Turkish society. As Kehl-Bodrogi mentions that one of the most important requirement to be an Alevi is to have a müsahip along with being an Alevi who is dependent on affinity as Alevi lineage [7]
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