Migration, collective remittances and religion: the growth of Alevi worship places (cemevi) in the rural homeland

ABSTRACT

The influence of transnational engagements on emigrant villages has attracted noticeable scholarly attention, however, the religious dimension of the link between migration and remittances remains largely unexplored. Providing an ethnographic study exploring the dynamics and meanings involved in the growth of cemevis in villages, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon, something that has received less attention in studies of migration and transnationalism. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of the British Alevi community in London and their villages in the Afşin-Elbistan region in Maraş province in Turkey, the paper discovers how and to what extent these transnational interactions shape places and social and religious spaces in the villages. The paper describes rural cemevis built by migrants as “remittance cemevis’ that form a channel between the diaspora and homeland and allow migrant Alevis to expand their role in the village community and influence social and cultural life.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• diaspora
• homeland
• religious remittances
• religious change
• Alevis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr David Garbin, Dr Janroj Yilmaz Keles and Dr Kumru Berfin Emre and the reviewers of this journal for their valuable feedback and advice and Dr Derrick Wright for his thorough proofreading and useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The doctoral study obtained ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee (REC) of the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR) at the University of Kent.

Notes

1 Cemevi is a Turkish word (“mala cem” in Kurdish) which means “cem house” in English. Cem means a religious gathering, the fundamental worshipping practice of Alevis. In this article, I shall use the term “cemevi” due to its wider use among research participants as well as the wider Alevi population. One can hear the word “cemevi” in any English or Kurdish (including Kirmancki/Zazaki) conversation without translation.

2 On 6 February 2023, a devastating (Mw 7.8) earthquake struck Maraş/Gaziantep and surrounding areas, including southern and central Turkey and northern and western Syria. There was widespread damage in such a large area and an estimated 14 million people, 16 per cent of Turkey's population, were affected, with around 1.5 million people left homeless and more than fifty thousand confirmed dead by March 2023. As Maraş was the epicentre of the earthquake, the fieldwork area has been devastatingly affected and thousands have died. I would like to express my deepest sympathies for all of the earthquake survivors, including my participants who lost their family members, relatives and neighbours.

3 All participants were informed regarding the aims and methods of the research and how the data collected would be used, especially the procedures concerning confidentiality and data anonymisation. The majority of the interviews were conducted in Turkish and all the quotes in Turkish have been translated by myself. All the photographs were taken by me. Since ethnographic work is conducted in natural settings, control of the ethnographer over the fieldwork process is limited (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995) and as the sites and events observed and photographed were public spaces, it was not possible to inform every individual about my research to secure their consent. However, I gained the consent of the administrative boards for the cemevi events and that of the family or the organisation committee for other kinds of events like weddings or village festivals and introduced myself to every individual I communicated with and informed them about my research.

4 One of these rare examples is Kötüre where emigrant villagers have funded infrastructural projects. Kötüre is one of the pioneering villages that led the wave of migration from the region to the UK.

5 The massacre took place between 19 and 26 December 1978. It was planned in advance as the doors of Alevi houses were marked with red crosses weeks before the attack. In the event, 101 people were killed, 176 were injured, and 552 houses and 289 workplaces were destroyed (Jongerden 2003; Sinclair-Webb 2003). The UK Alevi community includes many individuals who have either lost relatives, friends and neighbours in the massacre or are connected to those who have so that the traumatic effects of the massacre are vividly engraved on the collective memory of British Alevis.

6 I would like to pay my respects to the late chairman of the London Cemevi, Tugay Hurman, whose untimely death represents such a loss to the British Alevi community, his friends and associates. I had close contact with him during the fieldwork and received detailed information and assistance. His valuable insights and comments besides his friendliness have made a supportive impression on this research.

7 10 August 2017, London Cemevi, Dalston. Translated.

8 Despite some suggestions that some old specific buildings existed, I shall argue that the current model of the cemevi is an urban tradition that emerged as a result of migration and is the spatial marker of urban Alevism.

9 There are rare cases that do not however invalidate this generalisation.

10 6 October 2018, London Cemevi in Wood Green. Translated.

11 President Erdogan’s visit to a cemevi is a recent example of this. He attended a Muharram fast-breaking dinner at the Hüseyin Gazi Cemevi in Ankara (8 August 2022), though his visit was widely criticised by Alevi organisations. See https://www.duvarenglish.com/alevi-groups-criticize-erdogans-cemevi-visit-find-it-insincere-news-61113. When this article was under review, the Turkish government had just launched a new bill establishing an Alevi cultural agency attached to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. This step engendered heavy criticism from the wider Alevi community and was seen as another refusal to recognise Alevis as a religious community since such an agency under the Culture and Tourism Ministry recognises cemevis as Alevi cultural centres and invests them with no religious meaning. See https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/11/turkish-government-criticized-creating-new-alevi-cultural-agency.

12 One may be surprised at seeing a mosque and a cemevi together since the villages in the region generally show homogeneity in terms of religion, either Alevis or Sunnis but not both. However, Tapkıran is a mixed village in the Elbistan region that has Alevi and Sunni inhabitants and hosts both a mosque and a cemevi located at different entrances to the village. There is no tension between Alevi and Sunni villagers as most of the village inhabitants are relatives but some practice Alevism using the cemevi, others practice Islam and pray in the mosque. It was said that the whole village population used to be Alevi until a dispute between some of the villagers and their dede (Alevi cleric) resulted in their conversion into, in their words, “Sunnism”.

13 An exception is Demircilik Cemevi which remains active the whole year as there is a non-migrant population in the village to use the cemevi.

14 Kırk is a Turkish word that means forty. Kırk meal means the meal of forty: the ritual of the fortieth day after a death ending the mourning period for the family. The family of the deceased prepare a meal to share with the community.

15 4 August 2018, Kötüre village. Translated.

16 The use of Quranic prayers in Alevism may seem puzzling here. On the one hand, particularly in Turkey, perhaps local Alevis feel the need to fit in with their Sunni village neighbours; and on the other, for some the recitation of prayers from the Quran is also seen as a tradition that they have performed for a long time. Dertli Divani, an Alevi poet and a dede interviewed by Akdemir, claims that “Alevism suffered from cultural erosion, and the community needs to recover from it” (cited in Akdemir 2016a, 246). He explains how such customs became infused into Alevi culture:

The path has come from those days to today, there is a tradition that has been going on, but because of the pressure gradually, we looked like others. Especially in the cities, people needed hocas because they don’t know anything about their own teaching, and they didn’t want others to say, “They didn’t even pray Fatiha [an essential ritual prayer of Muslims] and buried their dead like an animal corpse”. And as time goes by, they thought this is how it is supposed to be. Our funeral rituals are unique to us.

This quotation from Dertli Divani is from fieldwork conducted by Aysegul Akdemir (cited in Akdemir 2016a, 247).

17 For a more detailed account of this, see Gültekin (2019).