Review article: Kurds, Zazas and Alevis

October 2020 Volume: 8, No: 2, pp. 371 – 381 ISSN: 2051-4883 e-ISSN: 2051-4891 www.KurdishStudies.net Article History: Received: 22 May 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33182/ks.v8i2.574 Review article: Kurds, Zazas and Alevis Martin van Bruinessen1 Celia Jenkins, Suavi Aydin & Umit Cetin, eds., Alevism as an Ethno- Religious Identity: Contested Boundaries, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2018, 130 pp., (ISBN 978-1-138-09631-8). Erdal Gezik & Ahmet Kerim Gültekin, eds., Kurdish Alevis and the Case of Dersim: Historical and Contemporary Insights, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019, 172 pp., (ISBN 978-1-4985-7548-5). Eberhard Werner, Rivers and Mountains: A Historical, Applied Anthropological and Linguistical Study of the Zaza People of Turkey Including an Introduction to Applied Cultural Anthropology, Nürnberg: VTR Publications, 2017, 549 pp., (ISBN 978-3-95776-065-4). Religious and linguistic minorities among the Kurds have often had an ambivalent relationship with the Kurdish movement and with Kurdish identity. Sunni Muslim speakers of Kurmanji or Sorani too have at times been willing to downplay ethnicity in the name of Muslim brotherhood with dominant Arab or Turkish state elites, but the emphasis on Islam has rarely led them to deny being Kurdish. For the minorities, on the other hand, Kurdish identity has been only one of several possible options, and political conditions have often strongly influenced which identity they prioritised. The Yezidis (Êzîdî) are a case in point: for a long time most Yezidis considered themselves as Kurds and were considered as Kurds by others – in fact it was mostly Yezidis who pioneered modern Kurdish literature and Kurdish broadcasting in Soviet Armenia – but during the past thirty years we could observe a notable move away from Kurdish identity towards a distinct Yezidi ethnicity. In the case of the Yezidis in Armenia, this process was strongly stimulated by Armenian nationalists; in Northern Iraq, 1 Martin van Bruinessen, Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Janskerhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. Copyright @ 2020 KURDISH STUDIES © Transnational Press London 372 Kurds, Zazas and Alevis especially in Sinjar, it received a strong impetus due to the occupation and genocide by ISIS. Two other groups whose Kurdishness has been contested during the past decades (and, in fact, since the early days of the Republic of Turkey) are the Alevis and Zazas. The communities themselves are divided over their self- definition, and for over a century state agencies have exerted various forms of pressure to increase the social distance between Alevi and Sunni Kurds as well as between speakers of Zazaki and Kurmanji. In a series of reports written in the 1930s and 1940s, Hasan Reşit Tankut, one of Turkey’s official “experts” on Eastern Turkey, argued that assimilation of the Kurds would be more feasible if the Alevis and Zazas were separated from the main body of Kurds and persuaded of their Turkish origins first.2 The military interventions of 1960 and 1980 were followed by military-sponsored publications differentiating Alevis and Zazas from Kurds and purporting to prove their Turkishness.3 Kurdish and Zaza Alevis have, like Yezidis, suffered oppression and discrimination by their Sunni neighbours as well as by the state and have traditionally felt they had little in common with Sunni Kurds. From the 1960s onwards, many of the educated youngsters rejected religion as the core of their identities and chose to define Alevism as an oppositional habitus, a cultural tradition, and a humanistic philosophy of life, which they shared with Turkish Alevis and expressed in participation in left-wing politics. Some were prominently active in the Kurdish movement and others, sharing their parents’ distrust of Sunni Kurds, defined themselves as universalist socialists and later came to think of the Alevis as a distinct ethnic group, separate from Turks as well as Kurds. In response to the state’s efforts to impose a conservative variety of Sunni Islam, the Alevi movement has increasingly focused on redefining the religious dimension of Alevi identity. Two recent edited volumes address various aspects of these identity struggles. The volume edited by Jenkins, Aydin and Cetin addresses questions of identity of the Alevis in the different contexts of Turkey and Britain. As the editors note in their introduction, speakers of Kurdish and Zaza constitute only a minority among the Alevis – they suggest a number of 3-5 million, out of 15-20 million Alevis and a similar number of Kurds in Turkey. These are as good guesses as any, but it may be relevant to add that the numbers 2 Tankut’s reports, along with various similar documents, are reproduced in Bayrak (1994). 3 A few examples include Fırat (1981), Başbuǧ (1984). Fırat’s book, originally written in 1945, was reprinted in 1960 with a foreword by Cemal Gürsel, the leader of that year’s coup. Other reprints followed after the 1971 and 1980 military coups. The institute that published both books in the early 1980s put out a whole series of similar contributions to what came to be called “anti-Kurdology.” See Anuk (2015), Bruinessen (2016). www.KurdishStudies.net  Van Bruinessen 373 of people who are willing to self-define as Kurds and/or Alevis have fluctuated considerably with changes in political circumstances. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe, as several contributions in the book observe, second-generation immigrants have been inclined to assert identities that their parents’ generation often tried to keep hidden. The editors’ concern is not specifically with Kurds but with identity processes of the larger Alevi community as a social formation that maintains boundaries separating it from other ethnic or religious communities. Suavi Aydın, Turkey’s leading anthropologist of ethnic and ethno-religious communities, contributes a conceptual chapter in which he argues against essentialist views of Alevism and, following Barth and Wimmer, looks at the boundaries and mechanisms of boundary maintenance that constitute Alevism as an ethno-religious identity. He emphasises the great diversity of local Alevi communities and the differential impact of processes of Islamisation, noting several communities that are now Sunni Muslim but preserve memories of their Alevi past. The constructivism of the ethnic boundary approach seems to be forgotten in the second part of the chapter, where Aydın gives a brief overview of the historical origins of Alevism in devotional texts associated with 13th to 15th-century popular mystical movements, the 16th-century Safavid movement, and the Bektashi Sufi order and sketches the changing attitudes of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic towards their Alevi subjects. The following chapter, by Omer Tekdemir, is an exercise in the application of political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s conceptual apparatus to Alevi identity struggles and has little new to offer in terms of empirical content. It is useful, however, as a guide to the relevant literature on Alevi organisation and political mobilisation. By contrast, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump’s chapter seeks to be very concrete and empirical in defining who the Alevis are and what they want (no anti- essentialism here!). As a scholar, Karakaya-Stump has made significant contributions to the historiography of Alevism with sophisticated analyses of little-known written sources held by East Anatolian ocak, families of hereditary Alevi religious leaders (2019). Here she writes as an Alevi political activist, inveighing against the various forms of oppression and discrimination to which Alevis have been subjected in Turkey, under the military-dominated governments of the 1980s and under AKP rule since 2003, and clearly restating the demands put forward by Alevi associations. Nimet Okan discusses the frequently made claim that Alevis distinguish themselves from Sunni Muslims by gender equality, based on fieldwork in a Turkmen Alevi community, the Anşabacılı, which is named for a female religious leader, Anşa Bacı. She finds that in spite of the symbolic value of Copyright @ 2020 KURDISH STUDIES © Transnational Press London 374 Kurds, Zazas and Alevis Anşa Bacı, who is a source of pride for the community, patriarchy remains alive and well. Neither in the cem ritual, nor in inheritance or in daily life are women treated as equals, while the discourse of gender equality as a marker of Alevi identity makes it in fact hard for women to complain. The last two chapters bring out the different yet interrelated processes of construction of Alevi identity in the Turkish and European contexts. Kumru Berfin Emre Cetin does this in her discussion of two satellite television channels that represent two competing visions of Alevism, Cem TV and Yol TV. The former, associated with the Cem Foundation, appears to seek the accommodation of Alevism in the semi-official ideology of the Turkish- Islamic synthesis. Its programs pay much attention to Central Asian Turkic Sufism and the Bektashi tradition of the Balkans, subjects compatible with the neo-Ottomanism of the ruling AKP. Yol TV, on the other hand, represents the oppositional voice of Alevism, highlighting multiculturalism and secular values rather than Turkish nationalism and accommodation with conservative Islam. Yol TV was established in Germany and voices of the diaspora have been well represented in its broadcasts; news programs are presented in Kurdish and Zazaki as well as Turkish. The final chapter, by Celia Jenkins and Umit Cetin, focuses on second- generation Kurdish Alevi immigrants in London, among whom there is a high incidence of underperformance in school, gang membership and suicide. The authors associate this with “negative identity” and low self- esteem – these youth are seen by outsiders as “sort of Turkish Muslims” but are neither “real” Turks nor “real” Muslims and yet know too little about Alevism to present a coherent self-image – and discuss an educational project designed to alleviate these problems. They took part in a pilot project, carried out in a number of schools, in which lessons on Alevism were added to the core curriculum of religion classes for all pupils, and report enthusiastically on parents’ and pupils’ responses to this initiative and the positive impact on the pupils’ overall school performance. This project, like a number of similar projects elsewhere in Europe – Alevi religious education as an elective subject in German schools, chairs of Alevi theology at several continental European universities – appears to show that in order to gain formal recognition, Alevis have needed to define their communal identity as religious rather than political or cultural. Dersim, since 1938 officially renamed Tunceli, is the most distinctive region of Alevi settlement. Tunceli is Turkey’s only province where Alevis, speaking Zazaki or Kurmanji, constitute the vast majority of the population. In the late Ottoman period, the mountains of Dersim had a reputation as the ultimate internal frontier, the last region where state authority had not been established. This was the reason for a series of military campaigns to subdue it, culminating in the genocidal operations of 1937-38. The religious beliefs www.KurdishStudies.net  Van Bruinessen 375 and practices of Dersim were reputed to be heterodox even by Alevi standards. Gezik and Gültekin’s volume is, to my knowledge, the first book on Kurdish Alevism or Dersim to appear in English. The editors have put together a wide-ranging set of essays by authors who are themselves of Dersimi origin and have previously made significant contributions to the remarkable surge in serious publications on the subject appearing in Turkey in the second decade of the millennium. Alişan Akpınar opens the volume with an analysis of what late Ottoman documents tell us of how the Ottoman statesmen perceived the Alevis of this region. Their main concern appeared to be that the Alevis, as a minority that had strayed from the mainstream of Islam, might be susceptible to efforts to convert them to Christianity and might join the Armenians in common action. Although they professed to be Muslims and loyal to the Empire, they were mistrusted; a request by Alevi tribes who wished to join the Hamidiye regiments was rejected. Focusing on a later period, Sabır Güler shows that Alevis have not always been associated with progressive politics, as many would have it. Analysing how Kurdish Alevis voted in the parliamentary elections from 1950 to 2015, he shows a more complex picture, with considerable support for conservative parties in the 1950s and 1960s, growing support for the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) during the 1960s, and fluctuating but generally high support for the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The first party that specifically targeted Alevi voters in the 1970s, the Union Party of Turkey (TBP), performed very poorly in Tunceli. The most remarkable electoral gains ever were made by the pro-Kurdish HDP, which in both 2015 elections won an absolute majority. At most times, people’s votes were only partly based on ideological preference. Patronage remained an important factor, as exemplified by Kamer Genç, who was elected as a delegate on the ticket of several ideologically different parties and later as an independent. The fact that the CHP has since 2010 been led by a person of Dersimi origin (Kemal Kılıçdaroǧlu) has strengthened this party’s performance in Tunceli, irrespective of its policies. After these historical chapters, the next sections of the book move to religion and anthropology. Erdal Gezik has elsewhere (2010, 2012, 2013) published important work on the belief system and social organisation of Dersim’s Alevism – or, as he prefers to call it in the local languages, Raa Haqi (Zazaki)/Riya Heqî (Kurmanji). Here he discusses the calendar of winter and spring festivals Gaǧan, Khizr, Black Wednesday and Hawtemal that break up the long winter period, conventionally reckoned as ninety or hundred days, into blocks of forty (chelle, conventionally the time period of a religious Copyright @ 2020 KURDISH STUDIES © Transnational Press London 376 Kurds, Zazas and Alevis retreat), twenty (“little chelle”) or ten. He offers explanations of why different communities, in Dersim and elsewhere in East Anatolia, celebrate the festivals at different dates and divide up time differently, and relates the underlying categories to Iranian tradition. In a balanced discussion of the beliefs, rituals and social organisation of Dersim’s Alevism, Dilşa Deniz takes position against the view that Alevism is a heterodox sect of Islam and presents it as a distinct religion with nature worship and ancestor worship as core elements and the cem or civat as its major collective ritual. The superficial layer of Arabic-derived names and terms is, in her view, not part of the religion proper and only served for protection against persecution. Much of the article consists of a thoughtful analysis of the complex system of religious authority that connects commoner (taliw) tribes with holy lineages (ocax) whose members may serve the taliw as spiritual guides and preceptors (raywer, pîr, murşîd) and themselves in turn also need a preceptor from another, or sometimes the same, ocax. She discusses the roles of the three types of religious authority and two forms of ritual kinship that strengthen social cohesion in the community, kirîvtî (kirvelik), which connects two families through sponsorship of a circumcision and misawîtî (musahiplik), in which two male friends and their spouses remain connected for life. None of these practices, obviously, are part of scripturalist Islam but we find the same or very similar practices among various other religious communities that have emerged in a Muslim environment, including the Yezidis and Ahl-i Haqq (Yaresan), many of whom also reject the association with Islam, as well as Sufi orders that insist on being Muslim. Debates about the relationship of Alevism with Islam have divided Alevi communities as well as Sunni opinion.4 Reform- or Salafi-minded Muslims reject Alevism as beyond the pale but tend to be equally critical of Sufism, which for many others constitutes the true spirit of Anatolian Islam. A more common Sunni attitude is to point out Islamic elements in Alevi tradition, conclude that Alevi communities have in the course of time moved away from formal Islam, and invite them to return to their true origins and embrace the teachings of the Qur’an. Some Alevi associations have opted to define Alevism as a branch of Islam and seek recognition with equal rights to those of the Sunni branch; others insist that it is an independent religion or philosophy and way of life. Alevi communities differ considerably in the degree to which they have undergone Islamising influences. Turkish Alevis, especially those affiliated with the descendants of Haji Bektash, have generally been more open to such influences than the Kurdish Alevis. 4A good overview of the debates in Sunni and Alevi circles, with a special emphasis on those Alevis rejecting the association with Islam and looking at late antiquity, Central Asian Turkish religion or Iranian Zoroastrianism/Mazdaeism for origins, is given by Bulut (1997). www.KurdishStudies.net  Van Bruinessen 377 Ahmet Kerim Gültekin looks at the Sunni-Alevi relationship from a very different perspective in his chapter on the semi-nomadic Şavak tribe. The Şavak, who in winter live in villages and towns in the southern part of the province and take their animals to the mountains in summer, are an interesting and distinctive part of the social fabric of Dersim. The tribe consists of two sections, one of which is Alevi and Kurmanji-speaking, the other Sunni and Turcoman (but speaking the same Kurmanji dialect). There is no intermarriage between these sections, but they do consider each other as members of a single tribe and there are instances where both sections act together, for instance in negotiating access to pastureland for their flocks. The Alevi Şavak express closeness to the other Alevi tribes of the region. The Sunni Şavak do not have a similar relationship with tribes in Dersim; outside the region, though, the Şavak are considered as a Turcoman tribe with some Kurdish Alevi hangers-on. One gathers, from Gültekin’s account, that it is mainly outsiders who attribute Turkish ethnicity to the Sunni Şavak, and that the shared Kurdish dialect (“Şavakça”), different from that of other tribes, is an important factor in the two sections’ sense of being a single tribe. Çiçek İlengiz has a chapter on the fascinating phenomenon of holy madmen in Dersim. The best-known of these, Şeywuşen (Seyid Huseyin), was a mentally deranged, homeless man whose eccentricities met with friendly tolerance, partly because he belonged to the most highly respected Kureyşan ocak. It was after his death that he began appearing in people’s dreams and that a cult focused on him emerged. People attributed prophecies and miracles to him and he was often referred to as one of the budela, saints mediating between everyday reality and the spirit world. The town of Tunceli has three statues of famous persons: Ataturk, Seyid Rıza (the leader of the 1937 uprising), and Şeywuşen but it is only at the last that people sometimes lit candles. İlengiz places her discussion of the cult in the context of popular beliefs and the major political events of Şeywuşen’s lifetime, the 1937-38 massacres and the 1980 military coup. The volume gives a good indication of the richness and variety of recent research on Dersim and Kurdish Alevism. Unfortunately it is marred by poor translation and language editing. In many passages I found it impossible to understand what the author meant. In some cases it helped to re-translate expressions to Turkish, but more often I had to guess or give up trying to understand the text altogether. It is laudable that this scholarship is made available in English, but one would wish that the authors had been helped to make their arguments in better English. Rivers and Mountains is a different book altogether. It is, to my knowledge, the second book in English entirely dedicated to the Zaza, after Mehmed Kaya’s The Zaza Kurds, which was reviewed in Kurdish Studies 3(1). The author, Eberhard Werner, came to the study of Zazaki and its speakers as a Copyright @ 2020 KURDISH STUDIES © Transnational Press London 378 Kurds, Zazas and Alevis Bible translator, and places himself in a long tradition of missionary involvement (which he calls “Christian Development Aid”) with the peoples of the region. Unlike his 19th-century predecessors, he spent little time in the region, making only two visits to the three main zones of Zaza settlement, and his acquaintance with their language and culture appears largely based on contacts in the Zaza diaspora in Germany and especially a small group of collaborators who are native speakers of Zazaki. Werner and his wife, Brigitte Werner, are affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which has developed a set of techniques for language description and translation and a comprehensive classification of the languages of the world but has often come under criticism for its missionary and “imperialist” agenda.5 SIL has been working on Zazaki for many years; the first book-length grammar of Zazaki was written by a SIL scholar, Terry Todd (1985), and SIL was involved in a number of later publications on Zazaki vocabulary, e.g. Hayıg & Werner (2012). Another product of their collaboration with native speakers is an interesting collection of folk tales collected by one of these native speakers, Rosan Hayıg (2007), transcribed in Zazaki with German and English translations. Werner and his colleagues consider the Zaza as a distinct people, different from the Kurds by language and history, though they are aware that many Zazas do in fact consider themselves as Kurds. He estimates that 40% of the Zazas are assimilated to Turkish culture and another 40% identify themselves with the Kurds. Of the 27 “famous Zazas” – artists and politicians – about whom he compiled some biographical data, he notes with apparent regret that they all spoke of themselves as Kurds and of Zazaki as a Kurdish dialect (pp. 295-8). Only small numbers are involved in the promotion of Zaza language and culture as part of political projects. One group “proactively works linguistically and anthropologically towards the Kurds” (he means the group around Malmîsanij and the journal Vate), the other towards separation from the Kurds as a people in their own right (p. 70). He claims that his research contacts were restricted to non-political groups, but his sympathies are clearly with the last group. In Werner’s case, the inclination to consider Zazas as separate from Kurds appears to be due to SIL methodology rather than a definite political agenda, as in the case of the Armenian scholars around Garnik Asatrian or certain actors in Turkey’s state apparatus. SIL treats languages as homogenous units whose boundaries can be objectively established, and associates each language with a people. The idea that identities are not objectively given but 5A brief summary of SIL’s methods and the controversies surrounding it can be found in the Wikipedia article “SIL International”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_International (last accessed 19 August 2020). A range of views from anthropologists is collected in Hvalkof & Aaby (1981). www.KurdishStudies.net  Van Bruinessen 379 socially constructed, dependent on context, and shaped and reshaped in political struggles is quite alien to the SIL approach. Werner follows Ludwig Paul’s (1998) classification of Zazaki dialects in three major groups, associated with three major sub-communities of Zaza: the Alevi Zaza of Dersim and Varto (“Northern group”), the Sunni Zaza of Palu and Bingöl (“Eastern group”), and those of Çermik, Siverek, etc. (“Southern group”). He notes that the Sunnis of the Eastern group follow the Shafi`i school of Islamic law, which brings them closer to the Kurds, whereas those of the Southern group are predominantly Hanafis and therefore closer to Turkey’s official Islam. SIL’s work has concentrated on the Southern dialect, which Werner suggests should therefore be adopted as the standard. (The Vate group, on the other hand, has mainly published on the Northern and Eastern dialects, for instance their 2001 Turkish-Zazaki dictionary.) Its title notwithstanding, the book is neither an anthropological nor a linguistic study but a not very well organised compilation of various bits of information about language, culture and religion of the three main Zaza sub- communities. Moreover, the text contains numerous minor and some major errors, some perhaps due to sloppy editing, others reflecting misunderstanding or misinformation. The frequent errors in Zazaki, Kurmanji, Turkish and Arabic terms makes one wonder how well the author has learned these languages. He could have avoided many embarrassing mistakes if he had acquired some basic knowledge about Islam before writing about aspects of Zaza religion. The book cannot be recommended as a reliable source of information about Zaza history and society, though some may find it useful as a guide to the literature. (For those who read Turkish, there is a recent book by Ercan Çaǧlayan (2016) that covers much of the same ground more systematically, without the errors.) Its main interest, in my view, is in exemplifying the SIL approach to language, culture and religion. Following this approach, Werner attempts to catch the essence of Zaza culture in terms of shame versus guilt orientation, envy, and “location of emotion, intellect and conscience” (pp. 203, 210ff) – which I gather are considered as possible entry points for the missionary endeavour. There is also an attempt to identify core elements of the Zaza religious attitude, which yielded as the most worthwhile finding a Mewlûd (devotional poem about the birth of the Prophet), written in 1886 by Osman Efendi Babij in the Zaza dialect of Siverek. The text, which had been published before, is reproduced here with an English translation (pp. 251, 455-71). The official thesis of Turkey’s ethnic homogeneity and essential Turkishness has been discarded in the new millennium, and there is a widespread Copyright @ 2020 KURDISH STUDIES © Transnational Press London 380 Kurds, Zazas and Alevis interest in the identity of Turkey’s “Others” and subaltern cultures. This may be counted as one of the successes of the Kurdish movement. The AKP government, for reasons of its own, allowed the establishment of university departments for research and teaching about Alevism and “living languages”: Kurdish language and literature in Mardin, Zazaki in Bingöl. Local history and culture has become a legitimate subject of study at other universities too. Large academic conferences about the history and culture of Dersim at Tunceli University in 2010 and about Zaza history and culture at Bingöl University in 2012, at which several of the authors discussed here were present,6 appeared to open up new space for discussing subjects that had long been taboo in Turkey. Since 2015, that space has again been increasingly restricted, but the academic and public interest has remained, and the books discussed here are, in a sense, an expression of the changed attitude towards minority cultures and minority rights, as well as documents of the continuing identity debates. Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Other works referred to: Anuk, N. (2015). Bir Türkleştirme Aygıtı: Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü [An Instrument of Turkification, the Institute for Researching Turkish Culture]. Kürt Tarihi, 19 (July-August 2015), 16-23. Basbuǧ, H. (1984). İki Türk Boyu Zaza ve Kurmancalar [Zazas and Kurmanj: Two Turkish Tribal Groups]. Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü. Bayrak, M. (1994). Açık-Gizli / Resmi-Gayrıresmi Kurdoloji Belgeleri [Public and Secret, Official and Unofficial Kurdological Documents]. Ankara: Öz-Ge Yayınları. Bruinessen, M. van (2016). The Kurds as objects and subjects of historiography: Turkish and Kurdish nationalists struggling over identity. In F. Richter (ed.), Identität, Ethnizität und Nationalismus in Kurdistan: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Ferhad Ibrahim Seyder (13-61). Münster: Lit Verlag. Bulut, F. (1997). Ali’siz Alevilik [Alevism without Ali]. Ankara: Doruk. Çaǧlayan, E. (2016). Zazalar: Tarih, Kültür ve Kimlik [The Zazas: History, Culture and Identity]. Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları. Fırat, M.Ş. (1981 [1945]). Doǧu İlleri ve Varto Tarihi [History of the Provinces of the East and Varto]. 4th edition. Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü. Gezik, E. (2012). Dinsel, Etnik ve Politik Sorunlar Baǧlamında Alevi Kürtler [The Alevi Kurds, in the Perspective of Religious, Ethnic and Political Questions]. Istanbul: İletişim. Gezik, E. & Çakmak, H. (2010). Raa Haqi–Riya Haqi: Dersim Aleviliǧi İnanç Terimleri Sözlüǧü [Dictionary of Religious Terms of Dersim Alevism]. Ankara: Kalan. Gezik, E., & Özcan, M. (Eds.). (2013). Alevi Ocakları ve Örgütlenmeleri [Alevi Ocaks and their Organisation]. Ankara: Kalan. 6Dilşa Deniz presented a paper at the Tunceli conference and several other contributors of the same book were present there; Eberhard Werner delivered a keynote lecture in Bingöl. www.KurdishStudies.net  Van Bruinessen 381 Hayıg, R. (2007). Mahmeşa: Vizêr ra Ewro Istanıkê Zazayan [Mahmesha, Zaza Folktales: Then and Now]. Istanbul: Tij Yayınları. Retrieved from http://www.zazaki.de/kitabi/Mahmesa.pdf (last accessed 19 August 2020). Hayıg, R., & Werner, B. (2012). Zazaca-Türkçe Sözlük ; Türkçe-Zazaca Sözcük Listesi (Çermik–Çüngüş–Siverek–Gerger Bölgeleri). Istanbul: Tij Yayınları. Retrieved from http://www.zazaki.de/zazaki/qisebendeZazakiTirkiRosanHayig.pdf (last accessed 19 August 2020). Hvalkof, S., & Aaby, P. (Eds.). (1981). Is God an American? An Anthropological Perspective on the Missionary Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Copenhagen: International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs / London: Survival International. Karakaya Stump, A. (2019). The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kaya, M.S. (2011). The Zaza Kurds of Turkey: A Middle Eastern Minority in a Globalised Society. London: I.B. Tauris. Paul, L. (1998). Zazaki Grammatik und Versuch einer Dialektologie. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Todd, T.L. (1985). A Grammar of Dimili (also known as Zaza). (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Retrieved from http://www.zazaki.de/english/T.L.Todd-AGrammarofDimli.pdf (last accessed 19 August 2020). Vate Çalışma Grubu (2001). Türkçe-Kirmancca (Zazaca) Sözlük / Ferhengê Tirkî- Kirmanckî (Zazakî) [Turkish-Zazaki dictionary]. Istanbul: Avesta. Copyright @ 2020 KURDISH STUDIES © Transnational Press London