Humanist Mystics: Nationalism and the Commemoration of Saints in Turkey

Humanist Mystics

Humanist Mystics

NATIONALISM AND THE COMMEMORATION OF SAINTS IN TURKEY

MARK SOILEAU

THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS

Salt Lake City

Copyright © 2018 by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.

The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of The University of Utah Press. It is based on a four-foot-tall Ancient Puebloan pictograph (late PIII) near Glen Canyon, Utah.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Soileau, Mark, author.

Title: Human mystics : nationalism and the commemoration of saints in Turkey / Mark Soileau.

Other titles: Nationalism and the commemoration of saints in Turkey

Description: Salt Lake City : The University of Utah Press, [2018] | Series: Utah series in Middle East studies | Based on the author›s thesis of the same title, University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph. D. in Religious Studies, 2006. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018011930 (print) | LCCN 2018013955 (ebook) | ISBN 9781607816348 (e-isbn) | ISBN 9781607816331 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Muslim saints. | Secularization (Theology) | Nationalism—Turkey—History. | Sufism—Turkey—History. | Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Maulana, 1207-1273. | Hacı Bektaş Veli, active 13th century. | Yunus Emre, -1320?

Classification: LCC BP189.33 (ebook) | LCC BP189.33 .S645 2018 (print) | DDC 297.4092/2561—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011930

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Shape-Shifting Saints

1. Commemoration, Saints, and Nationalization

2. Nationalism, Secularism, and the Rise of Humanist Mystics

3. Our Master: Memories of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi

4. The Fountainhead: Memories of Hacı Bektaş Veli

5. Our Yunus: Memories of Yunus Emre

Epilogue: Saint-Shaping Shifts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1. Souvenir image of Abdal Musa legend

2.1. How Was It? page from 1933 republican pamphlet

2.2. How Has It Become? page from 1933 republican pamphlet

2.3. Diyanet sign at tomb

3.1. Poster of Mevlana poem

3.2. Wall hanging of the Seven Counsels of Mevlana

3.3. Magnet displaying the Seven Counsels of Mevlana

3.4. Brochure promoting the Mevlana Exchange Program

3.5. Poster of Mevlana poem

3.6. Poster for Mevlana commemoration ceremony

3.7. 5,000 lira banknote

4.1. Poster of Hacı Bektaş

4.2. Statuette of Ali, Atatürk, and Hacı Bektaş

4.3. Poster of Hacı Bektaş sayings

4.4. Cover of Babalılar Ayaklanması

4.5. Cover of Bektaşîlik Niçin Bâtıldır

4.6. Cover of graphic novel Hacı Bektaş Velî

4.7. Poster for Hacı Bektaş commemoration ceremony

5.1. Poster of Yunus Emre poem

5.2. Poster for Yunus Emre Year of Love

5.3. Poster for Yunus Emre commemoration ceremony

5.4. 200 lira banknote

Acknowledgments

This book began as my doctoral dissertation in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and would not have come to fruition without the guidance and support of my advisors Juan Campo, Dwight Reynolds, Richard Hecht, and Stephen Humphreys. The initial research was funded by a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program and the writing by a UCSB Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship, for which I am very grateful. A research affiliation with Bilkent University in Ankara greatly facilitated this stage of the work, and I am indebted to Metin Heper for kindly arranging this. Besides giving me access to its fine library, my stay at Bilkent afforded me the opportunity to benefit from the wisdom of Talat Sait Halman, who, sadly, has since passed away. My thanks to Mehmet Kalpaklı for his encouragement and administrative support. Conversations with Ahmet Yaşar Ocak also contributed greatly to my understanding of Turkish saints and Sufism.

Further work was done on this project while I was teaching at Albion College. I would like to acknowledge the institutional support that I received for summer research trips and to express my gratitude to my colleagues Jocelyn McWhirter, Ronney Mourad, and the late Selva Raj. Work also continued while I was affiliated with the anthropology department at Mardin Artuklu University and now at my present institution, Hacettepe University, where Elif Başak Aksoy has been a tremendously supportive colleague. I would like to thank John Alley at the University of Utah Press and Martin van Bruinessen for a thorough critical reading. My acquisition of images was facilitated by the helpful staff of the National Library and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and I thank Meliha Melis Koruyucu for last-minute photographic assistance. I am thankful to Huseyin Abiva for providing help at critical moments. I would also like to express my gratitude to Zeliha Ünaldı, whose support took many forms.

Continual encouragement and support over many years has come from Oktay Özel, who has followed the progress and contributed to the betterment of this project at every stage. Likewise, Christopher Dole has offered help, guidance, and critique over many a stimulating conversation through the years. My understanding of the people and cultures of Turkey has been informed greatly by the keen observations of my friend Bilal Topluk. My understanding of Sufism in Turkey has been imbued deeply with the inspirations of the late Teoman İlhami Güre, whose words still ring through my ears. My sense of wonder has been set aflow by my wondrous son, Revan. And my life has been shaped indelibly by my grandmother, Dorothy; my father, Billy; and my mother, Wanda, who passed away as the manuscript was nearing completion. I dedicate this book in her memory.

Prologue

Shape-Shifting Saints

A STORY IS TOLD OF the meeting between the young Prince Gaybi and the great saint Abdal Musa:

One day Prince Gaybi went out hunting with his retinue. While hunting beast and fowl, he saw it—a gazelle suddenly appeared before him. As soon as Prince Gaybi saw it, he pulled an arrow from his quiver, set it to the bowstring, and drew it taut. He eyed that gazelle, released the string, and the arrow shot out, striking the gazelle under the shoulder. The gazelle fled leaping and bleeding, and Gaybi set off after it. He chased after the gazelle hurriedly over hill and dale, until it came down to a plain.

Now, in those days there was a saint named Abdal Musa Sultan who had built a great convent where many disciples served. Prince Gaybi saw that gazelle go into the convent through the gate. He too entered through the gate. The gazelle disappeared. The dervishes welcomed Prince Gaybi, who asked for the gazelle that he had shot. The dervishes, though, said that they had not seen a gazelle come in. While Prince Gaybi was wondering what had happened to the gazelle, Abdal Musa Sultan called from his cell, instructing the dervishes to bring Prince Gaybi in so that he himself could answer him.

Gaybi entered the room, looked, and saw the master. He touched his forehead to the dust at the saint’s feet then stood facing him. Abdal Musa Sultan welcomed him and asked him what his heart desired. Prince Gaybi told him of shooting and chasing the gazelle. Abdal Musa asked him if he would recognize the arrow if he saw it. He responded that he would. Abdal Musa said, Look, then—see your arrow! He lifted up his blessed arm and pointed. Gaybi saw that the arrow he had shot was there, lodged under Abdal Musa’s arm. It was him wandering in the guise of a gazelle that the prince had shot with an arrow. When he saw that, he felt sorry and passed out.

After a while he came to himself, begged forgiveness, and kissed the hand and touched his forehead to the feet of the master, who pulled out the arrow and placed it in front of him. Abdal Musa forgave him but warned him: Don’t shoot an arrow at every soul you see.¹

Gaybi, overcome by what he had witnessed, immediately renounced his former life, surrendered himself to the saint, was initiated into the community under the saint’s guidance, and served there for forty years, eventually becoming the great Turkish Sufi poet Kaygusuz Abdal and a saint himself.

The narrative of Gaybi’s encounter with Abdal Musa portrays an individual who is seeking something but is not aware of what he really seeks. Hunting a gazelle, as was his wont, he is led on a chase that brings him to the convent of a saint. He is drawn to the realization of his true needs as he comes into the presence of Abdal Musa and sees the projectile of his desire lodged in the heart of the saint. Gaybi was only seemingly chasing a gazelle; what he was really seeking—what his heart desired—was spiritual transformation, which he realizes in the presence of the saint. Now aware of his real needs, he proceeds toward transformation.

What brings about Gaybi’s realization and leads to his eventual transformation is Abdal Musa’s own ability to transform himself into a gazelle and back again. This type of miracle appears in many legends in various contexts and is known in Turkish as don değiştirme: changing guise.² With this ability, the shape-shifting saint can appear in different forms to different observers at different times. Gaybi’s witnessing of Abdal Musa’s ability to metamorphose astounds him into the awareness of his true needs, but the specific form that the saint takes in this case is also relevant to the situation. Gaybi is hunting, so the saint takes the form of a gazelle—that is, the form of what the seeker thinks he is seeking. The form taken by Abdal Musa is thus not randomly chosen, not just something spectacular and designed to amaze. Rather, the form is what Gaybi expected to see, a reflection of his ostensible desires. The saint’s transformation is subtle, case-specific, and designed to attract. As Abdal Musa transforms and attracts, Gaybi moves toward him. When he arrives, Abdal Musa has returned to his original state, and Gaybi begins his own transformation. Thus Abdal Musa’s transformation pivots around Gaybi for his sake, and Gaybi’s transformation pivots around Abdal Musa as a result. It is perhaps relevant that the title Abdal, taken by both the saint and Kaygusuz, derives from an Arabic root meaning to change.

Gaybi’s desires lead him to Abdal Musa, and the saint’s ability to metamorphose overwhelms him to the point of surrendering himself to the saint. Renouncing his former station, he joins the community of dervishes who have gathered around the saint, likewise attracted through such experiences. After Gaybi’s ritual initiation into the community, he serves according to its rules and customs and moves toward his own transformation into the saintly poet Kaygusuz Abdal. Through attraction to the saint as well as commitment to the saint and to being part of the community that is also committed to him and serving in that setting—that is, by becoming part of an institution—Gaybi finds his voice.

The story of Gaybi/Kaygusuz meeting Abdal Musa would have been passed around orally during the life of Kaygusuz and after his death, gradually accreting standardized details until it cohered into a memorable narrative form. This allowed it to be passed on more or less the same to succeeding generations. The repeated telling of the story serves to consolidate the memory of the event in the imaginations of those who hear, who thereby make up a community of people interested in maintaining the legacy of Kaygusuz. The story emerges within a nascent tradition and helps to form and perpetuate that tradition as it is recounted.

After being repeated orally for some time, the story was eventually set down in writing well after his death, as the opening scene of Kaygusuz’s hagiography.³ As it was written, it incorporated features peculiar to written narrative and also some of the anonymous author’s own narrative and literary style. Once set down in writing, the story became a standard for the way the life of Kaygusuz was to be understood for generations to come. Subsequent copyists may have added, deleted, or altered some details, but in its main outline the narrative came to be perpetuated in a certain form. Even after being written down, the story could be told orally from memory, but the written version remains a reference.

The story is also recalled in an undated anonymous painting, the original of which is housed in the central Bektaşi convent around the tomb of Hacı Bektaş. The picture captures the critical moment from the legend: Abdal Musa’s showing of the arrow and Gaybi’s realization that the man before him is the same being as the animal that he shot while hunting. In the painting, Abdal Musa, with a bemused gaze, raises his left arm, revealing Gaybi’s arrow lodged in his side very close to his heart. He points to the arrow—or perhaps to his heart—with the index finger of his right hand. The young Gaybi looks not at the arrow but at Abdal Musa’s face, with his own right hand placed over his own heart as a sign of respect to the master. This is a pictorial representation of Gaybi’s realization that Abdal Musa can change his form—and hence that he is a saint—and his own submission to that reality. The image was much later copied in enlarged form as a mural on an outside wall of Abdal Musa’s tomb in the hinterlands of Antalya. In very recent times it was set in stone in the form of a pair of statues near the tomb. The painting has also been mass-produced and sold in poster and other souvenir form (figure 0.1).

While the image illustrates a single moment, it simultaneously recalls the entire narrative, which was known to the experienced dervishes who beheld it and told to unknowing neophytes. Viewing it serves as a catalyst for the mystical imagination. Looking at the picture, we can only imagine what Gaybi was thinking and feeling at that moment. However, through this imagination the observer can vicariously experience Gaybi’s moment through his or her own interpretation, guided by the community’s tradition. The truth that the imaginer arrives at takes on a reality for that individual that is much deeper than the abstract historical question of whether Gaybi himself experienced the event in the same way. The experience, even if vicarious, becomes part of the individual, as part of the community and tradition in which he or she remembers. Like the written legend, the painting freezes an image but not the imagination.

Six centuries after the event the legend is still relevant to the spiritual imagination of some, though its significance may have evolved through the course of time. The intervening stretch of time has allowed other forces to influence interpretations of the imagined experience, as historical events affecting the various polities that the tradition has fallen under have brought about ideological shifts. The centuries leave such an epistemological chasm between event and observer that even a traditional bridge spanning it would be shaky. Relating the story in verse in the twentieth century, the poet known as Vaktidolu expresses the difficulty of penetrating the saint’s essence from such a distance:

Entering the guise of a deer, appearing

Being struck by Kaygusuz’s arrow

Entering the convent and there become a mystery

Abdal Musa is now for us too a mystery.⁴

Yet, like all mysteries, this impenetrableness is at the same time attractive, inspiring the imagination to try to reach the essence, to bend the course of linear time that propels the subject relentlessly forward, away from the object, and to return to it through cyclical time.

For the historian, though, the traces left in linear time are taken as the object of study. The same legend can be read through the historical imagination as, say, reflective of a period of institutionalization, when more or less independent wandering dervishes were being incorporated into settled, organized Sufi orders, in accordance with a state policy of centralization. The details in the narrative can then be taken as evidence of the concerns of the period and employed as proof of the theory being put forth. Often, though, such historical interpretations are themselves reflective of the periods in which they are propounded, especially at times when an ideology such as nationalism prevails. Writing in 1935 during the heyday of the Turkish nation-building project, for example, Fuad Köprülü, the first great Turkish historian of the early republican period, saw the miraculous encounter between Gaybi and Abdal Musa as significant in that the saint’s ability to change into the form of a gazelle was a Turkish folklore motif surviving from Central Asian shamanism, thereby providing a specifically Turkish origin to the legend. He comments:

This section of the Kaygusuz hagiography that pertains to Abdal Musa is worthy of attention from several points. The master’s entering the form of a deer [and other miraculous feats] are from the legends of the shamanic Turks and are motifs found in the Turkish saint legends that continue these shamanic traditions and in the Bektaşi legends, which are the purest products of these.⁵

Köprülü’s interpretation reflects the historical concerns of the period in which he himself was writing: the early twentieth century, which saw the transition from a dynastic Ottoman Empire to a national Turkish Republic, the prevalence of Turkish nationalism as an interpretive scheme to account for historical, social, and cultural material, and the formation of the idea of a Turkish nation with a deep cultural heritage. Others have followed this interpretive scheme, and Abdal Musa’s and Kaygusuz’s legacies are now often presented within this framework.

For the metahistorian, then, the concerns of historians and other observers writing at later times from different perspectives can be a focus of study. These concerns shape the observer’s interpretation, reflect the era in which the interpretation is made, and mark changes in the understanding of a phenomenon over time. I make my own use of the same legend for such a purpose: to illustrate the process of transformation that saints undergo in time as they are subjected to different interpretations, which in turn reflect the expectations of the perceiver, the perceiver’s community, and the times when the perception is expressed. I am looking at how interpreters within certain historical, cultural, and ideological milieux look back on the objects of their gaze.

The specific case of saintly transformation to be discussed here was undergone especially by three mystic saints who lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Anatolia, a land that after their deaths came under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire and that today falls under the Republic of Turkey. All three were mystics within a medieval Islamicate milieu, have been venerated since their deaths as saints, and have been honored in modern Turkey as great Turkish humanists.

Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, the illustrious Persian mystical poet and eponymous founder of the Mevlevi Order, famous for its whirling dervish dance, is characterized in a promotional article on the Turkish Ministry of Culture’s website as believing that all mankind are brothers and maintaining the equality of men and women.⁶ Hacı Bektaş Veli, the eponymous founder of the Bektaşi Order and preeminent saint for millions of Alevis, is described in the same document as having propounded a philosophy based on tolerance and human love, his vision aligning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Yunus Emre, the first major poet in the Anatolian Turkish language, was honored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1991, the supposed 750th anniversary of his birth, for being a great advocate of humanist values, solidarity and peace whose aspirations coincide with the objectives of Unesco—based on a draft resolution submitted by Turkey.⁷ All three are also commemorated annually in festivals supported by the Ministry of Culture, and the discourse of public figures who speak at them is often centered on the values of tolerance, peace, fellowship, human rights, and love of humankind.

It is not an entirely unwarranted assertion that these medieval mystics were in some sense humanists. As Sufis attempting to describe the relationship between God and humankind, and particularly the proper role of humans with respect to God, they dealt with the themes of love, peace, and fellowship and focused at times on the human. These can be considered humanist values in a later context, and examples of each can be found in the poetry, legends, and legacy of these three saints. However, it was the exigencies of a certain historical conjuncture that led to their being consciously identified with these values and having the label of humanist affixed to them.

The Turkish nationalist movement, which became official with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in the 1920s, sought to bring together elements of Turkish culture, present them as national culture, and institutionalize this through modern forms of political governance. This included an ideology of secularism and the implementation of policies to enact it. The Ottoman state had a strong Islamic orientation for much of its history, and the Muslim subjects in Anatolia based their supralocal communal identities in large part on their status as Muslims rather than as Turks or other ethnic distinctions. The nationalist ideologues, however, sought to shift the orientations of the people remaining within the realm of the republic toward an ethnic-based national identity, but this was no easy task due to the strong religious affiliations of the people. Reforms aiming specifically at breaking the religious hold on society and distancing the Turkish nation from Islamic symbols were enacted; these included the abolition of the caliphate, the closure of the dervish orders, and the change from the Arabic to the Latin script, with the consequent replacement of Arabic- and Persian-derived words with pure Turkish ones. This secularizing movement closed down the dervish orders but at the same time incorporated and promoted the founding saints of some of these same orders as national icons, though new categories had to be formulated for them. Mevlana, Hacı Bektaş, and Yunus Emre have found their place in the cultural heritage of modern, national Turkey in part as the patron saints of Turkish humanism.

The process through which this came about is analyzed here. Chapter 1 lays out the conceptual framework for this analysis, discussing some of the fundamentals, dynamics, and implications of its main components: collective memory and its process of commemoration, saints and the processes through which their legacies are perpetuated, and nationalism and its process of nationalization. Through all of these runs the theme of change. Chapter 2 traces the development of Turkish nationalism and its implementation in the republic, showing how Sufism and the cults of saints were impacted by the reforms and shifts in consciousness that accompanied its rise. It was in this context that certain medieval saints came to be regarded as humanists, and the process through which this occurred is analyzed here. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are devoted to the three saints themselves, showing how the legacy of each has been perpetuated for the past seven centuries through various forms of commemoration, how changes have occurred in their representations, and how they have all come to be known as humanists as part of their relevance in modern, national Turkey, along with the implications of this attribution.

This transformation in the understanding of saints is tied to larger shifts in the cultural history of Turkey, especially changes in attitudes toward communal identity, religion, and mysticism. Saints in the Turkish context have always been important focal points: for the veneration of pilgrims, for the formation of dervish orders, for the legitimacy of rulers, and now for the pride of the Turkish nation. The way in which they are understood in the cultural imagination is often a reflection of the perspective of the observers, shaped by the communities in which they participate, which is in turn influenced by historical exigencies. Saints, then, like other cultural symbols, are multiform rather than uniform, taking different shapes in accordance with shifting expectations; they are thus mirrors of history, reflecting change.

CHAPTER 1

Commemoration, Saints, and Nationalization

COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AND COMMEMORATION

THE QUESTION OF HOW SAINTS no longer alive are imagined at a given time is a matter of memory, the faculty that links observers in the present with phenomena from the past in the imaginal realm. With the living saint no longer around to serve as a reference for reality, ideas as to who the saint was and what he or she did and said are ultimately retained in the memories of people, though they are of course influenced by descriptions expressed by others, especially those bearing some kind of authority. Most such memories are in fact the ongoing results of complex negotiations among individuals, communities, traditions, narratives, places, material culture, and power.

A memory is initiated by an experience and by an effect of the experience on the self—an impression on one’s wax block, as Plato put it.¹ Depending on the magnitude of the experience and its relevance to other memories, as well as the particular memory faculty of the individual, this imprint can be deep or shallow and can remain ready in the conscious or linger in the unconscious as a result of a myriad of psychological processes. When the experience occurs to an individual alone, the memory of it will remain an individual memory unless it is communicated to other people and linked to other, more social memories. But if the experience itself is shared by more than one person, its memory is a shared one from the start as well as an individual memory of each of the individuals affected. It can then be elaborated when the individuals who shared it reinterpret it through discussion and later use it as a point on which to reminisce. Such reminiscences include both a consolidation of the memory as it is reinforced in the retelling and a harmonizing reinterpretation as the reminiscers balance their own individual interpretations with those of the others. An experience shared by a group is not necessarily understood in the same way by all members, since individuals experience the same event from different perspectives and with different levels of interest and are thus affected differently. Time is also a differentiating factor: as the experience is left behind in time, memories can fade, be consolidated, or transform. Thus a collective memory is usually not shared equally among all remembering individuals and changes in time, so it will reflect different perspectives.

All memory is in a certain sense ultimately individual; but society (or particular groupings and institutions) influences what and how an individual remembers, so all memory is at the same time both individual and social. Even an individual’s memory of a solely individual experience is at the same time social in that it is determined and shaped by the concepts and categories that he or she uses to interpret the experience and the language in which the memory is communicated or thought, as concepts, categories, and language are socially derived. Memories, as Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, occur, are processed, are given meaning, and are expressed within social frameworks.² The collective nature of a memory is then amplified as it is shared with others through discussion and its interpretation amended in the process. The more factors that enter the process, then, the more complex it obviously becomes. Wulf Kansteiner, for example, has categorized three types of historical factors that interact to form collective memory: the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their own interests.³ Among the memory makers can be included agents promoting encompassing ideologies such as religion or nationalism.

Given this complex interplay of factors, it is problematic to postulate the existence of an all-encompassing collective memory of a group of people. There is first of all the problem, as James Fentress and Chris Wickham have noted, of assigning to memory an object-like consistency that it does not really possess.⁴ The problem of reifying memory is then compounded if we attempt to transpose our understanding of individual memory onto a society. An individual can be said to possess memory in an abstract sense; this would consist of the sum total of his or her particular memories as well as the very faculty of remembering possessed by that individual. To transpose such a conception of memory onto society, however, involves attributing to society a unitary self that it possesses only metaphorically, if at all. A society is composed of various individuals, subgroups, and institutions, each with its own memory dispositions (which are sometimes at odds with each other), so the idea of an abstract memory peculiar to a certain society is too imprecise and unwieldy to be useful as an analytical concept, especially in reference to large-scale societies.

However, the concept of collective memory can serve productively in another sense. The word memory has two main meanings: the faculty of remembering in general (people can be said, for instance, to have a good memory, meaning that they have the ability to remember many things accurately) and a particular remembrance of a certain thing or event: a memory of something. Collective memory can then be taken in this latter sense—not as the remembering mechanism or memory pool of an abstract collective mind but as a particular collective memory of a particular experience that occurred in the past. There still remains the problem of reifying a memory that varies with respect to certain individual and subgroup dispositions and changes in time. With the memory isolated in reference to a specific thing, however, this becomes an identifiable concept that can be used to explicate the varying interpretations held by the individuals or subgroups who make up the collectivity defined with respect to the remembered thing in question.

We can refer to the object of a memory as a memorand: that which is to be remembered, whether person, thing, place, event, or other type of focal point. It is often the case that a memory involves several interconnected objects: for example, a person involved in a certain event, in a particular place, and speaking a specific set of words. What constitutes the memory’s memorand depends on what is taken as its primary object. This may materialize, for example, when the memory is intentionally recalled with respect to a particular memorand (and not an involuntary memory, such as the one following Marcel Proust’s madeleine dip). The subject of this study is the remembrance of saints, so it may be useful to focus specifically on the human memorand. A person can be remembered in terms of specific actions and speech. A composite character with personality traits can emerge from all these, defining the memorand for the one who remembers. The rememberer can then recall the memorand in terms of this generalized character, and particular memories serve as examples illustrating it. When a memorand is something relevant to a group of individuals, the memory of it becomes a collective memory.

It may also be useful to distinguish here between direct and indirect memories. A direct memory is a memory of a memorand directly experienced by an individual. An indirect memory, then, is one not directly experienced by an individual, though it can still be understood to be in some sense part of his or her collective experience. Such a memory might be one of a legendary or historical nature, such as an event told about the ancestors or the founders. Though not directly experienced, such events can nevertheless become part of one’s collective memory and thus work their way into one’s individual memory. These kinds of memories, similar to what James Wertsch refers to as textually mediated memory,⁵ have been transmitted through cultural processes such as narratives and are thus part of the community’s understanding of its past. Many of them extend beyond the confines of the local group and derive from larger cultural traditions, such as those of a religion or a nation. Ultimately, though, indirect memories too are based on experience, as they derive from the direct experience of, say, hearing a narrative about an indirect experience. Although this is not a direct experience of the memorand itself, it can nevertheless come to bear the same import. From the perspective of the usual understanding of memory, an indirect memory might seem to be not a memory at all or at best only a metaphor of a memory. These can nonetheless still be considered memories, because they reflect something from the past that is in some way relevant to the present, because in being remembered they can become a real part of an individual’s sense of identity, and because the process of recalling them is similar to that of recalling direct memories. Since they are indirect and the time between event and remembrance—the memorial distance—may be greater, however, they are more dependent on and susceptible to the fluctuations of collective remembering, as they have no direct event-experience to fall back upon. Memory, then, whether direct or indirect, is the recalling to mind of something from the past that is in some sense meaningful in the present. With collective memories, the meaning is related to an individual’s identity as part of a community.

Memories that come to be considered important for an individual’s identity are filtered through the community that the individual feels a part of, thereby linking him or her to the memorand. As Paul Connerton notes, in summarizing the contribution of Maurice Halbwachs, Groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localised and memories are localised by a kind of mapping. We situate what we recollect within the mental spaces provided by the group.⁶ Groups are thus fundamental to the way we remember, yet the memory of a particular memorand is not necessarily shared by all members of a given community and often extends beyond its confines. Hence we might think of there being collectivities that are communities specifically because their members share memories of a certain memorand, even if these are not coterminous with more explicitly defined communities such as a village, tribe, or nation. Such communities—groups of people defined as a group by their retention of memories of a certain memorand—can be called, following Peter Burke, memory communities. Burke bases this concept on the idea of interpretive communities that Stanley Fish developed in order to account for the variety of strategies for interpreting texts. In a similar way, Burke explains, it might be useful to think in terms of different ‘memory communities’ within a given society. It is important to ask the question, who wants whom to remember what, and why? Whose version of the past is recorded and preserved?⁷ While memory communities usually do not exist as well-defined entities, use of this concept can help elucidate the potentiality of a diversity of understandings of a particular memorand as well as the process through which the relevance of a memorand can be expanded and transformed, as in the case of medieval Turkish mystics.

While the borders of a memory community might not necessarily align with those of recognizable collective entities, memory communities are often limited more or less to their confines, since society, culture, history, geographic location, and political authority are factors in determining what a community remembers and how it does so. Various levels of memory communities can thus exist, corresponding to a family, village, tribe, city, nation, religion, and ultimately even the world. The memory community functions at these various levels with respect to different memorands of varying magnitude. A family has its memorands, which are not especially relevant for those not related to it. A village or a region has its local heroes or leaders, who have little or no relevance to outsiders. A tarikat (dervish order) has its founding saint, other saints, poets, and present and past leaders whose relevance is mostly limited to the community of initiates, though their fame may spread to outsiders—especially in the case of the poets and the great mystics. The nation has been a particularly interesting community and has its own heroes who are relevant especially to those considered to be members of that nation. Religions have their prophets, saintly figures, and officials who may or may not have relevance for followers of other religions. And some world leaders, artists, and sports figures can be relevant to and thus remembered by people all over the world. So, besides highlighting the diversity of memories related to specific memorands, analyzing the memory community allows us to show the field of relevance of a memorand, the lateral increase of which can be measured by the expansion of the memory community.

Like other kinds of community, a memory community can in time institutionalize, developing its own rules, customs, habits, and expectations—adapting to the changing times, while keeping more or less tied to the legacy of the memorand. Because memory communities are groups of mortal humans, their constitution changes in time. Another set of individuals, with different dynamics among them, responding to different historical circumstances, will often be faced with the problem of reimagining their communal identity and reinterpreting the symbols that represent that identity.

The process through which humans in communities recall and reimagine their pasts can be referred to as commemoration. This term is most commonly used to refer to ceremonial events that are organized to remember a particular memorand, such as a historical person or event, in a collective setting. But with its com- prefix indicating a joint endeavor, the concept of commemoration can be extended to include any event in which a memorand is remembered by more than one person. Fentress and Wickham, in fact, define commemoration as the action of speaking or writing about memories, as well as the formal re-enaction of the past that we usually mean when we use the word.⁸ At its most general level, commemoration would then include every oral utterance or written text that recalls something from the past. Added to these must be material forms of commemoration such as monuments and museums, which are displayed for the sake of the observers’ remembering,⁹ as well as rituals that impel participants to enact and embody the memories. In order to include all of these media, we can define commemoration in its general sense as collective remembering, which occurs through the expression of collectively constituted memories in a form that can be observed or participated in by other members of a community.

However, special features of the organized ceremonial events that commemorate a memorand make them an exceptional case among commemorative forms. Not the least of these factors is that they are intentionally commemorative and summon individuals to come together as a group in order collectively to remember a specific memorand. This creates a cultural space around a memorand, in which participants see themselves as part of a group and more specifically as part of a particular memory community. In addition, they represent the memorand performatively in this space, so that individuals present at that place and time both observe and participate bodily in the remembrance. As Connerton explains after describing a Nazi commemorative ceremony,

This narrative was more than a story told—it was a cult enacted. It was a rite fixed and performed. Its story was told not unequivocally in the past tense but in the tense of a metaphysical present. We would underestimate the commemorative hold of the rite, we would minimise its mnemonic power, if we were to say that it reminded the participants of mythic events; we should say rather that the sacred event of 1923 was re-presented; the participants in the rite gave it ceremonially embodied form.¹⁰

In this way,