Download or read book Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia written by Ayfer Karakaya-Stump and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.