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The book analyses the ongoing struggle for a shared ´Alevi Cultural Heritage´. In these processes, the actors have to negotiate standardisation and plurality cutting across the manifold ethnic and socio-religious differences among Alevis.

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Over the last decades of the 20 th century, Alevi identity, religion and culture have gained an increasingly public character in both Turkey and Western Europe. This book analyses the ongoing efforts of negotiating common cultural denominators and shared repertoires of texts, sources, practices, or musemes, which are to represent Alevism across its ethnic, social, political, and regional differences. Bringing together international contributions from a wide range of disciplines, such as Islamic and Religious Studies, Musicology, Anthropology, and Islamic Theology, this book focusses on the processes of negotiating an Alevi ´Cultural Heritage´ between standardisation and plurality-processes in which Alevis and non-Alevis, politics and scholarship partake.

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Literary Foundations of the Alevi Tradition - Defining Alevism via Written Texts - Alevi Cultural Heritage - Bektashi Hagiographies - Culture, Text and Identity amongst the Alevis - Between Debate and Sources - Religious Music in and from Dersim/Tunceli Today - Broadening and Homogenising the National Body - Approaching Alevi History beyond the Köprülü Paradigm

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Benjamin Weineck is Research Assistant in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Bayreuth. Johannes Zimmermann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near East at Heidelberg University.

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