In 1898 Lynch considered the population to be close to 30,000, comprising 10,000 Armenians, 300 Syrians, and the rest Muslim Kurds (both Alevis and Sunnis included).
Most of the village inhabitants are actually Tahtacı (Alevi- Turkmen) origin
In 1514, to reduce the chances of attack during his march to Iran, Selim I sent his officials to the province of Rum, in north-central Anatolia, with orders to register by name anyone identified as Qizilbash, including members of the Alevi population.
Alevi |
Just like the conflict in Kahramanmaraş in December 1978 the clashes in Çorum seemed to emerge from religious tensions between the dominant Sunnites and the minority of Alevites, but at the same time were a battle between right and left wing groups for domination in the town.
The Zaza-Kurdish Alevi singer Ferhat Tunç was born in 1964 in the city of Tunceli, in Turkey's eastern province of Tunceli (Dersim).
During September 2005 he attended the First Alevi-Bektashi Conference in Isparta, Turkey, where he presented a paper on links between Freemasonry and the Bektashi community.
However, in Turkish culture such a neat division into Sufi and Shi'a is scarcely possible: for instance, Yunus Emre is considered by some to have been an Alevi, while the entire Turkish aşık/ozan tradition is permeated with the thought of the Bektashi Sufi order, which is itself a blending of Shi'a and Sufi concepts.
One of the common characteristic of these three distinct group of people is that they frequently call themselves as "Kurdish Alawites" and distance themselves from Twelver-Shia-Muslim-Tariqat of the Anatolian Turkish-Qizilbash-Alevi-Bektashis in such a way that the prophecy of Muhammad as it was revealed by the verses of the Quran does not constitute a part of their fundamental religious faith.