Search Results (2)

The Alevis of Anatolia and the Balkans and the Alawites of Syria and southeastern Turkey are two distinct ethnoreligious communities frequently conflated in both media and scholarly literature, despite their divergent historical origins, theological differences, and varying sociocultural formations. While their shared histories of marginalization and persecution, certain theological parallels, and cognate ethnonyms contribute to this conflation, it largely stems from a broader tendency within mainstream Islamic frameworks to homogenize so-called heterodox communities without sufficient attention to their doctrinal and cultural specificities. This paper, grounded in a synthetic analysis of current scholarship, maps the key historical, theological, and sociocultural intersections and divergences between Alawite and Alevi communities. Situated within the broader framework of intra-Islamic diversity, it seeks to move beyond essentialist and homogenizing paradigms by foregrounding the distinct genealogies of each tradition, rooted, respectively, in the early pro-Alid movements of Iraq and Syria and in Anatolian Sufism. In addition, the study examines the communities’ overlapping political trajectories in the modern era, particularly their alignments with leftist and secular–nationalist currents, as well as their evolving relationship—from mutual unawareness to a recent political rapprochement—prompted by the growing existential threats posed by the rise of Sunni-Salafi Islamist movements. Full article

This study investigates the social and historical dynamics affecting the religion/sect-based linguistic distribution and associations of the Qaf variants, namely [q] and [ʔ]. The findings are based on the data gathered through interactions with 93 Arabic speakers from Tartus Center, Syria. The descriptive analysis reveals the presence of religion/sect-based linguistic distribution, with [q] being dominant mainly among Alawites and [ʔ] being dominant among Sunnis and Christians and increasingly becoming popular among Alawites of the urban regions. The paper highlights the emergence of [q] as a religiously, socially, and symbolically marked Alawite variant during the war, contrary to the [ʔ], which became a supralocal and religiously neutral variant that speakers of marked [q] backgrounds can resort to at times of tension and social pressure. Full article