 CHAPTER TWELVE THE KIZILBAŞ OF SYRIA AND OTTOMAN SHIISM* Stefan Winter T he ‘Kızılbaş’ were essentially the antithesis of Ottoman din ü devlet, ‘religion and order’. The term, which refers to the red, twelve-pleated turban emblazoned with the names of the Shiite imams that was worn by the eastern Anatolian tribal followers of the Safavid sufi order of Ardabil in the late fifteenth century, seems already to have been used by Safavid leaders of the time. In Ottoman chancery sources it is first used in a derogatory sense when a number of these tribes began to revolt and helped shah Ismail conquer Tabriz in , laying the groundwork for the establishment of a Shi- ite rival state in Iran. 1 In the mid-sixteenth century, judicial opinions by the Ottoman şeyhülislam (chief jurisprudent) Ebussuud Efendi (d. ) and others defined the Kızılbaş as illegal heretics whose elimination was a religious duty. This permitted the state to pursue a veritable inquisition against the heterodox tribesmen whose frequent revolts continued to shake Ottoman rule in Anatolia, while also providing a legal and ideological framework for further warfare against the Safavids. Although the Anatolian Kızılbaş gradually ceased to be a major concern for the Ottoman state – the –  celali rebellions, though alluding to an earlier Kızılbaş revolt, in fact had nothing to do with them – the Iranians and their supporters in Iraq are characterized as Kızılbaş throughout the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conflict with the Kızılbaş is thus often seen as a basic fact of Ottoman and indeed Middle Eastern history in general, as the start of the empire’s uncompromisingly Sunni identity, as the paradigm for its treatment of minorities, and as the validation of an unbridgeable political split between Sunnism and Shiism. Given the importance of the challenge posed by the ‘Kızılbaş’ to the Ottomans, it is hardly surprising that they have been the subject of sustained scholarly interest in modern times. At least five collections of Ottoman archival documents dealing spe- cifically with the Kızılbaş, the Bektaşis and other unorthodox groups have been pub- lished, re-edited, or translated in the past two decades. 2 Numerous popular histories as well as a growing number of scholarly studies have also been devoted to the subject, the most recent of which have tended to emphasize the role which centre–periphery rela- tions, the formulation of authoritative categories of orthodoxy and heterodoxy and the establishment of an early modern state bureaucracy played in the persecution of Shiites in the empire’s formative period. 3 Despite all this attention it is somewhat noteworthy 