The Order Tied to an Army, and Broken with It

The Bektashiyya's later history was shaped decisively by an institutional alliance rather than by doctrine alone: the order became closely associated with the Ottoman Janissary corps, the elite infantry recruited largely through the devshirme levy of Christian boys, who adopted Bektashi spiritual affiliation and gave the order a political and military weight far beyond what its own lodges alone would have carried. That alliance made the order's fortunes rise and fall with the Janissaries' own standing, and when Sultan Mahmud II abolished the corps by force in 1826, in the episode Ottoman history calls the Auspicious Incident, the Bektashi order was suppressed alongside it, its lodges closed on the grounds of the same association that had once given it influence.

The order recovered gradually over the following century, only to face a second suppression when Ataturk's republic banned Sufi orders across Turkey in 1925, and it was in the aftermath of that ban that Albania, where Bektashi communities were already well established, became the order's effective centre, with Albanian Bektashism preserving and continuing a tradition whose original heartland in Anatolia and Istanbul had twice been closed down by the state.