Nefes

Alevis call the saz the stringed Quran, and the phrase is not a flourish. Alevi religious teaching has been carried in sung Turkish poetry rather than in Arabic legal texts, and the instrument on which that poetry is performed is treated with a reverence that Sunni jurisprudence reserves for the book. Critics of the tradition have taken the expression as evidence of heterodoxy, which tells you how much weight it carries on both sides.

The performance belongs to the cem, the communal ritual, and it belongs to it structurally. The cem is organised around a set of offices, and one of them, the zakir, is the musician. He is not accompanying the service. Singing the nefes is one of its constituent duties, in the same way that the presence of the dede who leads it is a duty, and a cem without it is incomplete rather than plain.

The content of the repertory is doctrinal, devotional and often political at once. Its poems address the household of the Prophet and the twelve imams, they teach the ethical demands the tradition makes on its members, and a substantial part of the canon is the work of poets who were executed. Pir Sultan Abdal, the best known of them, was hanged in the sixteenth century after siding against the Ottoman state, and his poems have been sung as protest for four hundred years since, including by Turkish left wing movements in the twentieth century that held none of the theology. That double life, as liturgy and as protest song, is one of the things that makes the nefes hard to file.

The tradition names seven great poets and treats their work as the core of the repertory. The list is usually given as Nesimi, Fuzuli, Shah Khatai, Pir Sultan Abdal, Kul Himmet, Yemini and Virani, and it spans the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Shah Khatai is the pen name of Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, which places a reigning shah inside the devotional canon of a community that lived under his Ottoman rivals, and that placement is itself a piece of the tradition's history.

Two things complicate the canon. The first is that it was transmitted orally and by manuscript in village settings for centuries, so texts circulate in variants and attributions move between poets. Poems ascribed to Pir Sultan Abdal in particular are considerably more numerous than one man could plausibly have written, and the name has functioned partly as a signature that later poets could take up.

The second is that the naming of a definite canon of seven is comparatively recent. Alevism was described, categorised and to a significant extent codified from the late Ottoman period onward, under pressure from a state that wanted to know what it was dealing with and from Alevi intellectuals who wanted to state it. The repertory is genuinely old. The tidy list of seven, and the printed collections that fixed particular texts as standard, belong to that later process, and a reader should keep the two apart.