Kaygusuz Abdal: A Medieval Turkish Saint and the Formation of Vernacular Islam in Anatolia – Ahmet T Karamustafa

The archaeology of the religious lives of Turkish speakers in late medieval and early modern Anatolia is in many ways still in its infancy. Even though significant strides were taken in this area during the late Ottoman and early Republican eras, the field suffered from the unquestioned hegemony of a single paradigm during the course of the entire twentieth century, which—we can now see with the benefit of hindsight—stifled new and innovative research. This paradigm, was, of course, the one put into place by M.F. Köprülü, according to which Anatolian Turkish religiosity had to be understood primarily in the light of the pre-Islamic cultural history of Turks in Central Asia. Köprülü’s approach privileged continuity over against change in the religious thought and practice of Turkish speakers both in the longue durée (from pre-Islamic to Islamic periods) and in geo- graphical and cultural expanse (from Central and Southwest Asia to Anatolia and the Balkans).1 The Köprülü paradigm was, at least initially, a step forward in at least the sense that it brought the Turkish vernacular into full view and focused the scholarly gaze squarely on Turkish speakers, but in the long run it had several unfortunate consequences, which, for those who have labored under its influence, include an inability to conceive the religious lives of vernacular speakers as dynamic, ever-changing webs spun by actual human beings who lived at the threshold of continuity and rupture, of the new and the old. Speakers of Turkish (not to mention other vernaculars spoken in Anatolia) were not, however, mere repositories of culture but actual architects of it, and in the half millennium long his- tory of their Islamization between the tenth and fifteenth centuries and beyond, it is their dynamism and agency, not their presumed preservation of “archaic” lifeways, that need to be explored and explained.