Suavi Aydin

Hacettepe University · Department of Anthropology

This special issue brings together scholarship on Alevi Kurds by focusing on their ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, cultural and social specificity including a range of articles from the disciplines of anthropology, history, politics, linguistics and sociology. The first part focuses on Turkey, exploring the roots of Kurdish Alevism and ho...

This interview with Martin van Bruinessen records his personal and intellectual engagement with Alevis in Turkey and the Netherlands for over fifty years. Initially, his interest was in Anatolian Alevi culture and he began exploring the religious dimension of Alevism in the 1970s at a time when Alevis were more preoccupied with left-wing politics....

This article focuses on the generic form of Alevism, commonly referred to as “Anatolian Alevism”, asking how ethnic and tribal divergences occurred, their interrelationships and the basis of the differences and similarities. It assumes that the beliefs and practices known collectively as “Anatolian Alevism” constitute a “wholistic structure” that r...

Until recently the importance of religion in the modern world has often been underestimated in Western societies, whereas its significance is absolutely crucial in the Middle East. Religion is critical to a sense of belonging for communities and nations, and can be a force for unity or division. This is the case for the Alevis, an ethnic and religi...

Alevism has been regarded as a contested identity which is difficult to define because of its ‘syncretic’ character. Attempts at definition have been overwhelmed by essentialist approaches as well as different political agendas since the fifteenth-century Ottoman period. This paper aims to trace the history of Alevism with a particular focus on his...

Homing of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells to sites favoring growth, a critical step in disease progression, is principally coordinated by the CXCL12/CXCR4 axis. A cohort of 62 CLL patients was divided into migrating and nonmigrating subsets according to chemotaxis toward CXCL12. Migrating patients phosphorylated extracellular signal-regula...

The ‘Turkish History Thesis’ was the project of constructing a history of origins and an ethnic identity for the Turks in early republican Turkey. In this respect, the project was similar to nation-building efforts elsewhere. Yet, archaeological activities, designed along the lines of the thesis, experienced a paradox between demonstrating the gene...

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), traditionally considered a disease of failed apoptosis, is now seen as characterized by a different propensity to grow according to microenvironmental signals. CD38 (surface receptor) and ZAP-70 (cytoplasmic molecule) independently predict unfavorable outcome in CLL patients. We reported that CD38 is a receptor m...