Markus Dressler
Biographic Data
| ID | 577906 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Markus Dressler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Markus |
| FAMILY NAME | Dressler |
| SIGNATURE | DRESSLER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leipzig University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5997-8690 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Alevi Community-Building in Eastern Anatolia: An Ethnohistory Approach
This article probes ethnohistory as an approach for connecting historical and ethnographic data to reconstruct Alevi community formation in a long-term perspective. Historical traces of some of the sacred lineages (ocaks), which constitute the socio-religious backbone of Alevism, date back to as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Two of these Alevi lineages are those of Şeyh Ahmed and Şeyh Hasan Onar. A variety of contemporary narr…
Alevi Pasts in the Present: Rethinking Epistemologies and Narratives
This introduction positions the special issue Alevi Pasts Contested as an intervention in the ongoing effort to rethink Alevi tradition by foregrounding the plurality, dynamism, and situated character of imaginations related to the history of the Alevis. It argues that epistemological frameworks shaped by Orientalist and nationalist paradigms, as well as ethnographic and diaspora research, have produced enduring binaries (e.g., oral vs. written, …
Contested terrains: Youth in twenty-first century Turkey at the intersection of education, family, gender and public space
The Middle East and North Africa
This volume collects reflections on secularity from the Middle East and North Africa. To highlight proximate connections as well as resonances with debates elsewhere, it includes premodern contributions from the region as well as Jewish thought from Europe that have provided significant references for modern appropriations of secularity. The texts, for the most part previously untranslated, reflect commonalities within the region as well as its g…
Carisma, personificação e revelação contínua: Ampliando o conceito de Islã
Este artigo tem o objetivo de ampliar e pluralizar nossa abordagem do Islã como uma tradição discursiva. Ele formula uma intervenção no debate acadêmico sobre a conceituação do Islã como uma tradição discursiva proposta por Talal Asad. Essa conceituação foi criticada por conter um certo viés sunita em sua noção de ortodoxia, notadamente por Shahab Ahmed e Zeynep Oktay. Esta última, com base em seu trabalho sobre o alevismo, argumentou a favor da …
Tracing the Nationalisation of Millet in the Late Ottoman Period: A Conceptual History Approach
During its last century, the Ottoman Empire faced strong contestation of its political order, which had undergone radical changes that are generally discussed in relation to modernisation. Against this background, key social and political concepts in Ottoman Turkish shed old meanings and acquired new ones. This article examines the trajectory of the term millet in this period as a case study. Drawing on political and lexicographic texts from the …
Religion und religiöse Tradition: Unterscheidungsdiskurse zu den Grenzen des Islams
Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich am Beispiel des islamischen Diskursfeldes mit der metasprachlichen Beschreibung objektsprachlicher Ab- und Ausgrenzungsdiskurse. Dies bringt zwangsläufig eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Dynamiken zwischen objekt- und metasprachlicher Begriffsebene mit sich. Der Artikel diskutiert in einem ersten Schritt Talal Asads Konzeption islamischer Orthodoxie und den ihr zugrundeliegenden Traditionsbegriff. In einem zweiten S…
The Social Construction of Reality (1966) Revisited: Epistemology and Theorizing in the Study of Religion
This paper takes the social constructivist approach, formulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, as a starting point for an investigation into epistemology and theorizing in the contemporary study of religion. It discusses various strands of scholarship in dialogue with social constructivism and questions in particular the reductionism of radical constructivist positions. Exploring the boundaries of the classical social constructivist paradig…
Turkish politics of doxa: Otherizing the Alevis as heterodox
The religious identity of Turkey’s Alevis, with the origins of their traditions, and in particular their relation to Islam, are the focus of a debate current in Turkey as well as in those western European countries with strong Turkish migrant populations. This debate began in the late 1980s, with the public coming-out of the Alevi community, when the Alevis set out on a manifest campaign to be recognized as a distinct cultural and/or religious tr…
Rereading Ziya Gökalp: Secularism and Reform of the Islamic State in the Late Young Turk Period
This article analyzes the ideas of the Turkish sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) in order to reevaluate the secularization politics of the Young Turks. A close reading of Gökalp's publications on Islamic institutional reform challenges homogenizing modernist interpretations of late Ottoman reform in general. Gökalp's legacy has often been judged through a secularist-Islamist binary. This article suggests that Gökalp's app…
The Western Discovery of the Kızılbas ̧-Alevis
This chapter discusses the encounter of the Kızılbaş with Western observers, who lived and travelled in Anatolia since the second half of the 19th century. Speculations about the origins of the Kızılbaş soon led to theories about their close relation to Christianity and pre-Islamic Anatolian civilizations. Such theories were articulated in modernist and revivalist language, focusing on questions of religious and racial/ethnic origins and boundari…
Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam
Academic and political debates on the nature and the history of the Alevis of Turkey have since the early 20th century, within the politics of Ottoman/Turkish modernization and Turkish nation-building, been locked in discourses of religious and ethnic essence and homogeneity. Within these discourses, groups previously referred to as Kızılbaş ("Redhead") and regarded as heretics with no attention to their ethnicity, were renamed "Alevi" and marked…
Secularism and Religion-Making
1. Introduction: Modernity, Religion-Making, and the Postsecular Arvind Mandair, Markus Dressler 2. Imagining Religions in India: Colonialism and the Mapping of South Asian History and Culture Richard King 3. Translations of Violence: Secularism and Religion-Making in the Discourses of Sikh Nationalism Arvind Mandair 4. On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time Ruth Mas 5. Secularism, Violence, and the Liberal Imaginary Brian Goldstone 6.…
The Modern Dede: Changing Parameters For Religious Authority In Contemporary Turkish Alevism
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections.
How to Conceptualize Inner-Islamic Plurality/Difference: ‘Heterodoxy’ and ‘Syncretism’ in the Writings of Mehmet F. Köprülü (1890–1966)
This article examines the work of the Turkish historian Mehmet Fuad Köprülü on Turkish/Anatolian Islam, which he referred to as ‘popular’ or ‘heterodox’. On the one hand committed to Western scientific standards, on the other part of the project of Turkish nationalism, Köprülü produced an extensive scholarly work that is until today widely accepted as authoritative in the field. Here, my focus is on the concepts Köprülü used in establishing a nar…
Between Legalist Exclusivism and Mysticist Universalism: Contested Sufi Muslim Identities in New York
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.2010.01330.x
Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality
1. Introduction Markus Dresser, Ron Geaves and Gritt Klinkhammer 2. Glocalization of Religions: Plural Authenticities at the Centres and at the Margins Peter Beyer 3. Global Sufism Theirs and Ours Marcia Hermansen 4. Globalizing the soundworld:Islam and Sufi music in the West Michael Frishkopf 5. Pluralism and Authenticity: Sufi Paths in Post-9/11 New York Markus Dressler 6. A Case of Cultural Binary Fission or Transglobal Sufism?: The Transmigra…
Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism
Journal Article Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism Get access Markus Dressler Markus Dressler Markus Dressler, Department of Religion, Hofstra University, 104 Heger Hall, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 76, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 280–311, https://doi.org/10.1093/…
Turkey's Alevi Enigma
Sufism in the West: By Jamal Malik and John Hinnells, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2006. 207 pages.)
This edited volume, along with David Westerlund’s edited Sufism in Europeand North America (RoutledgeCurzon: 2004), are pioneering works, sincethe systematic study of this topic is still in its infancy. Its introduction andnine chapters bring together anthropological, historical, Islamicist, and sociologicalperspectives on questions of identity as regards Sufism’s doublemarginalization within a non-Muslim majority environment and within thebroade…
The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey By Muammer Kaylan (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005. 482 pages.)
The range of titles in Prometheus Books’ “Islamic Studies” section is quiteintriguing. According to its webpage, this “leading publisher in philosophy,popular science, and critical thinking” appears to be dedicated to coveringIslamic-related topics of interest in a comprehensive manner for a post-9/11western audience. Recnet publications include The Legacy of Jihad: IslamicHoly War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (the author is a professor of medicin…
Le dede moderne: Évolution des paramètres de l'autorité religieuse de l'alévisme dans la Turquie contemporaine
L'article décrit, en la replaçant dans son contexte, l'évolution moderne du leadership et de la structure d'autorité dans l'alévisme turc. Au siècle dernier, à la faveur des processus d'urbanisation et de sécularisation, l'alévisme turc a subi de profondes transformations. Formant traditionnellement une communauté socioreligieuse endogame en marge de la société turque du point de vue géographique, politique et religieux, les alévis participent de…
Inventing Orthodoxy: Competing Claims for Authority and Legitimacy in the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict
Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism
Journal Article Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism Get access Markus Dressler Markus Dressler Markus Dressler, Department of Religion, Hofstra University, 104 Heger Hall, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 76, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 280–311, https://doi.org/10.1093/…
How to Conceptualize Inner-Islamic Plurality/Difference: ‘Heterodoxy’ and ‘Syncretism’ in the Writings of Mehmet F. Köprülü (1890–1966)
This article examines the work of the Turkish historian Mehmet Fuad Köprülü on Turkish/Anatolian Islam, which he referred to as ‘popular’ or ‘heterodox’. On the one hand committed to Western scientific standards, on the other part of the project of Turkish nationalism, Köprülü produced an extensive scholarly work that is until today widely accepted as authoritative in the field. Here, my focus is on the concepts Köprülü used in establishing a nar…
Turkish politics of doxa: Otherizing the Alevis as heterodox
The religious identity of Turkey’s Alevis, with the origins of their traditions, and in particular their relation to Islam, are the focus of a debate current in Turkey as well as in those western European countries with strong Turkish migrant populations. This debate began in the late 1980s, with the public coming-out of the Alevi community, when the Alevis set out on a manifest campaign to be recognized as a distinct cultural and/or religious tr…
Rereading Ziya Gökalp: Secularism and Reform of the Islamic State in the Late Young Turk Period
This article analyzes the ideas of the Turkish sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) in order to reevaluate the secularization politics of the Young Turks. A close reading of Gökalp's publications on Islamic institutional reform challenges homogenizing modernist interpretations of late Ottoman reform in general. Gökalp's legacy has often been judged through a secularist-Islamist binary. This article suggests that Gökalp's app…
Between Legalist Exclusivism and Mysticist Universalism: Contested Sufi Muslim Identities in New York
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.2010.01330.x
The Social Construction of Reality (1966) Revisited: Epistemology and Theorizing in the Study of Religion
This paper takes the social constructivist approach, formulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, as a starting point for an investigation into epistemology and theorizing in the contemporary study of religion. It discusses various strands of scholarship in dialogue with social constructivism and questions in particular the reductionism of radical constructivist positions. Exploring the boundaries of the classical social constructivist paradig…
Inventing Orthodoxy: Competing Claims for Authority and Legitimacy in the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict
The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey By Muammer Kaylan (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005. 482 pages.)
The range of titles in Prometheus Books’ “Islamic Studies” section is quiteintriguing. According to its webpage, this “leading publisher in philosophy,popular science, and critical thinking” appears to be dedicated to coveringIslamic-related topics of interest in a comprehensive manner for a post-9/11western audience. Recnet publications include The Legacy of Jihad: IslamicHoly War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (the author is a professor of medicin…
Le dede moderne: Évolution des paramètres de l'autorité religieuse de l'alévisme dans la Turquie contemporaine
L'article décrit, en la replaçant dans son contexte, l'évolution moderne du leadership et de la structure d'autorité dans l'alévisme turc. Au siècle dernier, à la faveur des processus d'urbanisation et de sécularisation, l'alévisme turc a subi de profondes transformations. Formant traditionnellement une communauté socioreligieuse endogame en marge de la société turque du point de vue géographique, politique et religieux, les alévis participent de…
Sufism in the West: By Jamal Malik and John Hinnells, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2006. 207 pages.)
This edited volume, along with David Westerlund’s edited Sufism in Europeand North America (RoutledgeCurzon: 2004), are pioneering works, sincethe systematic study of this topic is still in its infancy. Its introduction andnine chapters bring together anthropological, historical, Islamicist, and sociologicalperspectives on questions of identity as regards Sufism’s doublemarginalization within a non-Muslim majority environment and within thebroade…
Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism
Journal Article Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism Get access Markus Dressler Markus Dressler Markus Dressler, Department of Religion, Hofstra University, 104 Heger Hall, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 76, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 280–311, https://doi.org/10.1093/…
Turkey's Alevi Enigma
Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality
1. Introduction Markus Dresser, Ron Geaves and Gritt Klinkhammer 2. Glocalization of Religions: Plural Authenticities at the Centres and at the Margins Peter Beyer 3. Global Sufism Theirs and Ours Marcia Hermansen 4. Globalizing the soundworld:Islam and Sufi music in the West Michael Frishkopf 5. Pluralism and Authenticity: Sufi Paths in Post-9/11 New York Markus Dressler 6. A Case of Cultural Binary Fission or Transglobal Sufism?: The Transmigra…
The Modern Dede: Changing Parameters For Religious Authority In Contemporary Turkish Alevism
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections.
How to Conceptualize Inner-Islamic Plurality/Difference: ‘Heterodoxy’ and ‘Syncretism’ in the Writings of Mehmet F. Köprülü (1890–1966)
This article examines the work of the Turkish historian Mehmet Fuad Köprülü on Turkish/Anatolian Islam, which he referred to as ‘popular’ or ‘heterodox’. On the one hand committed to Western scientific standards, on the other part of the project of Turkish nationalism, Köprülü produced an extensive scholarly work that is until today widely accepted as authoritative in the field. Here, my focus is on the concepts Köprülü used in establishing a nar…
Between Legalist Exclusivism and Mysticist Universalism: Contested Sufi Muslim Identities in New York
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.2010.01330.x
Secularism and Religion-Making
1. Introduction: Modernity, Religion-Making, and the Postsecular Arvind Mandair, Markus Dressler 2. Imagining Religions in India: Colonialism and the Mapping of South Asian History and Culture Richard King 3. Translations of Violence: Secularism and Religion-Making in the Discourses of Sikh Nationalism Arvind Mandair 4. On the Apocalyptic Tones of Islam in Secular Time Ruth Mas 5. Secularism, Violence, and the Liberal Imaginary Brian Goldstone 6.…
The Western Discovery of the Kızılbas ̧-Alevis
This chapter discusses the encounter of the Kızılbaş with Western observers, who lived and travelled in Anatolia since the second half of the 19th century. Speculations about the origins of the Kızılbaş soon led to theories about their close relation to Christianity and pre-Islamic Anatolian civilizations. Such theories were articulated in modernist and revivalist language, focusing on questions of religious and racial/ethnic origins and boundari…
Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam
Academic and political debates on the nature and the history of the Alevis of Turkey have since the early 20th century, within the politics of Ottoman/Turkish modernization and Turkish nation-building, been locked in discourses of religious and ethnic essence and homogeneity. Within these discourses, groups previously referred to as Kızılbaş ("Redhead") and regarded as heretics with no attention to their ethnicity, were renamed "Alevi" and marked…
Turkish politics of doxa: Otherizing the Alevis as heterodox
The religious identity of Turkey’s Alevis, with the origins of their traditions, and in particular their relation to Islam, are the focus of a debate current in Turkey as well as in those western European countries with strong Turkish migrant populations. This debate began in the late 1980s, with the public coming-out of the Alevi community, when the Alevis set out on a manifest campaign to be recognized as a distinct cultural and/or religious tr…
Rereading Ziya Gökalp: Secularism and Reform of the Islamic State in the Late Young Turk Period
This article analyzes the ideas of the Turkish sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) in order to reevaluate the secularization politics of the Young Turks. A close reading of Gökalp's publications on Islamic institutional reform challenges homogenizing modernist interpretations of late Ottoman reform in general. Gökalp's legacy has often been judged through a secularist-Islamist binary. This article suggests that Gökalp's app…
The Social Construction of Reality (1966) Revisited: Epistemology and Theorizing in the Study of Religion
This paper takes the social constructivist approach, formulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, as a starting point for an investigation into epistemology and theorizing in the contemporary study of religion. It discusses various strands of scholarship in dialogue with social constructivism and questions in particular the reductionism of radical constructivist positions. Exploring the boundaries of the classical social constructivist paradig…
Religion und religiöse Tradition: Unterscheidungsdiskurse zu den Grenzen des Islams
Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich am Beispiel des islamischen Diskursfeldes mit der metasprachlichen Beschreibung objektsprachlicher Ab- und Ausgrenzungsdiskurse. Dies bringt zwangsläufig eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Dynamiken zwischen objekt- und metasprachlicher Begriffsebene mit sich. Der Artikel diskutiert in einem ersten Schritt Talal Asads Konzeption islamischer Orthodoxie und den ihr zugrundeliegenden Traditionsbegriff. In einem zweiten S…
Tracing the Nationalisation of Millet in the Late Ottoman Period: A Conceptual History Approach
During its last century, the Ottoman Empire faced strong contestation of its political order, which had undergone radical changes that are generally discussed in relation to modernisation. Against this background, key social and political concepts in Ottoman Turkish shed old meanings and acquired new ones. This article examines the trajectory of the term millet in this period as a case study. Drawing on political and lexicographic texts from the …
The Middle East and North Africa
This volume collects reflections on secularity from the Middle East and North Africa. To highlight proximate connections as well as resonances with debates elsewhere, it includes premodern contributions from the region as well as Jewish thought from Europe that have provided significant references for modern appropriations of secularity. The texts, for the most part previously untranslated, reflect commonalities within the region as well as its g…
Carisma, personificação e revelação contínua: Ampliando o conceito de Islã
Este artigo tem o objetivo de ampliar e pluralizar nossa abordagem do Islã como uma tradição discursiva. Ele formula uma intervenção no debate acadêmico sobre a conceituação do Islã como uma tradição discursiva proposta por Talal Asad. Essa conceituação foi criticada por conter um certo viés sunita em sua noção de ortodoxia, notadamente por Shahab Ahmed e Zeynep Oktay. Esta última, com base em seu trabalho sobre o alevismo, argumentou a favor da …
Contested terrains: Youth in twenty-first century Turkey at the intersection of education, family, gender and public space
Alevi Community-Building in Eastern Anatolia: An Ethnohistory Approach
This article probes ethnohistory as an approach for connecting historical and ethnographic data to reconstruct Alevi community formation in a long-term perspective. Historical traces of some of the sacred lineages (ocaks), which constitute the socio-religious backbone of Alevism, date back to as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Two of these Alevi lineages are those of Şeyh Ahmed and Şeyh Hasan Onar. A variety of contemporary narr…
Alevi Pasts in the Present: Rethinking Epistemologies and Narratives
This introduction positions the special issue Alevi Pasts Contested as an intervention in the ongoing effort to rethink Alevi tradition by foregrounding the plurality, dynamism, and situated character of imaginations related to the history of the Alevis. It argues that epistemological frameworks shaped by Orientalist and nationalist paradigms, as well as ethnographic and diaspora research, have produced enduring binaries (e.g., oral vs. written, …
Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Islamic Studies and History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Religious studies (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · History (7 works)