Alevi-Bektashi
The term Alevi-Bektaşi is today a common term not only in scholarly, political, and media contexts, but also among Alevi and Bektashi communities and organisations...
Historiography of Bektashism
The historiography of Bektashism represents a striking example of the entanglement between identity, politics, and historical narrative. Historical representations of the Bektashi tradition have been...
Between Orality and Textuality: The Epistemic Foundations of Alevi Theology
What counts as a source of Alevi religiosity? Which sources and epistemic foundations enable us to reconstruct, from within Alevi self-understandings, responses to central theological questions such as religious meaning-making,...
Prof. Dr. Cem Kara
Cem Kara is Professor for Alevi Theology at the University of Hamburg. He studied history and philosophy in Cologne and Istanbul and received his doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His dissertation on the transcultural history of the Bektashi Order in the long 19th century received awards from the Southeast Europe Association and the German Oriental Society. He has held research positions at the Ludwig Maximilian University, the Orient Institute Istanbul, the Leibniz Institute for European History and the University of Vienna. His current research focuses on emotions in textual sources of Alevism. Recent publications include Cem Kara, Evelyn Reuter and Zsófia Turóczy (eds.) (2026): Sufism in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Europe. Entanglements in Past and Present. London: Routledge.
