Wie sollten wir jener alten Mythen vergessen können, die am Anfange aller Völker stehen, der Mythen von den Drachen, die sich im äußersten Augenblick in Prinzessinnen verwandeln; vielleicht sind alle Drachen unseres Lebens Prinzessinnen, die nur darauf warten, uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen.
In this article, I bring premodern and contemporary Bektaşi perspectives to the current ethical debate on gender equality in the Bektaşi Sufi order. While there is tremendous potential in the historical legacy of Kadıncık Ana, the spiritual successor of Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli (d. ca. 1271), and her peers who served as female spiritual leaders in the proto-Bektaşiyye, the institutionalization of the Bektaşi order resulted in the marginalization of women and their exclusion from certain opportunities and positions in religious practice and leadership. This article explores the spiritual journey of Güllizar Cengiz (today also known as Neriman Aşki Derviș after becoming a Bektaşi “dervish”), including her foundation of an Alevi-Bektaşi cultural institute in Cologne, Germany, in 1997 and the opening of a Bektaşi Sufi lodge (dergah) in the Westerwald near Bonn in 2006. I explore the impact of Hacı Bektaş’s teaching that both men and women have the same spiritual potential to become the ultimately ungendered insan-ı kamil, or spiritually and ethically completed human being. I also discuss the time-honored Bektaşi principle of “moving with the times and staying one step ahead of the times” and how it can inform contemporary understandings of ethical and spiritual prerogatives within Bektaşism.
This article examines the work of seven contemporary artists whose aesthetics exemplify the “lived” experience of Islamic mysticism or Sufism (Arabic tasawwuf) within a European context. The work of artists born in Islamic majority countries and familiar with “traditional” Sufi idioms and discourses, but now immersed in Western culture, is often associated with “diasporic art”. From this hybrid perspective some of their artistic narratives reconfigure or even subvert the “traditional” Sufi idioms, and do so in such a way as to provoke a more profound sensory experience in the viewer than traditional forms of art. Drawing upon on recent methodological tendencies inspired by the “aesthetic turn”, this study explores post- and decolonial ways of thinking about Sufi-inspired artworks, and the development of a transcultural Sufi-inspired aesthetic within the context of migration and displacement over the last half-century.
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