Of the many Sufi masters who began arriving in Anatolia in the thirteenth century or earlier, few were destined to play such a pivotal role in the socio-religious history of the region as Hac Bektaş (d. c.1270). Hac Bektaş is not only the eponym of the Bektashiyye, one of the most influential Sufi orders in the Ottoman Empire; he was also a cornerstone of the broader religious matrix from which Kizilbashism/Alevism emerged. In accordance with his historical significance, Hac Bektaş and his spiritual legacy have received sustained scholarly and popular interest. Despite that, large gaps and many uncertainties exist in our knowledge of Bektashi history. One particularly baffling aspect of this history that concerns us here is the origins and nature of the relationship between the Bektashiyye and the Kizilbash/Alevi communities. The latter share with the Bektashis a common reverence for Hac Bektaş. The two groups are likewise united in their veneration of ʿAli and the Twelve Imams, and they are near-identical in the sphere of doctrine and rites. On the other hand, Hac Bektaş was also the patron saint of the Janissaries, the elite infantry corps of the Ottomans, and the Bektashiyye was an officially recognised Sufi order in the Ottoman Empire. And so, the Bektashis, unlike the Kizilbash/Alevi communities, have lived for the most part a life free of persecution under Ottoman rule, at least until the order's abolition in 1826 (along with the destruction of the Janissaries), when they entered a period of underground existence.

For Fuad Köprülü, as for many others writing in his wake, the difference between the two groups is reduceable to one of separate social environments and organisation, and divergent political evolution in postsixteenth- century Ottoman society. In this view, the Alevis are simply the ‘village Bektashis’ who joined ranks with the Safavids, faced repression as a result and mutated into an inward-looking endogamous ethnoreligious community. The Bektashis, in contrast, were organised as a formal Sufi order, functioning on the basis of fixed rules for initiation and progression within the order.