A rapidly diminishing number of members of the Alevi community can still remember dedes’ visits to Karbala, or at least hearing stories about them. According to oral testimonies, some dedes were making the journey to Karbala to have their ocak's genealogical charts (A. shajaras; T. şeceres) updated until as late as the mid-twentieth century. While these testimonies offer little detail on the exact itineraries of these journeys, gaps in them can now be filled thanks to the recently surfaced Alevi documents of Iraq origin. These include primarily ziyāretnāmes and ḫilāfetnāmes in Turkish, and shajaras in Arabic, spanning the second half of the sixteenth century and the late nineteenth, respectively recording the dedes’ visits to the Shiʿi/Alevi sacred sites in Iraq, certifying their attachment to the convent in Karbala and confirming their sayyid descent. Collectively they point to some intimate and relatively routinised relations between the Kizilbash/ Alevi ocaks – specifically those of Wafaʾi background in eastern Anatolia that this work focuses on – and a web of sayyid families and Sufi convents in the Iraqi shrine cities.

This hitherto little recognised transregional Kizilbash network linking the Kizilbash/Alevi ocaks in Anatolia to a group of evidently pro-Safavid sayyid and Sufi circles in Iraq, while surprising at first sight, becomes more explicable when one keeps in mind the region's critical position in the Ottoman–Safavid rivalry. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, Iraq became a militarily and ideologically contested zone between the two empires. Although the Ottomans and the Safavids agreed to put an end to fighting and to accept each other's legitimacy under the Treaty of Amasya in 1555, several more wars occurred along the Iraqi frontier prior to the Treaty of Kasr-ı Şirin in 1639. Since the end of Akkoyunlu rule in the region in 1508, Iraq was mostly under Ottoman control except for the two prolonged intervals, 1508–1534 and 1624–1638, when it was politically dominated by the Safavids.