İran Türklerinde Mersiye Geleneği: Dinî ve Millî Kimlik Etkileşimi Üzerine Bir İnceleme

Abstract

Iranian Turks, who have a presence in Iran, have been the founders of many Turkish states throughout history. However, after Reza Shah took power in 1921, it was observed that the Turks’ sphere of dominance in Iran began to diminish. The impact of the policies put forward with the attempts to establish a new nation state is extremely important in this. Iranian Turks, who emphasized their identity awareness in every field until the Pahlavi Period, experienced a sociocultural process in which religious identity had a more inclusive effect than national identity, especially after the 1979 Revolution. This process was completed with the effort to create a binding super-identity with the establishment of the Shiite paradigm. The Shi’ite super-identity is maintained through a protection mechanism that affects all segments of the society throughout Iran, encompassing many elements from clothing to music, language to lifestyle. Among these cultural dynamics, the elegiac (mersiye) tradition is one of the areas where identity awareness can be revealed through the intersection of religious and national identity interaction. It has been observed that the elegiac (mersiye) tradition, with its important place in the lives of Iranian Turks, has unique functions such as language preservation, purification, maintaining tradition, integration with collective participation, social control and secret protest. On the other hand, the elegiac (mersiye) tradition plays an important role in the survival of Turkish in an environment where the single language approach in Iran is not limited to the public dimension and deeply affects social life due to factors such as the fact that the official language of the country is Persian and Turkish is not accepted as an official language. In this study, the role of elegiac (mersiye) tradition on the interaction of religious identity and national identity of Iranian Turks is analyzed based on these factors. First of all, definitions and historical explanations of the concepts and terms that are the subject of the research are given. In this framework, introductory information about Iranian Turks, Iranian Azerbaijan and Zanjan province, which is one of the regions where Turks live densely and where the tradition is strongly maintained, is presented in terms of the limitation of the study, and literature studies that can be associated with the elegiac (mersiye) tradition of Iranian Turks are discussed. Subsequently, the elegiac (mersiye) tradition is analyzed in terms of its definition, history and concept-ritual practices. The fact that the elegiac (mersiye) tradition has an important place in the folklore discipline can provide a holistic approach to the subject with functional methodology analysis. As a matter of fact, the functional dimension helps us to understand not only as a cultural expression but also its role in the religious and social dynamics of the society. Therefore, the functional dimension of the mersiye tradition from general to specific Iranian Turks has been revealed through the data obtained from the center and rural areas of Zanjan through fieldwork and participant and nonparticipant observation with examples of performers, performance environments, listeners/audience and texts. Finally, the findings and outputs regarding the role of the elegiac (mersiye) tradition in these identities are shared by discussing the data that exemplify the interaction of religious and national identity.