Otman Baba - Beliefs

Beliefs

Gramatikova states that Otman Baba followed the Khurasan-region Malamatiyya, a tradition characterized by its adherents’ independence of a director, a school, or conventional religious laws. Representing the doctrines of the halo of Muhammad and of the Perfect Man, Otman Baba held that the prophet Muhammad's divinity transmitted to the kutb, the highest ranking Sufi mystics. Furthermore, Otman Baba asserted that he—as a kutb—had mastered divine secrets, regarding himself above Ottoman rulers and other mystics and identifying himself as the religious and political figures Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Huseyn, Timur, and Sultan Mehmed II. Making the heretical claims of omnipresence and omniscience, Otman Baba insisted that anyone who harmed him would be harming themselves by denying his unity with God and that he could see the poor, starving, and ill and aid them. Before his death, Otman Baba expressed his belief in immortality: "Do not cry after me, because I am not dying, I shall live all the time on the earth and in the sky."

Although Otman Baba disapproved of mystics who worked for personal gain, he collected kurbans (livestock) for his Abdals. Illustrating the traits of an Abdal, Otman Baba said the following: "An Abdal is the man who gives up all but Allah. He has passed through all stages of spiritual self-perfection and is guided only by divine love and divine truth. He is no longer a body. Renouncing imitation and subjection to the body he aims at Ayn el-Yakın." Gramatikova interprets the term Ayn el-Yakın under Abdal and Bektashi teachings as experiencing God through God’s eyes.

Otman Baba's beliefs extended beyond the spiritual, as he disapproved of Turks speaking Persian and Arabic instead of their native tongue. Otman Baba maintained that "the Oghuz language is the father of all languages" and the "only way to stay in the alien, unknown lands".