Haji Bektash Veli - Origins

Origins

Hajji Bektash was born in Nishapur, Iran. He was an ethnic Persian

It is reported in some Bektashi legends that Hajji Bektash was a follower and the caliph ("representative") of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, a Sufi mystic from Central Asia who had great influence on the Turkic nomads of the steppes. However, there are no signs of Yasavi influence in the original teachings of Hajji Bektash and this claim is rejected by modern scholars, since Ahmad Yasavi lived nearly one hundred years before Hajji Bektash.

Modern research connects him to another important religious movement of that time: to the Qalandariyah movement and to Bābā Rasul Ilyās Khorāsānī († 1240), an influential mystic from Eastern Persia who was tortured to death because of his anti-orthodox views on Islam. The original Bektashi teachings in many ways resemble the teachings of the Khorasanian Qalandariyah and that of Rassul-Allāh Eliyās.

See also: Qalandariyah, Sufism, Zawiyya, Kosovo, and Albania

Read more about this topic:  Haji Bektash Veli

Famous quotes containing the word origins:

    “Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
    —W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)

    “The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
    —Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

    “Grown onto every inch of plate, except
    Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
    Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
    Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
    The origins of art.”
    —Howard Moss (b. 1922)