User:LouisAragon/sandbox/Baraq Baba

http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/baraq-baba-655-707-1257-58-1307-08-a-crypto-shamanic-anatolian-turkman-dervish-close-to-two-of-the-mongol-rulers-of-ir

Baraq Baba (1,026 words)

Baraq Baba (d. 707/1307–8) was a prominent dervish leader in Anatolia and Iran. The earliest and most informative Turkish source about him (Yazıcızāde) relates that he was a son of the Anatolian Saljūq ruler ʿIzz al-Dīn Kaykā’ūs II (d. 678/1279–80, in the Crimea). He was baptized as a child and received priestly training from the Greek patriarch in Constantinople, but was reconverted to Islam by Ṣarı Ṣalṭūq, the most famous “warrior-saint” associated with the partial Islamization and Turkification of Rumelia (the Ottoman Balkans) who possibly lived during the second half of the thirteenth century. He became a follower of the saint, who named him Baraq, “long-haired dog,” when the disciple eagerly swallowed a morsel that Ṣalṭūq had expectorated. Mamlūk sources in Arabic (al-Ṣafadī and al-ʿAynī are the most detailed) corroborate the initiatic relationship between Ṣalṭūq and Baraq, but they report that the latter was born in Tokat, in northern Anatolia, and that his father was a military commander and his paternal uncle a famous scribe.

Nothing is known about Baraq Baba’s undertakings until the end of the seventh/thirteenth century, when he travelled to Iran and gained the trust of the Īlkhān Ghāzān Khān (r. 694–703/1295–1304) and his successor Muḥammad Khudābanda Uljaytū (r. 703–16/1304–16). In 706/1306, he journeyed to Syria and Egypt with a group of dervish disciples, reportedly on an unspecified diplomatic mission on behalf of Uljaytū to the Mamlūks. After a colourful entry into Damascus, he went to Jerusalem; however, he was not allowed to enter Egypt, and he returned to Iran. In 707/1307–8, he was killed while on another diplomatic expedition, this time to Gīlān in northern Iran, in order to secure the release of a Mongol commander from captivity. (He was not yet forty years old at the time of his death.) His bones were taken to Sulṭāniyya (located in present-day Iran), where a zāwiya was constructed for his followers by the Īlkhān (al-Ṣafadī, al-ʿAynī). When the Mawlawī (Mevlevi) master Ulu ʿĀrif Çelebi (d. 719/1320) visited this hospice in 716/1316, a certain Ḥayrān Emīrci was the head of the dervishes (known as Baraqīs) residing there (Aflākī).

Baraq Baba was an unconventional figure, and his appearance attracted attention, especially when he was in Syria in 706/1306, with his party of roughly one hundred followers. His hair and moustache were long, while the rest of his face was clean shaven. On his head, he wore a felt turban affixed with buffalo horns, and around his neck, a rope adorned with the knucklebones of cattle or sheep. He carried a club and henna-dyed bells. His disciples resembled him, and some carried tambourines, drums, and bugle-horns. Baraq Baba did not accumulate any wealth, and he apparently had power over wild animals, which he demonstrated by frightening a tiger and riding an ostrich on two occasions (Mamlūk sources give conflicting accounts of these feats). His dervishes performed the prescribed religious prayers (though on pain of forty blows of the bastinado), but they failed to observe the ritual fast and consumed legally objectionable foods and drugs (al-Ṣafadī, al-ʿAynī).

Some of Baraq Baba’s ecstatic expressions in Kipchak Turkish are preserved in a learned Persian commentary about them, written by a certain Quṭb al-ʿAlavī, in 756/1355. One of these sayings (heyhāt heyhūt Ṣalṭūq Ata miskīn Baraq, “Alas! Alas! Holy Ṣalṭūq, poor Baraq!”) confirms that Baraq was a disciple of Ṣarı Ṣalṭūq (al-ʿAlavī, Persian, 462, lines 17–8; Turkish translation, 265). While these utterances are nearly obscure to present-day readers, the mere existence of al-ʿAlavī’s sophisticated work suggests that Baraq Baba’s influence on posterity was not inconsequential. Moreover, Baraq Baba might have had a connection to the famous Turkish Ṣūfī poet Yūnus Emre (fl. seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries), perhaps in the form of a chain of initiation through the latter’s master, Ṭaptuq Emre (fl. second half of the seventh/thirteenth century). However, the sole evidence that suggests such a link, a verse of Yūnus (Yūnus’a Ṭaptuq u Ṣalṭūq u Baraq’dandur naṣīb, “What (knowledge) Yūnus has is from Ṭaptuq and Ṣalṭūq and Baraq”), is ambiguous. At best, it establishes that there was a close affinity among the figures mentioned (Yūnus Emre, viii).

Ahmet T. Karamustafa

Karamustafa, Ahmet T., “Baraq Baba”, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, Edited by: Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Consulted online on 12 January 2019  First published online: 2013 First print edition: 9789004252653, 2013, 2013-1