[Special Feature: The Dynamics of Islamic Knowledge and Practice: Across Texts, Rituals, and Societies] Reaching the Unreachable: The Past and Present Kurdish Alevi Techniques of Contact with Inaccessible Sacred Sites (Turkey)

This study attempts to identify counterintuitive forms of mobility that enable people to maintain their connection with sacred geography despite constraints and inaccessibility. In the face of violence, militarization of the territory, migration, and formation of a transnational diaspora, certain local techniques of contact are being reappropriated and mobilized for new purposes, while others are being invented. In the contemporary context of Kurdish Alevism, these contact techniques take three forms: remote access, the fragmentation of visits, and moving sacred sites. I argue that attempts to build continuity despite ongoing obstacles are made possible by the appropriation of global technologies, the invention of rituals and the reinterpretation of older techniques locally known and transmitted.