Summary
A distinct aesthetic highlights Arab Alawi homes, shops, marketplaces, and festival sites in south Turkey, where an analogy is visually, materially and symbolically made between religious and political figures. Placed side by side, the pictures (some paintings, others photographs) stand for the Prophet Ali, for Turkey’s secularist and modernist founder Ataturk, as well as for left-wing Turkish revolutionaries like Deniz Gezmis, Yılmaz Güney, and Mahir Çayan, alongside Che Guevara. In this paper, I ask how this religio-political iconography relates to the Khidr-centred cosmology of the region. While never depicted in pictographic form, is there something in the mythological and transcendent figure of Khidr that is referenced in the socialist and secularist line up of exemplars for the Arab Alawis? Or, what does Khidr have to do with Ataturk and Che Guevara? 

Yael Navaro – Born in Istanbul, Yael Navaro was educated at Brandeis University (BA 1991) and Princeton University (MA 1993, PhD 1998). She has been teaching at the University of Cambridge since 1999 where she is Reader in Social Anthropology. Her publications include Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012). She was the Principal Investigator of a European Research Council grant under the title “Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey” (2012-16). The research for this paper was conducted under this project. A co-edited volume entitled Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is coming out this year, and a single-authored book centered around “Khidr cosmography” is under preparation.