Stone people, tree people and animal people in Turkic Asia and Eastern Europe.

In the 17th century the Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi, who was visiting the Turkmen nomads from the Karakoyunlu tribe in the north-west of Iran, was extremely surprised by one of the key elements of the faith of the people, who were nonetheless Muslim: worshipping trees, beside which they lit candles and to whose bark they attached pieces of iron. Two centuries later the same astonishment can be read of in the report presented to the Ottoman sultan Abdul-hamid II by one of his agents on the topic of some nomad peoples from Anatolia in present-day Turkey; in this report it says they blindly worship 'the great trees and monumental rocks that are touched by the first rays of the rising sun'. (1) Ethnologists witnessed the same phenomenon in Anatolia and the Balkans in the 20th century; one of them noted that the tree cult was very much alive in the second area and even invented the neologism 'dendrolatry'. (2)

The relationship with nature of the Turkic-speaking peoples of Europe (Balkans), Turkey and central Asia has several special features that do not exist among their Muslim co-religionists in the Middle East and North Africa. They are the consequence of a cross-fertilization of beliefs and practices inspired on the one hand by Islam, more especially Arab-Muslim philosophy (Ibn Sina, al-Farabi) and Sufism, and on the other by animism, shamanism and Buddhism. This cross-fertilization is not reflected in the Islam of the large urban centres of Islamo-Turkic civilization (Konya, Istanbul, Bukhara, Samarkand), where the rule is in fact fidelity to the most orthodox religious tradition as handed down by Arab scholars. It appears in human groups that settle at a distance from centres of learning, in the forests and plains of the Deliorman and Dobroudja (present-day Bulgaria and Romania), in central and eastern Anatolia (Turkey), in desert areas (Turkmenistan), steppes (Kazakhstan) or high mountains (Tianchan, Pamirs), as well as some isolated oases in eastern Turkestan (Kashghar, Turfan). This cross-fertilization, which began with the introduction of Islam into central Asia (7th century), is still continuing today in these areas and all those where Turkic peoples settled (Russia, Asia Minor/Turkey and eastern Europe). It took the form of an Islam, labelled 'heterodox', which was first of all restricted to rural areas before being carried by the flight from the land in the 20th century into the heart of the old centres of learning, which today have become big modern cities: Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Kazan, Istanbul. This heterodox Islam inevitably found itself in conflict with orthodox Islam, which rapidly became dominant as the state ideology of the Ottomans and in the various central Asian emirates, and remained the standard religion for the Turks in kemalist Turkey and ex-soviet and Maoist central Asia. In Turkey the representatives of this heterodox Islam, who used to be called Turkoman, Kizilbash (red heads), have been known since the late 19th century by the name Alevi; at the present time they form a population of around 10-15 million individuals. In central Asia heterodoxy runs through popular Islam but is not a distinguishing feature of any particular group.

In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, nature is in general seen as a place, which may be unique but is ordinary, where man lives, the only creature worthy of 'salvation', to whom alone the holy texts are addressed in order to teach the 'right way'. The respect or sympathy that is sometimes directed towards nature/creation seems ancillary and in no way resembles, as we shall see below, the great esteem accorded it by most Asian religions, more especially those that are still influenced by animism and shamanism. However, exception must be made of certain marginal mystical or theosophical sects (Kabbala, magic, alchemy, Sufism), which do have several similarities to these Asian religions. Nevertheless the vision of nature is quite different in Turkish and central Asian heterodox Islam and some strands of Muslim mysticism (Sufism).

The religious and philosophical influences that come together to form this original vision of nature are threefold. The first is from the animistic and shamanistic faith of the Turkic nomads of Asia, which has much in common with that of the region's other nomadic peoples. The second influence, which might be described as an immanentism, is a descendant of Neoplatonic philosophy, recast in the context of Arabo-Muslim philosophy and Sufism. This strand has similar features to the 'magic panvitalism' of Paracelsus (3) and the 'energetism' that prevails in eastern Asia. And finally the third influence comes from belief in the transmigration of beings borrowed from shamanism or central Asian Buddhism.

Thinking on Supernature

Roberte Hamayon writes that the concept of 'Supernature' seems more appropriate than animism to characterize 'a mode of thought that attributes to natural beings and things a soul similar to that of humans', and to indicate 'all the symbolic entities associated with nature': '"Supernature" is "above" or prior to nature only insofar as it animates it and determines its "life"; it is the symbolic component of nature but can only express itself through nature: in other words, every supernatural being has a natural form.' (4) In animistic Asia the worship of mountains, springs, stones, rocks, plants and animals predominates; these are all beings with which human communities have a number of relationships. And traces of that worship were introduced into the Mediterranean region, west of the Urals and into Europe by Turkic nomads who had embraced Islam. All the creatures of Supernature and nature are linked through alliances forged between human groups and animal societies, or by the willing transformation of people into animals or plants or even stones. And so it comes about that all beings in nature see themselves as clothed in the same dignity, with none being superior to another.

The cult of trees and the forest, which is linked to that of mountains and water, predominates; indeed trees play a part in legends ...