Hacı Bektaş Velî: The Pir of the Anatolian Erens

Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî (c. 1209 to 1271) is the great Anatolian Pir whose lodge at Suluca Karahöyük, the village in central Anatolia that today bears his name, gave classical Turkish tasawwuf one of its principal homes. From the Khorasani migration that brought Sufi shaykhs westward in the 13th century, he carried the Yesevi inheritance into the heart of Anatolia and taught it in the plain Turkish of the people he served.

The chain that begins with Ahmad Yasawi in Yasi reaches its first great Anatolian receiver in him. His Makâlât, the Four Gates and Forty Stations, became one of the most widely transmitted Sufi catechisms in Turkish religious history. His house phrase, “Be master of your hand, your tongue, and your loins,” continues to circulate in ordinary Turkish piety eight centuries later.

A Life from Nishapur to the Anatolian Plateau

Hacı Bektaş’s dates and birthplace are not historically fixed with the certainty of better-documented figures. The received tradition places his birth around 1209 in Nishapur in Khorasan, in a family descending from the Prophet through Ali ibn Abi Talib. His early teacher is reported to be Lokman Parende, a khalifa in the lineage of Ahmad Yasawi. Through this teacher he stands in direct cultural descent from the Yesevi tradition of Türkistan.

The 13th century was a turbulent moment in Anatolia. The Mongol invasions had emptied Khorasan of many of its scholars and Sufis, sending a westward wave that reached the Seljuk lands. The Seljuk state was in decline. The Babai uprising had recently shaken central Anatolia. Mevlana and Shams were in Konya. Türkmen tribes were settling the plateau. To this turbulent ground Hacı Bektaş brought the steady presence of a lodge.

He moved westward through Amasya and the Kırşehir region and settled finally at Suluca Karahöyük, then a small village near the line that connects the central Anatolian routes. He taught from this lodge for the rest of his life. He died around 1271 and was buried in the same village. His tomb at Hacıbektaş in Nevşehir province remains one of the most visited sites in Turkey.

The Makâlât: The Four Gates and Forty Stations

The text most firmly attributed to Hacı Bektaş is the Makâlât (“Discourses”), composed in Arabic and later widely transmitted in Turkish translation, principally through the redaction associated with Said Emre. The work is structured around the Four Gates of the spiritual path, each containing ten stations, for a total of forty.

The Gate of Sharia (ten stations). The foundational gate. It includes the testimony of faith, the daily prayer, the fast, the alms, the pilgrimage, the seeking of religious knowledge, the lawful earning, the avoidance of the unlawful, the duty to family, and the discipline of the tongue.

The Gate of Tariqa (ten stations). The disciplined inner work that begins after the Sharia is in place. Tövbe (repentance), service, fear of God, hope in God’s mercy, sincere intention, sabr, submission to the guide, adab in companionship, and the patient bearing of correction.

The Gate of Marifa (ten stations). The deepening of knowledge into recognition. Adab, fear and humility, zühd, patience under contentment, modesty, generosity, knowledge, recognition (marifa), knowledge of self (in the classical sense rooted in the Quranic call to self-examination), and recognition of the Lord.

The Gate of Haqiqa (ten stations). The final gate. The seeker arrives at humility before all of creation, sees no one as low or distant from God’s mercy, lives the inseparability of self and service, recognises the Real (al-Haqq) without ever blurring the Creator-creation distinction, and gains the unshakeable certainty that the path was real and that the Master who opened it was the Prophet, peace be upon him.

The structure follows the classical Sufi formulation worked out in Sharia, Tariqa, Haqiqa, with Marifa as the cognitive fruit, exactly as Imam Rabbani would later articulate it. Hacı Bektaş’s version is plainer in diction, aimed at the Anatolian Türkmen of his day rather than at the Bukharan madrasa. The substance is classical.

His most cited line distils the whole structure:

“Şeriat-tarikat yoldur varana, hakikat-marifet andan içeri.”

The Sharia and the tariqa are the road for the one who walks. Haqiqa and marifa are the chambers beyond.

The Lodge and Its Erkân

Three axes of the Hacıbektaş lodge are preserved by the tradition.

Service (hizmet). The lodge was open to ordinary people: the poor, the traveller, the soldier, the woman seeking blessing for her child. Kitchen service was central to the formation of the dervish. This carries the Yesevi imprint directly. Service is not a side activity; it is the first arena in which the nafs is trained.

Love (muhabbet). The maxim most often associated with Hacı Bektaş is “incinsen de incitme,” “though you be wounded, do not wound.” It is not sentimentality. It is the working principle of how the heart is to be defended against the wounds that pride, envy, and resentment would otherwise turn into walls. Love removes the obstacles to dhikr.

Plain speech. The teaching tongue at the lodge was simple Turkish. Not ornamented kalam, not Persianised verse, but the speech that Türkmen herders and townspeople actually used. The same project Ahmad Yasawi had opened in Yasi was extended into Anatolian soil here.

Connection to the Janissary Corps

Ottoman tradition recognises Hacı Bektaş as the patron Pir of the Janissary Corps. The Corps was organised after Hacı Bektaş’s lifetime (the Janissaries were institutionalised around the 1360s, almost a century after his death in 1271). The spiritual attribution to him is therefore an honorific bond developed by the Corps and the wider Ottoman state, not a literal commissioning. What the link signals is that, by the early Ottoman centuries, Hacı Bektaş had already become the shared Pir of central Anatolia, claimed not by a sect but by the wider Turkic Muslim civilisation that was taking shape in the peninsula.

Bektaşilik: Original Line and Later Developments

The historical Hacı Bektaş and his Makâlât stand within classical Sunni tasawwuf. The Four Gates and Forty Stations is a Sunni Sufi catechism, not an esoteric reading at odds with the Sharia. The later order called Bektaşilik developed in the centuries after him along two main branches:

The Çelebi branch, claimed by families tracing biological descent from Hacı Bektaş, rooted especially in rural Türkmen communities.

The Babagân branch, organised in the early 16th century by Balım Sultan (d. c. 1516) into a more formalised dervish institution with its own ceremonial order.

In later centuries, in particular subregions, Bektaşi communities became interwoven with Alevi folk practice. This is a layered, post-classical sociological development, distinct from the textual content of the Makâlât or the lodge described by the Vilâyetnâme. A historically careful reading of Hacı Bektaş himself, through his attributed text and his earliest hagiography, places him within the classical Sunni Sufi mainstream.

The Three-Limb Maxim

The short instruction most often repeated as Hacı Bektaş’s own counsel is:

“Eline, beline, diline sahip ol.”

Be master of your hand, your loins, and your tongue.

This compresses the Forty Stations into a working discipline a peasant or a soldier could carry into his ordinary day.

Hand: keep what you earn lawful, do not take what belongs to another, let the hand be a hand of service rather than seizure.

Loins: discipline the appetite, honour the bond of marriage, do not let what passes for pleasure undo what was meant to flourish.

Tongue: keep it from backbiting, from lying, from boasting; let it serve dhikr, truthful speech, and the keeping of one’s word.

The maxim is one of those rare formulations in Turkish religious history that compresses a complete program into a single sentence a child can memorise. Eight centuries later it is still spoken in central Anatolian homes.

Place in the Anatolian Inheritance

Hacı Bektaş belongs to the same Anatolian generation as Mevlana (d. 1273), Yunus Emre (d. 1321), Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 1274), and Sultan Walad (d. 1312). Together they constitute the founding generation of Anatolian tasawwuf as a continuous living tradition. Mevlana in Konya brought the Persianate Sufi inheritance to its highest poetic expression. Yunus brought the popular Turkish ilahi to its first maturity. Hacı Bektaş, at the Suluca Karahöyük lodge, made the Forty Stations a portable Anatolian catechism and rooted a tradition of service in the central plateau.

Each of these masters carried forward, in his own register, the underlying project: tasawwuf in a Turkic vernacular, rigorously Sunni in doctrine, accessible to the ordinary Muslim of the new Anatolian world. From Ahmad Yasawi the project had begun. With this generation it took root.

Legacy

The tomb of Hacı Bektaş at Hacıbektaş in Nevşehir province is one of the great pilgrimage centres of Turkey. The name has entered the language: not only as a place name but as a way of saying that Anatolia has a heart at its centre. The maxims attributed to him are quoted by people who have never opened a book of tasawwuf. “İncinsen de incitme.” “Eline, beline, diline sahip ol.” These are not folk wisdoms detached from the path. They are the path’s working formulations, distilled by an Anatolian Pir for an Anatolian people.

Yasi was the source. Hacıbektaş is one of the great rooms the source built when it reached the heartland.

Sources

• Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî, Makâlât (composed in Arabic in the 13th century; transmitted widely in Turkish translation, notably through Said Emre)
• Vilâyetnâme-i Hacı Bektaş-ı Velî, compiled by Uzun Firdevsî, 15th c., the principal hagiography
• Ahmed Eflâkî, Menâkıb al-Ârifîn (c. 1318), references to Hacı Bektaş among the Konya circle’s contemporaries
• Fuat Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar (1918), the founding modern study
• Esad Coşan, Hacı Bektâş-ı Velî, Makâlât (1971), critical edition with introduction
• Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Babaîler İsyanı (1980) and subsequent studies on early Anatolian tasawwuf
• Cemâl Kurnaz, “Hacı Bektaş Velî” entry in the TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi