Beşir Fuad (Beşīr Fuʾād, 1852(?)–1887) was one of the first proponents of materialism and positivism in the Ottoman Empire. Born into a Georgian family, in Istanbul, he was educated in Syria, where his father served as mutasarrıf (mutaṣarrif ), at a military preparatory school (…
The Bektaşiyye (Bektāshiyya), a Ṣūfī order established in ninth/fifteenth-century Anatolia by Balım Sultan (Bālım Sulṭān, d. 925/1519) and named after Hacı Bektaş Veli (Ḥācī Bektāş Velī, d. 669/1270), lay at the crossroads of several Muslim antinomian trends. Often depicted by S…
Hacı Bektaş Veli, (Ḥāccī Bektāş Velī, d. 669/1270–1?), the eponym of the Bektaşiye (Bektāshiyya) Sufi (Ṣūfī) order, was the leader of a group of antinomian dervishes linked to Turcoman tribes that fled from Azerbaijan and Khurāsān to central Anatolia in the seventh/thirteenth ce…
The Uzbek term bakhshī (from Chinese boshi 博, scholar, professor) refers, amongst Uyghurs and Mongols, to a Buddhist priest, a hermit, or a scribe (Laufer, 485–7). In Turkish and Persian sources from eighth/fourteenth-century Central Asia , it is written bakhshī or baḥshī , in t…
Baha Tevfik (Bahā Tevfīq, 1881 or 1884–1914) was born in Izmir, to a family of little means. His father later became the owner of a small bookshop in Istanbul. After graduating from the Ottoman School of Civil Administration (Mekteb-i Mülkiyye) in Istanbul, Tevfik worked as a ci…
