Ali (ʿAlī) Paşa Tepedelenli (b. between 1157/1744 and 1163–4/1750, d. 1237/1822) was born in either Tepelenë (Tr. Tepedelen), in today’s southern Albania, or in a nearby village. In the nineteenth century, his family was attributed with a legendary ancestry, which endowed it with a holy and Turkish character. Its origins were traced to a Mevlevi dervish from Konya, in Anatolia, who apparently came to Tepelenë from Kütahya. In fact, the family seems to have originated locally and achieved a level of…

Shaykh ʿAbd al-Bāqī (d. 1193/1779 or 1194/1780) was a Ṣūfī shaykh and later muftī in Ottoman-ruled Morea (modern-day Peloponnese). He was the youngest son of Shaykh Yaḥyā Sharaf al-Dīn Moravī (d. 1184/1770–71), who participated, along with a group of Khalwatī-Jarrāḥī dervishes, in the Ottoman campaign of Morea (1127/1715) and was appointed shaykh in a tekke (monastic complex) newly built there, in the fortress of Anabolu (Nauplion). ʿAbd al-Bāqī was initiated by his father into the rules of the ṭarīqa (order), and in 1145/1732–3 he was appointed head of a zāwiya—lit. “nook (of a bui…

The Cerrahi-Halveti (Jarrāḥī-Khalwatī) Ṣūfī order (tarikat/ṭarīqa) emerged in Istanbul at the beginning of the twelfth/eighteenth century, as an offshoot of the Halveti order. Its founder, Şeyh Nureddin Mehmed Cerrahi (Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn Meḥmed Jarrāḥī, d. 1133/1721), established a Ṣūfī lodge (tekke) in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Karagümrük. He had acquired a great reputation and initiated several halifes/ khalīfas (deputies) who achieved positions of influence amongst the political, military, and religious authorities in the Ottoman capital. Throug…

ʿAbd al-Karīm Wāʾiz Emīr Efendi (d. 1016/1607–8) is known to have followed initially the path of the ʿilmiyye (religious scholars), before becoming a Ṣūfī master. According to Maḥmūd Hulvī ( Lemezāt-i Hulvī (ms. Millet Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, fds. Ali Emiri, Şer’iyye)), he was first initiated in the Khalwatiyya by, and became a disciple of, the famous shaykh Kurd Efendi. He became acquainted with some shaykhs when he went to Syria in 970/1562–3, accompanying Malāmī, a ʿālim and biographer (d. 1012/1604), whom he was serving at that time. From Syria he embarked on a ḥajj, during which ti…

ʿAbdī Bābā (d. at the beginning of the nineteenth century) founded the tekke (convent) of the Khalwatī-Ḥayatī Ṣūfī order in Štip—his native city —in the second half of the twelfth/eighteenth century. He was responsible for the diffusion of the order in the Štip region. (The Khalwatiyya is a Ṣūfī order founded in mediaeval Herat). His descendants wrote, in a typescript entitled Ecdadımızın Mensup Olduğu Hânikayı Halvetiyül Hayatî Tarikatının Tarihini yazıyor (It describes the history of the path of the lodge Khalwatī-Ḥayatī which belonged to our ancestors), that h…

Kosovo (Kosova in Turkish and Albanian) is a Balkan territory that evolved with the time, with very different borders, from a plain to a much larger administrative province in the late Ottoman period, and then to a smaller province in Socialist Yugoslavia, and an independent state in 2008. It was originally the name of a plain west of Prishtina (Kosovo Polje, “the field of blackbirds”), where a famous battle took place on 15 June 1389 according to the Julian calendar, or 28 June 1389 according t…

ʿAlī Hormova (1902–85), the head of the Khalwatī community in Albania between 1949 (or 1951) and 1966 was, according to his son, Merkez Shehu, born on 23 May 1902, in the village of Hormova, near Gjirokastër, in present-day southern Albania. (The Khalwatiyya is a Ṣūfī order founded in Baku by Yaḥyā Shīrvānī, who died in Baku around 1460). ʿAlī Hormova was the son of Shaykh Vehbi (d. 1917), descendant of a line of shaykhs who had had charge of the Khalwatī tekke (Ṣūfī complex) in Hormova since the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century. ʿAlī attended a p…

ʿ Abd al-ʿAḥad Nūrī Sīvāsī (d. in 1061/1650–1), born in Sivas (Sīwās) in central Anatolia in 1003/1594–5 or 1013/1604–5, was son of the muftī of Sivas and nephew of the famous Khalwatī (Halveti) shaykh ʿAbd al-Majīd Sīvāsī (1563–1639), who had been invited by Sulṭān Meḥmed III (1003–12/1595–1603) to the Ottoman capital. He accompanied his uncle to Istanbul, where he studied religious sciences. His uncle initiated him into the Khalwatī ṭarīqa (mystical “way”), founded in Baku by Yaḥya Shirwānī (d. around 864/1460). After receiving the khilāfet (investiture diploma), he was sent …

The Akhī-Qādiriyya (Turk. Akhi-Qādiriyye) was a branch of the widespread Qādiriyya Ṣūfī order associated with the tanners’ and saddlers’ guilds and with Akhism—the Turkish form of the Arabic futuwwa, a term meaning literally the qualities of a young man (fatā) and referring to various urban movements and organisations, both Ṣūfī and professional—which is known to have existed in eleventh/seventeenth century Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia. Research by the Albanian historian Zija Shkodra led in the 1960s to the discovery of a document …

Vehbi Agolli (1867–1937) was the founder and first head of the Islamic Community in independent Albania. As grand muftī of Albania through the First World War until 1929, he led important changes in the organisation, teaching, and training of officials in the Albanian Islamic Community. Best known as Haji Vehbi Dibra, because he was born in the city of Dibra (today Debar, in the Republic of Macedonia), Vehbi Agolli was the son of Ahmed Efendi Agolli, the local muftī, who descended from a family of ʿulamāʾ. He was given a religious education, first in Dibra, then in Istanbul and,…

Before its use as the official name of the state recognised by the Great Powers in 1913, Albania referred to an area situated in the western part of the Balkans. The name Albania is derived from Arbanon or Arvanon, a region in today's central Albania, which was a term used by Byzantine authors who refer to the Arvanites (Gr.), groups of people living in this area. The Ottomans, too, used this term in their earliest designation of the territory ( sancaq-i arvanid). Later they used arnavūt to refer to the inhabitants, and arnavūtluk for the region. The term now used by the Albanians them…

Balkans is a term used only since the nineteenth century (especially from the end of the century) to designate the peninsula of southeastern Europe. The Ottomans had called the lands they conquered in this region Rumelia (Turk. Rumeli), while Westerners referred to them as European Turkey (Turquie d’Europe). “Balkans” was originally the name of a mountain range that crosses present-day Bulgaria from west to east, which was thought to stretch across the entire peninsula. At the beginning of the n…