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 Sunnī clerics as heretical, the Bektaşiyye flourished among the Turkish nomadic tribes of central Anatolia that originated in Azerbaijan and Iran. 1. Proto-Bektāşiyye, from Hacı Bektaş Veli to Balım Sultan (seventh-ninth/thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) The eponym of the order was a disciple of Baba