The Philosophical and Socio-Political Foundations of Tengriist Thought and Ontological Tradition in “The Book of Dede Qorqud” within the Context of Turkic Intellectual History

This study examines The Book of Dede Qorqud not merely as a folkloric-epic text, but as a foundational source of early Turkic philosophical consciousness and socio-political reasoning. Although the Oghuz epic tradition has been widely analyzed by folklorists, literary scholars, philologists, and historians, its profound philosophical layers— particularly those reflecting metaphysical, ontological, ethical, and political thought—remain insufficiently conceptualized. The present research situates The Book of Dede Qorqud within broader intellectual formations predating written Islamic cultural systems among Turkic societies, arguing that this epic embodies key principles of Tengriism, archaic ritual structures, ontological dualities, and socio-political order. By tracing the epic’s thematic lineages back to oral traditions formed between the 6th–8th centuries, and even earlier, the study demonstrates that The Book of Dede Qorqud emerges as one of the earliest philosophical-ideational documents of Turkic civilization. The article analyzes how notions of being (varlıq), divine sovereignty, sacred cosmology, ritual ethics, collective identity, and historical destiny are encoded into the epic worldview. Central attention is devoted to the relationship between Tengriism and Islam—both doctrinally and historically. The study reveals that the transition of Turks to Islam was not a rupture but rather an ontological and theological continuity grounded in monotheistic cosmology, sacred legitimacy, and social-political order. Furthermore, the research demonstrates how early Turkic metaphysics, political legitimacy, kinship structure, gender complementarity, fate, and moral-ritual codes are represented through the wisdom of Dede Qorqud. Ultimately, the study argues that the Oghuz epic corpus is indispensable for reconstructing the pre-Islamic philosophical frameworks of Turkic peoples and should be incorporated into the genealogy of Azerbaijani philosophical identity.