Turkish scholar Cemal Kafadar argues that Bedreddin's ghazi roots may also have contributed to his commitment to religious coexistence.
[2] In his youth he was a kadi to Ottoman warriors on the marches, which gave him ample experience in jurisprudence, a field of study in which he would become well-versed.
There, Borkluje Mustafa, one of Bedreddin’s foremost disciples, instigated an idealistic popular revolt by preaching the communal ownership of property and the equality of Muslims and Christians.
These uprisings posed a serious challenge to the authority of Mehmed I as he attempted to reunite the Ottoman Empire and govern his Balkan provinces.
According to the Greek historian Doukas, Bayezid slaughtered unconditionally to ensure the rebellion's defeat, and Borkluje was executed along with two thousand of his followers.
Accused of disturbing the public order by preaching religious syncretism and the communal ownership of property, he was executed in the marketplace.
Bedreddin advocated overlooking religious difference, arguing against zealous proselytism in favor of a utopian synthesis of faiths.
This latitudinarian interpretation of religion was a major part of what allowed him and his disciples to instigate a broad-reaching popular revolt in 1416, unifying a very heterogeneous base of support.
Bedreddin was a monist, believing that reality is a manifestation of God's essence, and that the spiritual and physical worlds were inseparable and necessary to one another.
As he writes in Varidat, he believed that "This world and the next, in their entirety, are imaginary fantasies; heaven and hell are no more than the spiritual manifestations, sweet and bitter, of good and evil actions.
Such ideas appealed greatly to those who felt marginalized in Ottoman society, and this egalitarian ideology played a major role in inspiring popular revolt in 1416.
According to the 15th-century Sunni historian Idris of Bitlis, Bedreddin considered himself the Mahdi, who would bring about God's unity in the world by distributing his lands among his followers.
In the twentieth century, he was brought back into the spotlight by the communist Turkish writer Nâzım Hikmet, who wrote The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin to voice opposition to the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
Hikmet's work popularized Bedreddin as a historical champion of socialism and an opponent of fascist tyranny, and his name has remained well known to those on the left of the political spectrum.
His bones were exhumed in 1924, but his devotees were so fearful of a backlash against Bedreddin's newfound political significance by the Turkish government that he was not buried until 1961.