The tekke takes its name from the lineage of Sheikh Ahmad al-Badawi, the 13th-century Egyptian Sufi saint whose order spread across the Ottoman world. The man who brought it to Beylerbeyi was Haji Seyyid Huseyin Hifzi Bedevi, who had been sent from his hometown of Bilecik — a city in northwestern Anatolia — to Istanbul by his spiritual guide, Sheikh Mustafa Karadag. Huseyin Hifzi arrived in the capital and found a philanthropist willing to act: a man named Ali Bey, who financed the construction of a three-story building between 1854 and 1855.

This kind of relationship — a spiritual leader directing a wealthy patron toward charitable construction — was central to how Sufi orders operated within the Ottoman city. The tekke was not simply a private house of worship; it was a social institution, part of a network of lodges that provided education, hospitality, and community support across the empire. In Beylerbeyi, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, the Badawi Tekke was one such node in that network.

The Republican era that began in 1923 was not kind to institutions like the Badawi Tekke. In 1925, the Turkish Republic banned Sufi orders and closed their lodges — tekkes and zawiyas across the country were shuttered, their activities declared illegal, their buildings repurposed or abandoned. This was part of a broader program of secularizing the new Turkish state, dismantling the religious infrastructure that had been woven into Ottoman civic life for centuries.

The Bedawi Dergahi, as the Beylerbeyi tekke was also known, fell into the neglect that followed. From 1924 until the 1990s, the building sat largely unused, deteriorating. Whatever functions it had served — the communal meals, the Sufi gatherings, the charitable work — ceased, at least officially. The building endured, but only as a structure, not as a community.

Revival came through the Huseyin Hifzi Foundation, which took on the work of reconstituting the tekke as a functioning institution — a kulliyye, or religious complex, called the Bedevi Dergahi. The foundation was later passed to the Istanbul Education Foundation (İSTEV), which undertook the physical restoration of the old three-floor building, working to return it to something close to its original plan and condition.

The restoration was not simply architectural. The goal was to re-establish the practices the tekke was built to sustain. The Naqshbandi order — one of the major Sufi brotherhoods with deep roots in Ottoman Anatolia — now holds regular zikir sessions at the dergah. *Zikir* (or *dhikr* in Arabic) is the Sufi practice of ritual remembrance, the repetition of divine names or phrases as a form of devotion. It is the practice that gives a tekke its spiritual heartbeat.

The tekke is known locally as much for its soup kitchen as for its religious functions. The tradition of feeding the poor — essential to the original purpose of Ottoman Sufi lodges, which served as charitable institutions as well as spiritual ones — has continued here. Warm meals are still served to the public, a practice that connects the present building to its 1854 founding as surely as any architectural feature.

In the Beylerbeyi neighbourhood of Üsküdar, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, the Badawi Tekke occupies a quiet but persistent place. It is not a tourist destination in any conventional sense. It is a working institution, carrying on the charitable and devotional functions it was built for, with a history of suppression and revival that mirrors the broader history of religious life in modern Turkey.