Turkish And Other Muslim Minorities In Bulgaria

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"The plight of the Turkish people living in Bulgaria since it ceased to be part of the Ottoman Empire deserves to be better understood by the world at large than it has been up to now. It is a painful story of the progressive violations of the human rights of a people who constituted about a third of the whole population. The author is an authority on Turkish and Ottoman history and in the present book he recounts with a wealth of documentary material the oppression of the Turks under Bulgarian rule starting with the Monarchy and ending with the People's Republic. It is an indictment of the persistent Bulgarianization of the Turks, often by force, in the fields of language, education, culture, freedom of speech, sport, local administration, and the right of emigration." --Dust jacket.

Introduction : Bulgaria's methods of nation building and the Turkish minority / Kemal H. Karpat -- Turkish settlements in Rumelia (Bulgaria) in the 15th and 16th centuries / İlhan Șahin, Feridun M. Emecen, Yusuf Halac̦oğlu -- The Turks in Bulgaria, 1878-1944 / R.J. Crampton -- Urban development in Bulgaria in the Turkish period / Machiel Kiel -- The Turkish minority in Bulgaria / Bilâl N. Șimșir -- Ahmed aga Tǎmrašlijata, the last derebey of the Rhodopes / Bernard Lory -- There are no Turks in Bulgaria / Ali Eminov -- Turkish influence on Bulgarian / Alf Grannes -- The rights of minorities in international law and treaties / A. Mete Tuncoku.

CONTENTS.

Bulgaria is a Slavic nation, Orthodox in faith but with a sizable Muslim minority. That minority is divided into various ethnic groups, including the most numerically significant Turks and the so-called Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking men and women who have converted to Islam. Mary Neuburger explores how Muslim minorities were integral to Bulgaria's struggle to extricate itself from its Ottoman past and develop a national identity, a process complicated by its geographic and historical positioning between evolving and imagined parameters of East and West. The Orient Within examines the Slavic majority's efforts to conceptualize and manage Turkish and Pomak identities and bodies through gendered dress practices, renaming of people and places, and land reclamation projects. Neuburger shows that the relationship between Muslims and the Bulgarian majority has run the gamut from accommodation to forced removal to total assimilation from 1878, when Bulgaria acquired autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, to 1989, when Bulgaria's Communist dictatorship collapsed. Neuburger subjects the concept of Orientalism to an important critique, showing its relevance and complexity in the Bulgarian context, where national identity and modernity were brokered in the shadow of Western Europe, Russia/USSR, and Turkey.