"Finally, a thoughtful case study of the influence of Islamic aid organizations among the Muslim minority populations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Kristen Ghodsee describes the changes that have taken place in the practice of Islam among the Pomaks, the indigenous Slav Muslims of Bulgaria. Her book reads like a detective story of why the Muslims of one particular town turned toward the new orthodox and 'foreign' Islam of mainly Saudi-inspired imams and proselytizing aid workers. A much-needed contribution."--Tone Bringa, author of Being Muslim the Bosnian Way

"Ghodsee's patient ethnography allows her to explore in rich detail the encounter between postcommunist Bulgaria and 'orthodox' Islam. In her hands, the abstract concept of agency takes on compelling specificity, as she shows the women and men of the Rhodope region adapting Muslim beliefs and practices to their own needs, with striking implications for gender relations. This study will prove illuminating not just to area specialists but to all those seeking to understand the nature and appeal of religion in postmodern spaces."--Sonya Michel, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

"Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe provides a nuanced perspective on social and economic change in postcommunist Bulgaria and a crucial ethnographic lens onto changing religious practices and gender norms among Pomak Bulgarians."--Lara Deeb, University of California, Irvine

"Ghodsee's book contains important lessons for scholars and policymakers striving to understand how and why some Muslims in postsocialist states are adopting more orthodox lifestyles, why they are doing so at this particular juncture, and what sorts of internal and external factors informed their decision. I truly enjoyed reading Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe, and learned a great deal."--Donna A. Buchanan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Kristen Ghodsee is associate professor of gender and women's studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea.

MUSLIM LIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE

GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ISLAM IN POSTSOCIALIST BULGARIABy Kristen Ghodsee

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13955-5

Contents

Illustrations............................................................ixA Note on Transliteration................................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................................xiiiIntroduction The changing Face of Islam in Bulgaria.....................1Chapter One Names to Be Buried With.....................................34Chapter Two Men and Mines...............................................56Chapter Three The Have-nots and the Have-nots...........................86Chapter Four Divide and Be conquered....................................109Chapter Five Islamic Aid................................................130Chapter Six The Miniskirt and the Veil..................................159Conclusion Minarets after Marx..........................................184Appendix.................................................................205Notes....................................................................207Selected Bibliography....................................................235Index....................................................................243

Chapter One

Names to Be Buried With

Iordan thought frequently about his own death. This was not be cause he was afraid to die. This was because he did not know what would happen to his remains when he did. Because of his name and who his parents were, no one in Madan would bury him. Iordan was a Pomak, and his name was changed when he was sixteen years old. He was born with the Turkish name Fikret, not because he was a Turk, but because his parents lived in a village near the Turkish minority region and they liked the name. As a child Fikret spent his days helping his mother string tobacco leaves to dry and tending to his parents' sheep. But the communists had plans for him; they intended to tear him from the tobacco and make him "modern."

Fikret became "Iordan," a good Bulgarian name. He was sent away to school to learn a trade, to join in the economic development of Madan and the building of the "bright socialist future." As Iordan, he did his apprenticeships, earned his certificates, went to the army for his two years of mandatory military service, got married, had two sons, bought his own apartment, and worked for over fifteen years for the state mining enterprise until communism's sudden and unexpected collapse in 1989. All of his documents—his national I.D. card, his driver's license, his diplomas, his military discharge, his marriage certificate, the birth certificates of his sons, the deed to his apartment, his pension card, his medical records, his bank accounts—were all under the name Iordan. After more than thirty years of being Iordan, he had almost forgotten that he was ever Fikret.

But no one would bury him if he remained Iordan.

He ran a tanned and weathered hand through his thick white hair, shaking his head. He had just returned from the nearby city of Zlatograd, where he recently found work fixing cement trucks for a large construction job. His blue overalls were covered with oil and dust, and his shoulders were slumped over with exhaustion. A former classmate of his had died that day, and Iordan was feeling all fifty-two years of his age. His Pomak friend had died suddenly of a heart attack. He had died with his Bulgarian name.

Although some of Iordan's former classmates and neighbors had re taken their original Muslim names after 1989, when it became possible to do so, the vast majority of men and women in Madan kept the Slavic names the communists had given them. This was particularly true for men like Iordan who were forced to leave the Rhodope after the implosion of GORUBSO. In a society historically hostile to Turkey, it was much easier to find work with a Bulgariansounding name. Since so many Rhodope villages were mixed, prospective employers could only tell the Muslims from the Christians by their names. There were real economic advantages to being "Iordan" rather than "Fikret," at least until he died.

Iordan explained that the state-run mortuaries had closed in Madan, and only the church and mosque handled the bodies of the recently de parted. Iordan was a Christian name, but the priest that serviced the local Orthodox Christian Church would not bury him because Iordan was a Muslim. Iordan was an atheist, but his parents and grandparents were Muslims. That made Iordan a Muslim, too. The priest only buried Christians.

The new, foreign-schooled imam in the mosque refused to bury Muslims with Christian names. Although the procedures were complicated and it took time and money to have all the important documents in one's life reissued under one's original name, the imam insisted that all Muslims must have a Muslim name. He would not perform funerary rites for Pomaks who kept their Christian names. The young imam in Madan had grown more influential with each passing year. His position was strengthened by the funds he received from both domestic and foreign foundations to promote a more "pure" version of Islam, one that was not contaminated by contact with Christianity and communism. Iordan dared not challenge him. When the time came, most likely Iordan's wife, Silvi, would have to travel to a Turkish village to find an entrepreneurial hodzha willing to perform the necessary procedures, and he would charge a hefty fee for the service. Or Iordan could change his name. But the bureaucracy was so cumbersome and inefficient, and the hostility to Muslims in Bulgaria so deep-seated, that it would be easier for him to convert to Christianity, he told me, than to change his name. "And cheaper, too."

We were sitting in Saramov's drinking draught beer. The restaurant was having a special that was quite popular with the locals: order two large Ariana beers and get a free plate of French fries. The evening was warm, and we were happily munching on potatoes while we waited for Silvi to join us for a light dinner. We were sitting at a table overlooking the Madanska River, and I asked Iordan if he would tell me about his parents. He drained the contents of his first glass and waved to the waitress to bring two more. I wiggled the fingers on my right hand, preparing to take detailed notes while also enjoying the tasty Bulgarian brew. Iordan stared for a while at a dark age spot on the back of his left wrist, scratching at it tentatively with a blunt fingernail, underneath which there was still the visible trace of black machine grease. I guessed that he was trying to figure out where to begin.

Although the details of Iordan's upbringing are unique to him, his life story is quite typical of many men of his generation, men who were born in the late 1950s in the villages surrounding what the communists would make into the city of Madan. The Rhodope region had always been poor compared to other parts of Bulgaria, until GORUBSO was founded and the communists launched an ambitious project of rural industrialization.

Fikret was born in 1956 in a small village in one of the most rural parts of the municipality of Madan. He was the seventh of nine children and lived in an extended household that included a total of twenty-nine, counting his grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. His earliest memories were of sharp, persistent pains in his stomach and the dizziness and disorientation that inevitably followed long periods of hunger. "When I ate, I ate with my hands and swallowed large pieces of bread without chewing. I ate fast so that my older brothers could not take my food. We were like animals, and my mother prohibited us from going to visit the homes of other children because we did not know how to behave around food."

All of his brothers and sisters had to work for the family to survive. "My older brothers cut wood and my sisters helped my mother with the tobacco. My job was to take the sheep down to the river in the morning and in the evening, and to help my mother. When I came back with the sheep, there would always be a big basket of [tobacco] leaves for me to string. We were always stringing."

Fikret and his family called themselves Pomaks, a local term he specifically used to distinguish Bulgarian-speaking from Turkish-speaking Muslims. He believed that his ancestors were Bulgarian Christians who converted to Islam or married into Muslim families during the Ottoman period, and this was the generally accepted view among most Madanchani. But there were competing histories, and understanding these contested origins is the first step in making sense of the unique ethnic identity crisis that faced the Madan Pomaks in the post-1989 era. Because the new "orthodox" Islam took root largely among the Pomak population, it is important to untangle who the Pomaks thought they were and how their Muslim identities were shaped and changed by their experiences under communism. Debates about Pomak identity continue to have real world bearing on the lives of individual Pomaks like Iordan, and so it is essential to explore them in some depth, even if it means leaving the beer and French fries for a few pages.

Who are the pomaks?

The entire territory that now includes modern Bulgaria fell to the invading Ottomans in 1396, and the region was part of the Ottoman Empire for the better part of five centuries. By most accounts, Islam followed the conquering Ottoman armies, having already undergone many mutations and modifications in its long journey from Arabia to Anatolia and evolving still further as it moved, eventually, into the Balkans. When Ottoman Islam arrived in Bulgaria, it was already quite distinct and more amenable to local Christian traditions. This led to the rise of various forms of "folk Islam" that were based on Islamic principles but blended with Christian and pagan practices. Various Sufi mystical orders also spread throughout the country.

In part because of the wide variety of religions represented in their territories, the Ottomans instituted the millet system, a kind of religious federalism. Under this system, each confessional community was subject to the autonomous rule of an "ethnarch" or denominational leader. There were four millets officially recognized under the Ottomans: Muslim, "Rum" (Christian), Jewish, and Armenian. All Christians save the Armenians were lumped together into one millet, no matter how vast their ethnic or linguistic diversity. Similarly, all Muslims were considered part of the Muslim millet, whether they were Sunnis, Shi'as, Sufis, or former Christians that had converted to Islam. Members of this millet had the highest status in society and enjoyed many privileges, particularly with regard to taxation.

Despite the diversity of Islam in the Balkans, it is important to remember that Islam in some form has been present there for at least six hundred years. The first Muslims in Bulgaria are believed to have been nomadic Turkmen stockbreeders who moved their herds into the Rhodope after the Ottoman Empire had done away with internal borders. They were followed by Turkish settlers from Anatolia. The descendants of these Turkish settlers today make up the largest group of Muslims in Bulgaria. There was, however, an indigenous population living in the Rhodope Mountains before the Turks arrived, and it is generally argued that some of them were either forcibly converted or voluntarily accepted Islam in the centuries that followed. The ethnic identity of this population and the process of their conversion remains highly contested both by historians and by ordinary people. These unsettled historical debates may have made the Pomaks vulnerable to both Arab and Turkish foreign influences, as well as making them the ongoing targets of Protestant evangelism and Christian Orthodox attempts at (re)assimilation.

The only two relatively uncontested facts are that the Pomaks (who go by different names in different countries) are a Bulgarian-speaking people who profess the Muslim faith. Today they are spread out among five nation-states: Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Turkey, and Albania, with by far the largest number concentrated in Bulgaria. Each of the countries tries to claim this group as their own, and the matter of ethnicity is taken very seriously in a region where national boundaries were historically fixed by the ideals of ethnic self-determination. The Pomaks in Greece live on the other side of the border from the Bulgarian Pomaks and speak a Slavic language that is essentially the same Bulgarian dialect spoken in Madan and Rudozem. The Greeks argue that the Pomaks are descendants of the Thracians (an ancient people who inhabited the Rhodope before the Slavs) who gradually intermarried with their Greek neighbors. These Thracian Greeks were then Slavicized and Islamicized during the course of the Ottoman period. Some Turkish scholars claim that the Pomaks are the descendants of Kuman Turks who settled in the Balkans before the Ottoman conquest and who were linguistically Slavicized by their daily contact with the Bulgarian Christian population. The Macedonians believe that the Pomaks are ethnic Macedonians who were forced to convert to Islam by the Turks. Another theory is that the Pomaks are a distinct ethnicity of their own, unrelated to any of the other peoples in the region, who speak Bulgarian because of regular contact with Christian Bulgarians.

One controversial theory holds that the Pomaks descend from a group of the Prophet Mohammed's most loyal followers, who were charged with spreading Islam beyond the Middle East. Some of these missionaries supposedly settled in the Balkans in the seventh century and were eventually Slavicized by intermarriage with local Slavic women. In other versions, the Pomaks are the descendants of Arab traders or of exiled sectarian leaders. These theories all share the thesis that the Pomaks were already Muslims before the Turks arrived. The historian Maria Todorova has argued that "this Arabic origin theory for the Pomaks was imported directly by Muslim missionaries sent from Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan," and the ethnologist Tsvetana Georgieva found that the "proof" of this theory in the Rhodope came usually in the form of an inscription found on a local tombstone or mosque by a visiting Arab missionary, which then disappeared. Her informants told her that "they wanted the terms Arabs and Pomaks to become identical so that they could rely on the Arab community for protection." In Madan and Rudozem, this theory was the topic of two books circulated through the local mosques, one in 1999 and one in 2006.

In my own interviews with local Muslim leaders and laypeople in the Rhodope, I also encountered various versions of this theory that the Pomaks were Arabs. In March 2007, the regional mufti (Muslim leader) of Smolyan explained that Islam had come to the Rhodope before the Turks, and that the reason that the communists had destroyed all of the old Muslim graveyards was because the tombstones had dates on them that proved this to be true. "Islam came to this region directly from Arabia," he said. When I asked him if it was possible that the Thracians had been Muslims, he merely answered, "Why not?"

This idea was also to be found in The History of the Pomaks, a book written by a local businessman in Madan but allegedly published and distributed with support from a Saudi foundation.

I believe that the Pomaks are an Arabic minority that settled in the Rhodopes because of Byzantine policies responding to the increased strength of the Slavs to the north. Byzantium had a long-term policy of settling Arabs along its northern borders and moving Slavs to the Near East, since the Arab Halifat was dominant in the Mediterranean for 500 years after the appearance of Islam ... That is how the Muslim community that lived in the Rhodopes in the 7th and 8th centuries was formed.

The most accepted argument among scholars for the origin of the Pomaks, however, is that they were ethnically Slavic, Bulgarian-speaking Christians who adopted Islam. During the socialist period, historians and ethnologists amassed extensive evidence in support of this thesis, but because the communists had funded this research to pursue their nationalist agenda, contemporary scholars have questioned its objectivity. Despite the continuing academic debates, however, this theory was the dominant belief of people like Iordan and the theory preferred by Bulgarians as a whole. The big issue within this school is whether the conversions were forced and mass or voluntary and individual. Those who believe the former propose that the Ottoman authorities gave their new subjects the choice between conversion and death, and that entire villages were Islamicized in order to avoid a massacre. This argument also tends to focus on the understandable Christian aversion to the Ottoman "blood tax," whereby the sons of Christian families were taken by the Ottomans and trained to become an elite corps of Janissary troops fiercely loyal to the sultan. While some scholars and many Bulgarians still believe in the mass conversion theory (which was actively promoted by communist propaganda before 1989), many recent studies have called into question the historiographic evidence that supported these claims.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MUSLIM LIVES IN EASTERN EUROPEby Kristen Ghodsee Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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