1 Balkan Secularities: Religion, State Atheism, and Public Space
Beginning in the 1960s, the work of Jürgen Habermas on the “public sphere” and “public space,” anchored primarily in the historical experience of Western Europe, was a touchstone for considering the intersection of religion, society, and politics in the Balkans.2 With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of activity, the fragmentation of authority that one of us described as parallel with the “new media” of the 1980s and 1990s suggests a break with the former “Enlightenment” model that leaves behind the salon, the coffee house, and the commons. The erosion of authority threatens more radical transformations than “public negotiation over the rules and discourse that morally bind the community together.”3 As Tarek El-Ariss argues, it leads us into the domain of leaks and scandals, where faith and belief remain important, but truth and falsehood are less the basis for discussion in public space and the quest for authority is elusive.4 Nonetheless, the concept of public space as invoked by Habermas, even if overly idealistic, inspires the exploration of intermediate
Although religion in Bulgaria, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, has been politicized and used as an instrument to achieve political goals,6 secularism should not be apprehended as a monolithic utopian ideal. The “separation wall” between the domains of the religious and secular is significantly more porous in social practice than conventionally assumed. Even under the Communist regime, religious affiliations, although transformed, did not fade away. The official place assigned to religion in public life under a certain political system does not necessarily reflect the actual role of faith in individual life and collective identities. The Communist period in Bulgaria (1944–1989) was dominated by an overwhelming ideology, in itself a political religion.
Marxism, especially in its Communist form, can—like National Socialism—be analyzed as referring to religious and ecclesiastical structures, having an overwhelming ideology that draws on a consistent set of rituals, symbols and images, religious metaphors related to an eschatology and “revolutionary messianism.”7 Socialism itself, from which Marxist-Leninism is a specific totalitarian offshoot, can be viewed as part of religious history—in Europe and elsewhere.8 In a similar vein, Raymond Aron called Communism a “secular religion.” He advanced the concept in 1944, relating it to socialism—and particularly to its totalitarian form, Marxism-Leninism, which developed its own theology and sacred order.9 This Marxist-Leninist “sacred order” included proselytism and messianism, the deification of leaders, scriptures, ideas of absolute truth, canon, rituals, iconography, evil and salvation until eventually “[t]rue believers became extinct dinosaurs, while the numbers of nonbelievers and atheists
Until the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the opportunities for social and anthropological research on religion in the former countries ruled by Communist regimes, where most of the Orthodox Christians lived, were limited.11 Under these regimes and thereafter, the Balkan states regulated and supervised the religious scene in various ways, ranging from enforcing homogeneity to “safeguarding a plural democratic home.”12 Nonetheless, there was a scholarly trajectory that quietly continued a genuinely academic tradition, mostly in Ottoman studies.
In Bulgaria, this field was maintained by scholars with different views, styles, and from different generations, including Vera Moutaftcheva (1929–2009), Strashimir Dimitrov (1930–2001), and subsequently Tsvetana Georgieva (b. 1937). The observed revitalization of various forms of religions in everyday life attracted the attention of scholars, particularly ethnographers who in countries like Bulgaria continued a tradition of studying “folk religion,” describing the social world around seers, clairvoyants, and healers.13 The most notable example of these studies were dealing with Vanga (1911–1996) known as Baba Vanga.14 Anthropologists, who brought to the fore new “ethnographies of religious revival,” have chosen “an actor-oriented perspective on ‘religion’” rather than “a church-oriented one” to study the “revival of Orthodoxy through the eyes of the local actors.”15 Historians of Orthodoxy, in turn, have focused on the
After the collapse of Communism, new underpinnings for social cohesion were needed and religion was again brought to the fore in public and social life. After half a century of secular religion, a new form of secularism based on a combination of national and historical religious identities gained ground. The earlier close correlation between religion and ethnic or national identity, a legacy of the millet system in the Ottoman Empire,18 was reasserted anew—notwithstanding that recently some scholars tend to see the Balkan nation-building policies not so much as an upended continuation of the Ottoman experience but rather as a “manufactured legacy.”19 Whether or not an elite choses to intervene or perpetuate a particular feature of the millet-like pattern is, however, not the main question here, as we bring to the fore the implicit, structural underpinnings of the entanglements between religion, nationalism, and identity, which entails how they—elites and commoners alike—have rather re-imagined their communities.
In the post-1989 period, national and religious identities began explicitly to function as entwined, evoking historically continuous, albeit fluctuating, patterns of communal and political identity. Analyzing this reemergence of religion in society, Kristen Ghodsee suggests the term “symphonic secularism” related to the region’s Byzantine past and its imagined model of religion and politics thus exploring the Bulgarian conception of religion through “an Orthodox
Re-imaging Byzantium and its role as a Christian Empire gets contextualized according to the type of nationalism and identity, including in countries that in the past have had competitively shared and sustained the notion of the Second or the Third Rome24—from Greece through Bulgaria to Russia.25 This “commonwealth” was implicated from the beginning with religion, and when applying it to the post-Byzantine period the notion gets even more closely associated with Orthodoxy.26 Entangled with the subsequent Ottoman experience, Byzantium or rather multiple Byzantiums take part in shaping Balkan political imagination and secularism.
Considering these re-imagined Byzantiums, the concept of “milletic secularism” invokes the Ottoman millet system to refer to divergent and competing
The notion of milletic secularism also indicates that secularism, an ideal type, always takes the form of cultural and historically specific meanings that can look paradoxical at first sight insofar as millet originated as an Islamic religious term. There is no single pattern of secularism but “multiple secularities”—a term that complements Shmuel Eisenstadt’s notion of “multiple modernities.”29 Recently suggested, the concept of multiple secularities30 transcends the scope of the classical Western idea of secularism with its focus on the relations between religion and politics (“God and Caesar”). It can be applied to distinctions between the religious and non-religious, making it relevant to the study of the Balkans, where religion remains important even in the non-believers’ identities. As can be observed in the case of Bulgaria, its model of secularism and the policies it entails implicit notions as the Byzantine symphoneia and the Ottoman millet, thus not fully matching the classical Western ideal of secularism.
The idea of a nation on the basis of a common language has never fully gained ground in the Balkans. The reason is rooted in the “millet mentality,” as Bernard Lory puts it to emphasize that the millet legacy underlies a set of phenomena—from the formation of distinct national identities even when
According to recent studies, in today’s Eastern Europe there is evidence that many citizens with Muslim family background no longer self-identify as Muslims—at least according to consecutive official censuses. In his attentive large-scale recent survey of Islam in twenty-one post-Communist Eastern European countries, Egdūnas Račius rightly points out the unreliability of these censuses and mentions in passim an intriguing tentative hypothesis that these developments might perhaps indicate a new “return of the secular.”34 Even if this proves to be a change in the tendency of a “return of the religious” during the first years after the collapse of Communism, it is too early to say whether there is a move to categories such as “non-religious,” “agnostic” or “atheist.” Such a trend, if correctly reflected by the censuses, rather signals a new way in which the elements of multiple identities are accentuated, contextually rearranged and brought to the fore under certain circumstances. First, given the data from available sociological surveys, according to which more Pomaks increasingly self-identify mainly as Muslims, even when asked about their “ethnicity,”35 other trends seem to unfold on the ground. These trends accentuate the Islamic component as increasingly overarching multiple identities.
2 Transnational Religious Identities and Ethno-Religious Belonging
Today more than ever, religious identities are increasingly transnational.36 In the predominantly Orthodox Christian countries of the Balkans during the post-Communist period, Orthodox identity has been revived—certainly in terms of religious devotion but also in the sense that the majority population assimilates it to national identity. Contemporary Bulgarians thus manifest not a Western pattern of “believing without belonging,”37 but rather “belonging without believing.” Others add the category of “behaving without believing or belonging” where, for example, in China many citizens neither believe in a supreme transcendent deity nor self-identify as followers of any specific faith but visit Confucian or Buddhist shrines and take part in rituals.38 Against the backdrop of such paradigms, Central and East Europeans are described also as “believing and belonging, without behaving” insofar as most people in the region claim to believe in God and self-identify as Orthodox Christians despite the low levels of religious observance and church attendance.39
Muslim identity has likewise coexisted with various ethnicities but has sought to overarch them as a basis for collective and political identity long before the current globalized era. The Balkans are no exception in that Muslim identity has proved highly resilient to rapidly take advantage of the development of modern communications, and enabling transnational mobilization.40 In the Islamic case, modern conditions have facilitated a variety of struggles over religious ideas and the increasingly fragmented authority in which different voices compete for recognition. Transnational Islamic ideas and
In the Balkans, particularly Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia, the mass post-1989 influx of religious emissaries and evangelizers from different denominations did not lead to the emergence of a “free market of religions” (Hann 2006).48 The majority of believers have, instead, returned to “traditional” religious denominations, strengthening their collective identities. Some observers, especially Westerners, are often surprised at the high number of the Bulgarians self-identifying as “Orthodox Christian” without even going to church regularly or being devout Christians. As a Western Christian interested in missionary activities in Bulgaria, James Hopkins, for example, perceives the Orthodox Church as “willingly becoming an instrument of Bulgarian geopoliticism,
Despite the conventional assumptions of Orthodox Christianity as a spearhead of nationalism,51 the relation between religious affiliation and national identity in the Balkans is more subtle and differs not only among Orthodox Christians and Muslims but also between the various groups subsumed under the categories of “Orthodoxy” or “Islam.” However, the ethno-religious belonging of both communities relates to divergent political imaginations and communal anticipations. Christians and Muslims, no matter their “actual” religious observance, share elements of an implicit social knowledge which is “what moves people without their knowing quite why or how, with what makes the real real and the normal normal, and above all with what makes ethical distinctions politically powerful.”52 In this sense, religion in post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe is an essential part of non-believers’ collective and national identity, and this distinguishes Balkan from Western patterns of religion and secularism.
The Balkans may well be seen as fitting into a paradigm of “belonging without believing.” Nonetheless, the Balkans share with some parts of Western Europe the model of “vicarious religion,” a notion that sociologist of religion Grace Davie uses to designate the phenomenon of an active minority implicitly performing religious obligations on behalf of a larger community that understands and approves of their behavior.53 Davie focuses on the process by which churches, church leaders, and churchgoers perform ritual on behalf of others, believe on behalf of others, and embody moral codes on behalf of others. In this view, churches provide space for debating the unresolved issues of
Within the evolving post-1989 situation in the Balkans, this pattern, however, functions differently, particularly in public space. In Bulgaria particularly, a religiously dedicated minority can act on behalf of an approving an often silent majority. However, instead of providing space for debating socially significant issues in their churches, Orthodox Christians tend to prefer using the churches for strictly religious ceremonies while staging their faith-related demands in public sphere. This “staging virtue”56 is the product of various individuals and groups acting on behalf of the community in a deinstitutionalized manner, unfolding informal strategies of communication and public legitimization. Post-Communist Muslims, for their part, have rapidly learned how to couch their demands in “universalistic terms”57 in the context of the mainstream society of non-Muslims and irreligious people. This pattern may be designated as “proxy religion” by which religious claims are publicly staged in “universalistic” language through the explicit or quietly condoned actions of representatives perceived as acting for the common good of the entire community and on its behalf.
3 Agency and Structure, Divergence and Convergence
Public entanglements between religion and politics produce differing results in social practice contingent on two sets of factors. The first set of factors relates to recurrent social rules and conventions. The second set of factors relates to “agency,” understood as “the socially constructed capacity to act.”58 The tension between agency and structure entails the question of how they relate to each other in what Antony Giddens has called structuration.59 Despite the recent
In introducing the subject of Islam in the Balkans, Arolda Elbasani and Jelena Tošić, for example, write that “localized Islam [provides] an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith.” They claim that the use of an agency-focused approach allows them to “transcend essentialized readings of Islam.”62 Behar Sadriu argues that in the post-Communist period and the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the recent Syrian war has accelerated a process, whereby “Muslim Albanians in the Balkans are being ‘reconnected’ with a more cosmopolitan vision of their past.” On the other hand, he claims in his conclusion that Muslims are not just “passive recipients of nationalized categories of belonging—they are active agents shaping their own identities.”63 Similarly, Laura Olson discusses the revitalized shared identity of Bulgarian Muslims, providing a vivid account of how “a new pious Islamic identity distinguishes itself sharply from local custom” to emphasize that “Muslim communities are not fixed or set apart. … Community is imagined, mediated by
More than four decades ago, the Egyptian social scientist Abdul Hamid el-Zein, equally devoted to interpretive anthropology and to Islam,65 analyzed the views of Clifford Geertz and suggested the use of the plural islams instead of “Islam.”66 Inspired by structuralism, el-Zein argued that “Islam,” “religion,” “economy,” “politics,” and even “saints”67 do not really exist with any inherent meaning. “Islam,” he wrote, “without referring it to the facets of a system of which it is part, does not exist.”68 Other scholars, such as Aziz al-Azmeh, pursued this line of reasoning to emphasize the multiplicity of Islamic experience and even claim that “there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it.”69 More recently, some authors promote the “global history” approach by even suggesting that the “Muslim world” likewise has never existed and that “the construction of the Muslim world was a product of Muslim subjecthood under empire and a means to criticize European racism.”70
Shahab Ahmed, in turn, proposed anew the question “What is Islam?” but he was more cautious than others. Along with the classical views of Islam as law, he likewise rejected what he called the “islams-not-Islam” approach.71 The problem with such approaches which seek to fully de-compose religion, and in
The study of “little traditions,” and particularly Islam in local contexts, faces the challenge “to describe and analyze how the universalistic principles of Islam have been realized in various social and historical contexts without representing Islam as a seamless essence on the one hand or as a plastic congeries of beliefs and practices on the other.”74 The distinction between norm and practice, “great” and “little” traditions initially helped scholars to analyze different connections between the religious traditions as known through their normative texts and exegetical paradigms and their interpretations in a given local or “popular” context. Subsequently, the use of the notion of the “local” has often led to a misleading mixture: “local” has been equated with the “provincial” vulgarizing of the beliefs and practices conceived of as coming from an “authentic” high culture. Therefore, without neglecting the role of agency, individual choice, and diversity in social practice, we suggest refreshing the search for a middle ground in order to grasp how the universalistic elements of Orthodox Christianity and (mostly Sunni) Islam are communicated in practice and of how modes of communication affect religious “universals.”75 Linking all individual believers to God, Islam is not only normatively defined as the “firmest tie” (al-‘urwa al-wuthqā),76 but—as Orthodox Christianity is for Balkan Christians—functions as a major vehicle of collective identity, communal belonging, and social cohesion.
The analysis of religion today, particularly Islam, bristles with well-intended dicta, such as the phrase that “Islam is what Muslims do” or the claims that
Religion is far from being a timeless, ahistorical and monolithic whole. At the same time, it is not, as many imagine it, “putty in the hands of exegetes—as if a heritage could successfully be interpreted to mean whatever one wanted and all interpretations were equally plausible to one’s fellow believers.”81 One can drown in diversity even though the many voices claim to speak for Islam or Christianity, not just some part of them. Religious traditions change but in a time-consuming and gradual way. Charles Taylor notes that belief in God has had a different meaning in the years 1500 and 2000. The same goes for creedal suppositions. He writes, “this emerges as soon as we take account of the fact that all beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated.”82 Therefore, some structural underpinnings of “staging virtue”83 at the interface of religion, politics, and identity remain socially implicit.
4
In the long-run, taken-for-granted understandings of belief and practice change, but often in incremental ways so that actors are not aware of what is gained and what is lost. Background understandings are just that. As Taji-Farouki and Poulton write, “Islam in the Balkans has never been monolithic, having always had a broad variety of forms and expressions,”84 and the same is likewise perfectly true for Orthodox Christianity. These “implicit” forms and expressions of intertwined religion, politics, and identity in the Balkans that traversed do change but within a time-consuming process rooted in the social structure.
After the collapse of Communism in Bulgaria and the splintering of Yugoslavia, Muslim and Orthodox Christian identities have been revitalized, with Christians and Muslims evoking different religious and historical antecedents symbolically represented in the Byzantine and Ottoman past of the Balkans. Today, the transnationalization of religious identities marks certain processes of convergence observed against the backdrop of the otherwise predominant diversity in Southeastern Europe. That convergence does not mean that religious communities are “monolithic” or altogether bound up to a “fixed” identity. Identities remain multiple but their religious component gains an increased public significance. Developments in Bulgaria and the Balkans, as well as some comparisons with regions as the Middle East and phenomena as transnational Salafism or hijab controversies, signal that such homogenizing forces are at work differently among Muslims and Orthodox Christians, including when they pursue religious arguments in a secular public space.
Orthodox Christians stage their religious affiliation in multiple ways of believing and belonging, albeit with an emphasis on bringing religion to the fore in terms of belonging—even without believing. From the perspective of national identity, the Balkan pattern of continuing and transforming the Ottoman organization of communal life in a millet-like model under the emerging modern nation-states shows that even in this respect there is not necessarily a single model of secularism, as indicated by the notable exception with the emergence of the Albanian nation. Due to this multiplicity of experience and forms of modern identity, it is appealing to think of Balkan secularities rather than of a single type of secularism embedded in the classical Western ideal.
For Muslims in the post-communist period, the transnationalization of religious experience, the ease of travel, internet, Facebook and Twitter have fostered a different type of a higher level of belonging to the global imagined Muslim community—the umma. More mainstream, observant Muslims are increasingly abandoning local syncretic practices and seek to share the universal, core beliefs and rituals with their coreligionists in Turkey, the Middle East, and elsewhere. However different Orthodox Christianity and Islam are in terms of doctrine and ritual, the identities of their adherents need to be further studied comparatively in a search for the implicit religious underpinnings of political imagination and secularism.
Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?).” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (2004): 61–81.
For discussions distinguishing between “the public sphere” and “the public space,” see Neil Smith and Setha Low, “Introduction: The Imperative of Public Space,” in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low and Neil Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 4–5; Setha Law, “Public Space and Public Sphere: The Legacy of Neil Smith,” Antipode 49, no. 1 (2017): 153–70.
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 [orig. 1996]), 7.
Tarek El-Ariss, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 125.
Dale F. Eickelman and Armando Salvatore, “The Public Sphere and Muslim Identities,” European Journal of Sociology 43, no. 1 (2002), 92–115.
Some Bulgarian political scientists thus plea for a firmer “democratic neutrality” in which “[t]he state is the community of man and man; religion is the community of man and God.” See Anna Krasteva, “Religion, Politics, and Nationalism in Postcommunist Bulgaria: Elastic (Post)Secularism,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 21, no. 4 (2015): 424.
Michael Rohrwasser, “Religious and Ecclesiastical Structures in Communism and National Socialism, and the Role of the Writer,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, ed. Hans Maier, Vol. i: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships (London: Routledge, 1996), 317.
Gareth Stedman Jones, “Religion and the Origins of Socialism,” in Religion and the Political Imagination, ed. Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 171.
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2011 [1957]), 265.
Anatoly M. Khazanov, “Marxism–Leninism as a Secular Religion,” in The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne, ed. Roger Griffin, Robert Mallett, and John Tortorice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 138.
Chris Hann, “The Anthropology of Christianity per se,” European Journal of Sociology 48, no. 3 (2007): 388.
Arolda Elbasani, “Governing Islam in Plural Societies: Religious Freedom, State Neutrality and Traditional Heritage,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 19, no. 1 (2017): 17.
Galia Valtchinova (ed.), Religion and Boundaries: Studies from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Turkey (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2010). For a brief recent survey of major publications by Bulgarian ethnographers, see Margarita Karamihova, Dinamika na Sveti Mesta i Poklonnichestva v Postsotsialisticheska Bulgaria [Dynamics of Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Postsocialist Bulgaria] (Veliko Tarnovo: St. Cyril and Methodius University Press, 2014), 7–8.
Literally meaning “Grandmother Vanga.” Baba Vanga was a seer considerably popular throughout the country and beyond but as she was condemned by the Bulgarian Church, her visions were highly contested from the doctrinal viewpoint of Orthodox Christianity.
Galia Valtchinova, “From Postsocialist Religious Revival to a Socialist Seer and Vice Versa: The Remaking of Religion in Postsocialist Bulgaria,” Working Paper No. 98, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers (Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, 2007), 23.
Momchil Metodiev, Mezhdu Vyarata i Kompromisa: Bulgarskata Pravoslavna Tsurkva i Komunisticheskata Darzhava [Between Faith and Compromise: Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Communist State] (1944–1989) (Sofia: Ciela, 2010); Daniela Kalkandjieva, Bulgarskata Pravoslavna Tsarkva i “Narodnata Demokratsiya” [Bulgarian Orthodox Church and “People’s Democracy”] (1944–1953), 2nd rev. ed. (Sofia: Demos, 2002).
Mihail Gruev and Alexei Kalyonski, Vuzroditelniyat Protses: Myusyulmanskite Obshtnosti i Komunisticheskiyat Rezhim [The Revival Process: Muslim Communities and the Communist Regime] (Sofia: Ciela, 2008).
Hugh Poulton, “The Muslim Experience in the Balkan States,” Nationalities Papers 28, no. 1 (2000): 45. On the millet system as the structural organization of the state’s subjects according to their religious affiliations, see below, as well as in the Introduction and Chapter 3, this book.
Harris Mylonas, “Nation-Building Policies in the Balkans: an Ottoman or a Manufactured Legacy?” Nations and Nationalism 25, 3 (2019): 866–87.
Kristen Ghodsee, “Symphonic Secularism: Eastern Orthodoxy, Ethnic Identity and Religious Freedoms in Contemporary Bulgaria,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 27, 2 (2009): 208. See also Ghodsee, this volume, Chapter 2.
Ivan Dujčev, “Les études byzantines chez les Slaves méridionaux et occidentaux depuis le XVIIe siècle,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 15 (1966): 78–9.
Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Inheritance of Eastern Europe (London: Variorum, 1982).
Diana Mishkova, “The Afterlife of a Commonwealth: Narratives of Byzantium in the National Historiographies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania,” in Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 3: Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies, edited by Roumen Daskalov and Alexander Vezenkov (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 118–273.
Miliana Kaimakamova, “Turnovo—New Constantinople: The Third Rome in the Fourteenth-Century Bulgarian Translation of Constantine Manasses’ Synopsis Chronike,” in The Medieval Chronicle IV, edited by Erik Kooper (Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006), 91–2.
See the Introduction to this volume.
Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 38.
Simeon Evstatiev, “Milletic Secularism in the Balkans: Christianity, Islam, and Identity in Bulgaria,” Nationalities Papers 49, 1 (2019): 87–103.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
Shmuel Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129 (2000): 1–29.
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012): 875–909.
Bernard Lory, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” in Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 3: Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies, edited by Roumen Daskalov and Alexander Vezenkov, pp. 355–405 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 388.
Stark Draper, “The Conceptualization of an Albanian Nation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 20, no. 1 (1997): 125.
Lory, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” 388.
Egdūnas Račius, Muslims in Eastern Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 5.
Evstatiev, “Milletic Secularism in the Balkans,” 96–7.
Dale F. Eickelman, “Transnational Religious Identities (Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism): Cultural Concerns,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 602–06.
Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Anna Xiao Dong Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 128, 170.
Pew Research Center, “Religious Belief and National Belonging,” 7.
Michael Cook, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 52.
John R. Bowen, “Beyond Migration: Islam as a Transnational Public Space,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 5 (2004): 880.
Gary R. Bunt, iMuslims: Rewriting the House of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1.
Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), ix.
Ina Merdjanova, Rediscovering the Umma: Muslims in the Balkans Between Nationalism and Transnationalism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Kerem Öktem, “Global Diyanet and Multiple Networks: Turkey’s New Presence in the Balkans,” Journal of Muslims in Europe 1, 1 (2012): 27–58.
The Revival of Islam in the Balkans: From Identity to Ideology, ed. Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Katarzyna Górak Sosnowska, “Muslims in Europe: Different Communities, One Discourse? Adding the Central and Eastern European Perspective,” in Muslims in Poland and Eastern Europe: Widening the European Discourse on Islam, ed. Katarzyna Górak Sosnowska (Warszawa: University of Warsaw, Faculty of Oriental Studies, 2011), 13.
Chris Hann, “Introduction: Faith, Power, and Civility after Socialism,” in The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe, ed. Chris Hann et al. (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2006), 1–26.
James L. Hopkins, The Bulgarian Orthodox Church: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Evolving Relationship between Church, Nation and State in Bulgaria (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2009), 8.
See Ghodsee’s review of Hopkins’ book in Humanities and Social Sciences Online (h-sae),
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origin of the National Question in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19, 2 (1989): 150.
Michael Taussing, “History as Sorcery,” Representations 7 (1984): 87–109.
Grace Davie, “Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge,” in Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, ed. Nancy T. Ammerman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22.
Ibid., 23.
See Chapter 7, this book.
Armando Salvatore, “Staging Virtue: The Disembodiment of Self-Correctness and the Making of Islam as Public Norm,” in Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam, ed. Georg Stauth, vol. 1 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 1998), 87.
Kristen Ghodsee, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 156.
Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, Foreword by Paul Willis, 3rd ed. (London: sage Publications, 2008), 234.
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). For a more detailed discussion of these theoretical debates, see Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 134.
Murat Bayar, “Reconsidering Primordialism: An Alternative Approach to the Study of Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, 9 (2009), 1639–57.
As one scholar explains, “[e]ssentialists equate traditions to fixed essences to which they ascribe variations” while “[t]raditions are not fixed entities people happen to discover. They are contingent entities people produce by their own activities.” See Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 201–3.
Arolda Elbasani and Jelena Tošić, “Localized Islam(s): Interpreting Agents, Competing Narratives, and Experiences of Faith,” Nationalities Papers 45, 4 (2017), 499–510.
Behar Sadriu, “Grasping the Syrian War, a View from Albanians in the Balkans,” Nationalities Papers 45, 4 (2017), 540–59.
Laura J. Olson, “Negotiating meaning through costume and social media in Bulgarian Muslims’ communities of practice,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 4 (2017), 560–80. doi: 10.1080/00905992.2017.1303470, published online: 16 June 2017.
For an account of the intellectual development of el-Zein, see Dale F Eickelman, “A Search for the Anthropology of Islam: Abdul Hamid el-Zein,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 13, no. 3 (1981): 361–65.
Abdul Hamid El-Zein, “Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6 (1977): 242–43.
Ibid., 251. The quotation marks are el-Zein’s.
Ibid., 251.
Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 3rd ed. (London: Verso, 2009), 1.
Cemil Aydın, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 131.
Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), 148. In his review, David Nirenberg (“What is Islam? What is Christianity? What is Judaism?” Raritan 36, 2 (2016): 1–14) rightly notes the politicized connotations of defining Islam from some perspectives of contemporary thought (pp. 3–4) by emphasizing that “the Wahhabism that Ahmed frequently criticized is just as ‘true’ an experience of Islam as the Sufi-philosophical pluralism he celebrated” (p. 14).
Ahmed, What is Islam? 405, author’s emphasis.
Frank Griffel, “Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity: Two New Perspectives on Premodern (and Postclassical) Islamic Societies,” Bustan 8, no. 1 (2017): 13.
Dale F. Eickelman, “The Study of Islam in Local Contexts,” Contributions to Asian Studies 17 (1982), 1–2.
Ibid., 11.
Qur’ān 2: 256.
Ali Eminov, “Social Construction of Identities: Pomaks in Bulgaria,” Journal on Ethnopolitics & Minority Issues in Europe 6, no. 2 (2007): 1–2.
For example, Fatme Myuhtar-May, Identity, Nationalism, and Cultural Heritage under Siege. Five Narratives of Pomak Heritage—From Forced Renaming to Weddings (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 6–7.
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, updated ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ix.
William W. Hagen, “The Balkan’s Lethal Nationalisms,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (1999): 62–63.
Cook, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, xv.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13.
In the sense of Armando Salvatore, “Staging Virtue: The Disembodiment of Self-Correctness and the Making of Islam as Public Norm,” in Islam—Motor or Challenge of Modernity, Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 1, ed. Georg Stauth, Hamburg: Lit Verlag; New Brunswick: Transaction, 87–120.
Suha Taji-Farouki and Hugh Poulton, “Introduction,” in Muslim Identity and the Balkan State, ed. Hugh Poulton and Suha Taji-Farouki (London: Hurst, 1997), 2.
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