Recent years have witnessed a growth of interest in the study of Muslim societies in southeastern Europe in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire's nineteenth-century territorial losses. The emergence of new nation-states raised the issue of how local Muslim societies could be integrated into the new (predominantly Christian) state structures. Milena Methodieva addresses this question in the context of the Bulgarian state's Muslim community in the post-1878 era. Her narrative links the transformation of Bulgaria's Muslim community into a national minority with the emergence of a local Muslim reform movement. By focusing on the debates and activities of the latter, she reveals how the former conceived the Ottoman legacy, their religious and civil rights, their identity, and how these notions were linked to their visions and experiences of “modernity.”
The first of seven thematic chapters sketches the historical background, covering the establishment of Ottoman rule on the territory of Bulgaria and the formation of Muslim communities up to the peace treaties of 1878. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin established the Principality of Bulgaria under Ottoman suzerainty and the autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia while guaranteeing equal civil, political, and religious rights to all inhabitants, including Muslims.
Chapters 2 and 3 assess the situation faced by Muslims in Bulgaria after 1878. Bulgarian nation-building efforts and the resulting challenges of integrating Muslims, who made up almost one-third of the population of the Bulgarian Principality in 1880/81, are the main foci of chapter 2. While Bulgarian legislation, in accordance with the Treaty of Berlin, defined Muslims as its subjects, Methodieva highlights several conflicting ideas and discourses: On the one hand, the competing vision of a Bulgarian nation stretched beyond the new state borders, including Bulgarians in Ottoman Macedonia and Thrace. On the other hand, contemporary Orientalist discourse implicitly associated Muslims not only with the Ottoman Empire but also with negative stereotypes, such as backwardness, fatalism, and conservatism. For their part, Bulgarian Muslims did not sever their ties to the Ottoman Empire, often opting to register themselves as Ottoman subjects. As Methodieva outlines, this situation gave rise to new challenges, such as establishing an Islamic religious hierarchy and administering vakıfs (religious endowments) under Bulgarian state authority as well as introducing military conscription among Bulgaria's Muslims.
The third chapter further contextualizes the situation with which Muslims in Bulgaria were confronted after 1878, outlining the demographic change and decline in the number of Muslims. This development was accompanied by an urban transformation aimed at removing the most prominent vestiges of Ottoman heritage, as well as a massive transfer of land from Muslims to Bulgarian peasants.
The next two chapters discuss the reactions to these new circumstances and the reform initiatives of Bulgaria's Muslims. Chapter 4 traces the origins of reform initiatives among Bulgaria's Muslims in the mid-1890s and the role played by the press in this process. Methodieva links the emergence of the reform movement to the concurrent appearance of several Muslim periodicals, the liberalization of the Bulgarian political environment, and the spread of the Young Turk movement. She also points out that by the 1890s a new generation of Muslims, born during the establishment of Bulgaria, came of age and made significant contributions to the reform movement. Although critical of the conservative ulema (Islamic scholars) and the current state of religion, they still saw Islam as a pillar of the Muslim community.
Chapter 5 outlines the reform movement's goals and programs. Methodieva contends that reformers advocated for educational reform to remedy what they deemed to be a “backward,” morally decadent, and ignorant Muslim population. They suggested the introduction of standardized school curricula and the application of the “new method” (usul-i cedid), which mostly entailed a phonetic approach to reading instruction to improve literacy and the teaching of secular courses along with more traditional subjects. Progressives also sought to promote knowledge and new forms of sociability through kıraathanes (reading rooms) and theater. Other reform goals concerned the social role of women, who should also be educated owing to the societal role that they, as housewives and mothers, played in maintaining morality and “civilization.”
Chapter 6 is devoted to the political arena and Muslim involvement in it. Political franchise, either through elections or parliament, was one of the few tools afforded Muslims in their struggle for greater and more rights. Although the Bulgarian political system granted suffrage to all male citizens, the language barrier imposed by the use of Bulgarian as the official state language constrained Muslim political activity. Nevertheless, traditional Muslim power brokers, such as the Shumen Mufti and the parliamentarian Kesimzade Mehmed Rüştü, did act as community intermediaries and engage in the political arena. For their part, Muslim reformers wanted to end the influence of such traditional elites, confronting them both through the press and popular petitions.
The final chapter of Methodieva's work analyzes how Bulgaria's Muslims self-identified in light of their shifting and overlapping loyalties to local society, the Bulgarian state, the Ottoman Empire, and the global Muslim community. The author concludes that Bulgaria's Muslims identified largely along religious terms, even as those categories came to be conflated with national allegiance. Still, this new understanding of identity and community fueled discussions of ethnic and linguistic differences within the Bulgarian Muslim community, especially between ethnic Turks and Tatars. At the same time, Methodieva points out that Bulgarian Muslims demonstrated solidarity with other Muslim communities in a global context. They were particularly interested in the fate of Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia and the Crimean Tatars in the Russian Empire, with whom they shared the experience of being Muslim minorities.
Between Empire and Nation is a well-written and thoroughly researched history of Bulgaria's Muslim community between 1878 and 1908, the period from the emergence of Bulgaria as a nation-state under Ottoman suzerainty to its formal independence. Its main strength is its basis on a careful analysis of Ottoman and Bulgarian archival documents and printed source material, with a specific focus on the writings of Muslim reform activists. Methodieva's approach achieves its goal of highlighting the voices and experiences of Bulgaria's Muslims and portraying them as active agents of political and social change. She vividly illustrates how Bulgaria's Muslims, a minority that enjoyed equal civil rights on paper but nevertheless encountered exclusion and discrimination in practice, found their place in the new Bulgarian state. More importantly, she demonstrates that Bulgaria's Muslim community was not a homogeneous bloc but consisted of various ethnic and linguistic groups with different ideas and loyalties.
Although ostensibly focused on political activists and personalities, Methodieva also considers the situation of marginalized groups, such as women, Muslim Roma, and Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims). The result of her efforts is a convincing case for the importance of situating Muslim reform movements and political activism in their specific local contexts, which she accomplishes through her comprehensive account of the political, social, and demographic circumstances in which Bulgaria's Muslims lived during the period under study.
Ideally, the work's focus on the Bulgarian context could also have been emphasized in its title, which simply refers to Muslim reform in the Balkans. Some other limitations to the otherwise excellent study include its focus on political activists and personalities, with comparatively little attention paid to the everyday experiences of “ordinary” people or the functioning of Islamic religious structures within Bulgarian state structures. Nevertheless, the author's meticulous research provides a valuable contribution to the study of Muslim communities in Bulgaria and the broader post-Ottoman context. The readable and well-structured work is a valuable resource for historians and others interested in Muslim reformism and minority studies.
