The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria

by Mary Neuburger

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.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthropological study looks at Bulgaria, with its Slavic majority and sizable Muslim minority. The author traces relations between the two communities, particularly Slavic attitudes towards the Muslims, from the time of Bulgaria's independence in 1878 to the present day.

This is an interesting topic, and one that hasn't been written about much, so the author deserves credit for introducing the reader to new concepts and unfamiliar history. However, I was frustrated by the amount of jargon in it (this is definitely an academic book), and I wished the author had explored why Bulgaria has maintained its Muslim minority population while other Balkan states with similar minorities have collapsed in war or other types of instability.