Religious traditions: Islam in the Balkans.

Abstract

In the first chapter, we suggest that, even after the conversions and the embracement of Islam from a great part of the Balkan people, there are traces of a common Balkan mentality which is based on shared religious beliefs and practices. The intersections here lie in the common religious culture coming from the Byzantine era of Christianity, but also the adaptability that the new religion displays concerning, not only with the previous religious practices, but also even with the local traditions and customs. In the second chapter of this essay where we are examining the identification process in the Balkans during the nation-state building, we will not search to define the character and the political behavior of the Balkan societies that unconsciously come from their culture (including religious peculiarities). It should be unachievable. Instead, we will view the identification processes as the result of the interaction between different groups. As we say, identification is a meaningful process of definition of ‘self’ in strong contrast with others, or in other words, “ethnicity is a property of relationship and not the sound of one hand clapping”. Conversion to Islam here is a process for the various groups of preserving their identities. It is a landmark of belonging ‘somewhere’, when one group comes in touch and is compared to others, something which, as we say later, mostly takes place in the border lands of the Ottoman Empire (like Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo etc.), where the possibility of assimilation from the Roman Empire is also existent. In the last chapter, we examine the dichotomies being created within the Balkan society and, even within the separate successor of ethnic-nation states coming up from the breakup of former Yugoslavia. In these dichotomies, the religious ones are prevailing as Islam, unconsciously, has been coincided with the Ottoman Empire, and further with the Orient, and then with the ‘backwardness’, instead of the ‘progress’ that Christianity suggests, as it goes along with the Occident.