change font size

print version

copyright

Other languages:

Islam and Bulgaria's Muslims

17 07 2007  Summary of presentation by Velin Belev

Islam became a prominent theme for international media at the beginning of the 21th century. Somehow unavoidably, the Islamic fact gets interpreted irrationally, and thus becomes one of the most worrying of today’s phenomena. In it, Muslims and non-Muslims are almost always faced with reasonably unsolvable religious, cultural and political paradoxes. In Bulgaria, though less intensely than in some Western or Middle Eastern states, Islam turned out to be an attractive theme for journalists, with their own – unfortunately often clumsy, jargon.

The usual combination of ‘-isms’ (Islam-ism, fundamental-ism, radical-ism, integration-ism, fanatic-ism, etc.), which accompanies “Islamic themes,” is often used in the most inadequate ways by Bulgarian print and electronic media, even in cases when such use may be appropriate. However, the fault for such journalistic inaccuracies belongs to the so-called Islamic “spiritual elite” in Bulgaria, in the face of the Chief Mufty’s office and its branch structures. The Islamic clergy not only fails to set proper examples, but has general difficulty with the articulation of Islamic themes.

The problem with the religious and secular education in the Bulgarian Islamic community should be acutely raised here. For a long time, the Bulgaria’s Muslims have been unable to make strides towards a proper tone in religious dedication. Tripped up by political and confessional factors, 17 years after the fall of communism, Bulgaria’s Muslims are unable to nominate their own intellectual leaders, who can be at an equal footing with the cultural environment that surrounds them.

All the efforts to gain religious qualifications in Turkey and the Arab countries brought disappointments, rather than a stabilizing effect, to this community,. It turned out that simply mastering one of the Oriental languages, which is in and of itself important for the good understanding of Islam, is not enough to compensate for a serious religious and cultural lacking in any young person on his road to Islamic education. Training in an authentic Oriental environment can have a positive effect only if it is preceded by a serious educational background. The seemingly heavy linguistic and religious baggage, with which most young people return from the Islamic countries, puts them in a self-understood dominant position towards the remaining Muslims – however, one that is filled with many underwater stones.

Most of the people who have studied Islam usually adopt quite a mechanical behavior, which they see as “authentic” and which they try to impose after their return to Bulgaria. This gives rise to a fundamental discrepancy between the religious communities. This discrepancy has received very concrete dimensions for Bulgarian Muslims in the last ten years. A typical example of it is the case in the Rhodopi mountains, where it would not be an overstatement to say there is a confessional catastrophe, where a half-understood “Arab model” of Islam is confronted with the religious habits of the local Turks and Pomaks. A better understanding of the confessional differences in the framework of so-called Sunniism and Islam in general, would put to rest many of the absurd collisions in the practice of Islamic faith. These collisions may not be a fatal threat to those religious practices today, but they may cause serious damage tomorrow.

Of course, all of these perspectives should not be dramatized naively and purposefully. This is the other mistake made in our society, when it speaks histerically and without preparation about Islam in the Rhodopi mountains or the Islam of Turks and Arabs, or about the ever-perceived threat of the Orient. All that stands against the common and mirrored lack of knowledge, shared forever by the East and the West, is the eternal duty of the active mind. This mind (neither Eastern, nor Western) is described by the metaphor of the Holy Light: “Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth; a likeness of His light is as a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, (and) the glass is as it were a brightly shining star, lit from a blessed olive-tree, neither eastern nor western, the oil whereof almost gives light though fire touch it not-- light upon light-- Allah guides to His light whom He pleases, and Allah sets forth parables for men, and Allah is Cognizant of all things.” – Sura 24/35.