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The importance of settled minorities for facilitating refugee belonging is seldom discussed in research on refugee integration. Drawing on scholarship on belonging, boundary-making, and bordering, this study investigates how boundaries are drawn between settled minorities and refugees in Bulgaria. Based on interviews with integration workers and organizations of settled minorities in a state with the largest historically present Muslim minority in the EU, an Arabic-speaking diaspora settled decades ago, and with minimal state involvement in refugee integration, the study shows how spatial, linguistic, and religious boundaries separate settled minorities from newly arrived refugees. Arabic-speaking diasporas are nevertheless witnessed to overcome the boundaries through geographical proximity, a shared language, and shared countries of origin, whereby they have functioned as facilitators of refugee belonging and inclusion. Furthermore, Muslim institutions led by Bulgarian Turks have functioned as spaces for refugee belonging. The study finds that settled minority communities have, despite multiple boundaries and some assimilatory discourses, contributed to refugee belonging in ways that in part has compensated for the state absence. The study calls for further research investigating the role of settled minorities in inclusionary processes in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how everyday religious practices inform the processes of social identification, complicate presumed ethno-religious categories, and mediate local cultural differences in face of political and cultural hegemonic practices. In the context of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey, Turkish Cypriots and Turks are considered to share an ethnicity and religion. This "overlap" has been employed to justify Turkey's military intervention and its political, economic, and cultural domination over the island. Yet the cultural diversities and "perceived" differences between and among these groups are exacerbated by power dynamics, nationalist agendas, and mutual biases. The article explains subtle discussions around "genuine" Turkish and Muslim identities, as well as the enforced coexistence and constructed brotherhood of Cypriots and Turks on the island. The competing accounts of the "correct" interpretation of Islam at a Muslim tekke reflect intragroup power asymmetries and the conflict between institutionalized Sunni-Orthodox and "heterodox" local Islam. The article focuses on two overlooked issues in the scholarship on Northern Cyprus—the relations between Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey, and the role of religion in the political processes—as well as on literature on shared sacred sites and an analysis of competitive intracommunal interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we show how judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have provided nationalists with an unexpected opportunity to promote a nationalist discourse that is seemingly in line with human rights while fundamentally at odds with the counter-majoritarian core of human rights. We start our analysis with two judgments in which the Court accepted the arguments of liberal democratic states to infringe fundamental rights of persons belonging to (immigrant) Muslim minorities in the name of "requirements of living together" or "social integration": SAS v France (2014) and Osmanoglu and Kocabas v Switzerland (2017). Strikingly, the justifications by the states for these infringements point to concerns about perceived threats to national identity and culture. We show how nationalist politicians in countries with minority populations, including those in East Central Europe, have used justifications in terms of national self-protection, tacitly or explicitly, to pursue old anti–human rights agendas. The case law discussed here enabled them to present these justifications as ECtHR proof, notwithstanding the underlying nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Turkish Language Olympiads as a political-performative strategy that the Muslim nationalists used to communicate their ideology. I argue that to understand the rise of Muslim nationalism, we also need to understand how emotional appeal is created through spectacles like the Turkish Olympiads. The spectacle was effective in boosting people's sense of national pride and self-confidence by resolving two important tensions of Kemalist nationalism. First, it addressed the tension between Westernization and nationalization. Depicting an image of Turkish national culture that is appreciated and imitated by foreigners, it contested the imitative, Westernist character of Kemalist nationalism. Second, recasting the outside world as friendly to Turks, even Turkophile, it challenged Kemalist nationalism's emphasis on external threats. Turkish-speaking and -acting foreigners communicated a message of nationalist self-empowerment and confidence, calling into question people's sense of fear and distrust of the outside world. How Muslim nationalism was promoted, particularly the performative-symbolic strategies that were used, are important to understand because of their emotional resonance and potential for mass mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, through comparative historical analysis, examines the traditional marriage rituals of the Dungan diaspora in Kazakhstan. Dungans are Chinese-speaking Muslims who were forced to migrate to present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan after the defeat of their revolt against the Qing dynasty from 1877 to 1888. The article focuses on the diversity of wedding ceremonies in three zones where Dungan settled in Kazakhstan: Zhalpak Tobe and Sortobe, two rural areas in the Zhambyl region; and Zaria Vostok, near the city of Almaty. I find that the local variations in traditional wedding ceremonies stem from their close intercultural and social cooperation with non-Dungan peoples—primarily Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, and Russians. The example of wedding rituals shows that, while Dungan existence in another cultural environment has stimulated the consolidation of their ethnic group, preserving many of the traditional archaic cultural features, it has also led to the transformation of the marriage ceremonies. I address a much-neglected pathway—the nature of borrowed elements in Dungan wedding rituals—and ask why the extent of borrowing varies from community to community even though the Dungan arrived from China with similar traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the “fear of Islam” through a specific series of political debates about Islam and the future of the Greek-Orthodox national identity. The analysis is based on the method of qualitative content analysis, which makes use of thematic categories and draws on the proceedings of the Greek parliament. The main questions the article will try to address are: How have Greek political parties reacted to public demand for the construction of a mosque? What have been the rhetorical tropes they use? How have they capitalized on current and old fears about Islam? What have been the implications of this discourse on state policies toward Islam? Have there been any differences in this discourse over time? The analysis highlights the role of historical interpretations of Greek national identity and contemporary problems related to new waves of migration due to Greece’s place on the border with Turkey and with the broader Islamic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes transformations of historiography and identity discourses by focusing on the Memory House of Ali Rıza Efendi (the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) as a “site of historical consciousness” which was reconstructed in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. The House, referred to by the villagers as the “Memory House of Atatürk,” was opened in 2014 in a Muslim village, Kocacık, with the support of the Turkish state. Through material and textual representations of Atatürk’s life, the House speaks to the Turkishness and Turkish presence in the Balkans. The Turkishness, however, is imagined through the neo-Ottoman and Islamic prisms. The House thus becomes the locus of alternative interpretations of the past, and, consequently, narratives of Muslims’ identity and origin in the region. Moreover, as it is reconstructed at the nexus of the local and the transnational, the House is also called a symbol of the “politics of brotherhood” between Macedonia and Turkey. In this way, the institution embodies the reconstruction of the past not only at the local and national levels, but also at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an attempt to chart recent developments in the field of Modern Greek Studies, focusing on shifting perceptions regarding Islam and Muslims. To do so, the essay positions the relevant literature in its historical context, touching upon both accomplishments and limitations. Its main proposition is that the Greek case is distinct yet connected to contemporary global contingencies and broader long-term regional dynamics. Athens remains the only European capital without a mosque. Moreover, despite recent academic endeavors, there exists today no coherent Greek field of Islamic Studies. That these absences have been brought recently under political and academic scrutiny constitutes, however, a noteworthy change. Most important, the traditional exclusion of Islam from the field of Modern Greek Studies does not suggest lack of relevance between the two but, quite to the contrary, reveals a set of loaded and complex socieconomic, geopolitical, and historical links that deserve to be studied in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia posed challenges for the universal concept of the Yugoslav Muslim nation for which several development paths were imaginable under the new circumstances. The concept of Bosniakdom, which was initially developed to address the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, gradually grew to become a new and coherent national program to include all the Muslims of former Yugoslavia, primarily due to its new pan-Bosniak orientation. The present article traces the conceptual history of the national ideas of Muslimdom versus Bosniakdom within the former Yugoslav states, as well as the conceptual and institutional history of the pan-Bosniak idea and movement during the 1990s and 2000s. It does this by emphasizing the decisive role the Official Muslim Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina played in their development and divulgence. This article claims that, contrary to some expectations, the strategy of internationalization and universalization of the hitherto territorial concept of Bosniakdom toward Muslims in neighboring countries during the second half of 1990s and 2000s was closely linked to the idea of the construction of the Bosniak national state. It also proposes that the evolution of Bosniakdom into pan-Bosniakdom during that time primarily followed concerns related to that goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]