Islam in Romania

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    Islam in Romania is followed by only 0.4 percent of the population, but has 700 years of tradition in

    Tatar and Turkish ethnic communities and follow the Sunni doctrine. The Islamic religion is one of the 18 rites awarded state recognition
    .

    According to tradition, Islam was first established locally around

    Sari Saltik during the Byzantine epoch. The Islamic presence in Northern Dobruja was expanded by Ottoman overseeing and successive immigration, but has been in steady decline since the late 19th century. In Wallachia and Moldavia, the two Danubian Principalities, the era of Ottoman suzerainty was not accompanied by a growth in the number of Muslims, whose presence there was always marginal. Also linked to the Ottoman Empire, groups of Islamic colonists in other parts of present-day Romania were relocated by the Habsburg
    expansion or by various other political changes.

    After Northern Dobruja became part of Romania following the

    communist regime, when Romanian Muslims were subject to a measure of supervision by the state, but the group again emancipated itself after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Its interests are represented by the Muftiyat
    (Muftiyatul Cultului Musulman din România), which was created as the reunion of two separate such institutions.

    Demographics and organization

    Percentage of Muslims by settlement, 2002

    According to the 2022 census, 76,215 people, approximately 0.4% of the total population, indicated that their religion was Islam,

    Roma social norms.[4]

    Ninety-seven percent of the Romanian Muslims are residents of the two counties forming Northern Dobruja: eighty-five percent live in Constanța County, and twelve percent in Tulcea County.[6] The rest mainly inhabit urban centers such as Bucharest, Brăila, Călărași, Galați, Giurgiu, and Drobeta-Turnu Severin.[7] A single municipality, Dobromir, has a Muslim majority.[8]

    In all, Romania has as many as eighty

    Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs, seventy-seven.[7] The city of Constanța, with its Grand Mosque of Constanța and the location of the Muftiyat, is the center of Romanian Islam; Mangalia, near Constanța, is the site of a monumental mosque, built in 1575 (see Esmahan Sultan Mosque).[5][9][10] The two mosques are state-recognized historical monuments, as are the ones in Hârșova, Amzacea, Babadag and Tulcea, together with the Babadag tombs of two popularly revered Sufi sheikhs—the supposed tomb of dervish Sari Saltik and that of Gazi Ali Pașa.[7] There are also 108 Islamic cemeteries in Romania.[7]

    The nationwide Islamic community is internally divided into 50 local groups of Muslims, each of whom elects its own leadership committee.[7] Members provide funding for the religious institution, which is supplemented by state donations and subsidies, as well by assistance from international Islamic organizations.[7]

    The Muslim clergy in Romania includes imams, imam-hatips, and muezzins.[7] As of 2008, the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs recognizes 35 imams.[7] The Constanța Mufti, who is the community's main representative, is elected by a secret ballot from among the imams.[7] He is assisted by a synodal body, the Sura Islam, which comprises 23 members and offers advice on matters of administration and discipline.[7] The current Mufti is Murat Iusuf.[7]

    History

    Early presence

    The first significant numbers of Muslims arrived in Romania with the Pechenegs and Cumans. Around 1061, when the Pechenegs ruled in Wallachia and Moldavia, there was a Muslim minority among them, as was among the Cumans.[9] The Cumans followed the Pechenegs in 1171,[9] while the Hungarian kings settled the Pechenegs in Transylvania and other parts of their kingdom.

    Muslim presence is traditional in

    Alevis who were regarded as apostates by the dominant Sunni group of central Anatolia, and who sought refuge from persecution.[11]

    The exact location of their earliest area of settlement is disputed: a group of historians proposes that the group was probably tasked with defending the Byzantine border to the north, and settled in and around what later became known as Babadag,[9][11] while another one centers this presence on the Southern Dobrujan strip of land known as Kaliakra (presently in Bulgaria).[11] In addition, various historians argue that this Seljuq migration was the decisive contributor to the ethnogenesis of the Gagauz people, which, some of them believe, could also have involved the Cumans, Pechenegs, Oghuz and other Turkic peoples.[11] The Gagauz, few of whom have endured in Dobruja, are majority Eastern Orthodox, a fact which was attributed to a process of religious conversion from Islam.[11]

    The presence of

    Berber traveler Ibn Battuta, who passed through the area in 1334.[5] In Ibn Battuta's time, the region was regarded as a westernmost possession of the Tatar Golden Horde, a khanate centered on the Eurasian Steppe.[11] Archeology has uncovered that another Tatar group, belonging to the Golden Horde, came to Dobruja during the rule of Nogai Khan, and were probably closely related to the present-day Nogais.[5] Following Timur's offensives, the troops of Aktai Khan visited the region in the mid-14th century and around 100,000 Tatars settled there.[9]

    Before and after the Golden Horde fell, Dobrujan Muslims, like the

    Beylerbeylik of Rumelia.[5]

    The grave of Sari Saltik, reportedly first erected into a monument by Sultan Bayezid, has since endured as a major shrine in Romanian Islam.

    Sveti Naum.[12] Other accounts hold that Saltuk was buried in the Anatolian city of İznik,[13] in Buzău, Wallachia, or even as far south as the Mediterranean island of Corfu or as far north as the Polish city of Gdańsk.[12] The toponym Babadağ (Turkish for "Old Man's Mountain", later adapted into Romanian as Babadag) is a probable reference to Sari Saltik, and a Dobrujan Muslim account recorded by chronicler Evliya Çelebi in the late 15th century has it that the name surfaced soon after a Christian attack partly destroyed the tomb.[11]

    The oldest

    madrasah in Dobruja and Romania as a whole was set up in Babadag, on orders from Bayezid II (1484); it was moved to Medgidia in 1903.[5] From the same period onwards, groups of Muslim Tatars and Oghuz Turks from Anatolia were settled into Dobruja at various intervals;[5] in 1525, a sizable group of these, originating from the ports of Samsun and Sinop, moved to Babadag.[9] Bayezid also asked Volga Tatars to resettle into northern Dobruja.[5]

    In late medieval Wallachia and Moldavia

    Esmahan Sultan Mosque in Mangalia, with Ottoman architecture.

    In the two

    kazas, a rule enforced until the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 (the status was briefly extended to Brăila in 1542).[9]

    For the following centuries, three conversions in the ranks of acting or former local

    Moldavian Prince Ilie II Rareș (1546–1551). At the other end of the social spectrum, Moldavia held a sizable population of Tatar slaves, who shared this status with all local Roma people (see Slavery in Romania). While Roma slavery also existed in Wallachia, the presence of Tatar slaves there has not been documented, and is only theorized.[14] The population may have foremost comprised Muslim Nogais from the Budjak who were captured in skirmishes, although, according to one theory, the first of them may have been Cumans captured long before the first Ottoman and Tatar incursions.[14]

    The issue of Muslim presence on the territory of the two countries is often viewed in relation to the relations between the Ottoman Sultans and local Princes. Romanian historiography has generally claimed that the latter two were bound by bilateral treaties with the

    Capitulations (Ottoman Turkish: ahdnâme), which were supposedly agreed between the two states and the Ottoman Empire at some point in the Middle Ages. Such documents have not been preserved: modern Romanian historians have revealed that Capitulations, as invoked in the 18th and 19th centuries to invoke Romanian rights vis à vis the Ottomans, and as reclaimed by nationalist discourse in the 20th century, were forgeries.[15] Traditionally, Ottoman documents referring to Wallachia and Moldavia were unilateral decrees issued by the Sultan.[15] In one compromise version published in 1993, Romanian historian Mihai Maxim argues that, although these were unilateral acts, they were viewed as treaties by the Wallachian and Moldavian rulers.[16]

    Provisions toward Muslim-Christian relations have traditionally been assessed by taking in view later policies. According to one prominent interpretation, this would mean that the Principalities were regarded by the Ottomans as belonging to the

    Arabic-speaking Christian traveler Paul of Aleppo.[20]

    17th–19th century

    Mosques in Timișoara, 1656

    By the 17th century, according to the notes of traveler

    Eyalet of Temeşvar (the Banat region of western Romania), which extended as far as Arad (1551–1699) and Oradea (1661–1699).[9] The few thousand Muslims settled there were, however, driven out by Habsburg conquest and settled at Ada Kaleh
    .

    The presence of Muslims in the two Danubian Principalities was also attested, centering on Turkish traders

    Russo-Turkish Wars, Ottoman troops were stationed on Wallachia's territory.[23]

    Following the

    Grand Vizier until 1808. Two more Grand Viziers between 1821 and 1828 came from the once Moldavian city of Bender: Benderli Ali Pasha and Mehmed Selim Pasha
    (nicknamed Benderli, meaning "from Bender").

    Over the same period, large groups of

    Persians—all of these three communities were quickly integrated into the Tatar–Turkish mainstream.[5]

    Kingdom of Romania

    Tatars (yellow) and Turks (dark purple) in Northern Dobruja (1903)

    Tatars in Tulcea County were driven out by Russian troops during the

    civil rights to non-Christians.[25] In 1923 a monument in the shape of a small mosque was built in Bucharest's Carol Park, as sign of reconciliation after World War I. A small Turkish-speaking Muslim community resided on Ada Kaleh island in the Danube, south of the Banat, an Ottoman enclave and later part of Austria-Hungary
    , which was transferred to Romania in 1923.

    At the end of the

    Qur'an into Albanian was completed by Ilo Mitke Qafëzezi in the Wallachian city of Ploiești.[5]

    Until after World War II, the overall religiously conservative and apolitical Muslim population reportedly enjoyed a notable degree of religious tolerance.[27] Nevertheless, after 1910, the community was subject to a steady decline, and many predominantly-Muslim villages were abandoned.[5]

    Communism and post-Revolution period

    Islamic crescent

    The Dobrujan Muslim community was exposed to cultural repression during

    madrasah in Medgidia was shut down in the 1960s.[5][7] The population of Ada Kaleh relocated to Anatolia shortly before the 1968 construction of the Iron Gates dam by a joint Yugoslav-Romanian venture, which resulted in the island being flooded. At the same time, Sufi tradition was frowned upon by Communist officials—as a result of their policies, the Sufi groups became almost completely inactive.[29]

    However, according to historian Zachary T. Irwin, the degree to which the Muslim community was repressed and dispersed was lower in Romania than in other countries of

    Great National Assembly during Nicolae Ceaușescu's years in office.[31] In the 1980s, a delegation of Romanian Muslims visited Iran after the Islamic Revolution succeeded in that country.[31] They also adhered to international bodies sponsored by Libya and Saudi Arabia.[31] These gestures, according to Irwin, brought only a few objections from the regime.[31]

    Following the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Tatar and Turkish were again added to the curriculum for members of the respective communities, and, in 1993, the Medgidia madrasah was reopened as a Theological and Pedagogic High School named after Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.[5][7] The school was later elevated to National College status, and is known in Romanian as Colegiul Național Kemal Atatürk. Since the 1990s, the official representatives of the Muslim community maintain close relations with international non-governmental organizations such as the Muslim World League.[7] Also after the fall of communism, ethnic Romanians began converting to Islam. According to Murat Iusuf, they number in the thousands, and are frequently women who marry Muslim men. In 2014, a member of this community established the Maryam Mosque. Located in Rediu, in the region of Moldavia, its congregation is made up of converts.[32][33]

    Statistics

    Year[34][35] Population Note
    1930 185,486 1.03%
    1949 28,782 0.18%
    1956 34,798 0.2%
    1966 40,191 0.21%
    1977 46,791 0.22%
    1992 55,928 0.25%
    2002 67,257 0.31%
    2011 64,337 0.34%
    2022 76,215 0.4%

    Gallery

    See also

    • Ottoman Romania

    Notes

    1. ^ "Religious Composition by Country, 2010-2050". Pew Research Center. 12 April 2015. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
    2. ^ "Populaţia rezidentă după grupa de vârstă, pe județe și municipii, orașe, comune, la 1 decembrie 2021" (XLS). National Institute of Statistics.
    3. ISBN 978-90-04-27754-0
    4. ^ a b c d e Ana Oprișan, George Grigore, "The Muslim Gypsies in Romania" Archived 2007-04-12 at the Wayback Machine, in International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Newsletter 8, September 2001, p.32. Retrieved June 2, 2007.
    5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s George Grigore, "Muslims in Romania" Archived 2007-09-26 at the Wayback Machine, in International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Newsletter 3, July 1999, p.34. Retrieved June 2, 2007.
    6. ^ (in Romanian) Adina Șuteu, "Europa merge pe sârmă între islamizare și radicalizare" Archived 2008-01-24 at the Wayback Machine, in Adevărul, January 24, 2008
    7. ^
      Romanian Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs' State Secretariat for Religious Affairs
      . Retrieved February 28, 2008.
    8. ^ (in Romanian) Cristian Delcea, Mihai Voinea, "Satul islamic. Reportaj din singura localitate majoritar musulmană din România", in Adevărul, November 22, 2015
    9. ^
      Revista Sud-Est
      , 2002/2/48. Retrieved June 2, 2007.
    10. ^ Thede Kahl, "Die muslimische Gemeinschaft Rumäniens. Der Weg einer Elite zur marginalisierten Minderheit", in Europa Regional, 3-4/2005, Leipzig, p.94-101
    11. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k (in Romanian) Constantin Rezachevici, "Găgăuzii" (part I) Archived 2007-01-26 at the Wayback Machine, in Magazin Istoric, May 1997
    12. ^
      ISBN 90-04-10505-0
    13. ^ Sari Saltuk Tomb Archived 2009-08-10 at the Wayback Machine, on ArchNet. Retrieved February 29, 2008.
    14. ^
      ISBN 963-9241-84-9
    15. ^ a b Boia, p.79
    16. ^ Boia, p.245
    17. ISBN 1-84511-505-8
    18. ^ Ștefan Gorovei, "Moldova în Casa Păcii, pe marginea izvoarelor privind primul secol de relații moldo-otomane", in Anuarul Institutului de Istorie și Arheologie A. D. Xenopol, XVII, 1980
    19. ^ Feodorov, p.304
    20. ^ Feodorov, p.300-304
    21. ^ Feodorov, p.301-302
    22. ^ a b Constantin C. Giurescu, Istoria Bucureștilor. Din cele mai vechi timpuri pînă în zilele noastre, Editura pentru literatură, Bucharest, 1966, p.273
    23. Humanitas, Bucharest, 1995, p.283 (mention of an Ottoman garrison stationed near Bucharest in 1802, one which intervened in the city to restore order after widespread panic over a rumored attack by Osman Pazvantoğlu
      's troops)
    24. ISBN 0-313-27497-5
    25. ^ a b c d e f g Irwin, p.402
    26. ^ Tița, Diana (16 September 2018). "Povestea dramatică a cerchezilor din Dobrogea". Historia (in Romanian).
    27. ^ Irwin, p.402, 404
    28. ^ Irwin, p.407
    29. ^ Nathalie Clayer, Alexandre Popovic, "A New Era for Sufi Trends in the Balkans" Archived 2007-09-26 at the Wayback Machine, in International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Newsletter 3, July 1999, p.32. Retrieved June 2, 2007.
    30. ^ Irwin, p.402-403
    31. ^ a b c d Irwin, p.403
    32. ^ "Moschee la Rediu, pentru românii convertiți la Islam". Ziarul de Roman (in Romanian). 28 June 2014.
    33. ^ Ionescu, Sînziana (15 January 2015). "Un român convertit la Islam a ridicat o moschee peste drum de casă. "Este pentru toți musulmanii"". Adevărul (in Romanian).
    34. ^ "What does the 2011 census tell us about religion?" (PDF). National Institute of Statistics Romania (in Romanian). Retrieved 23 April 2014.
    35. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.180.3753
      .

    References

    External links

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