Islam
Islam is the largest minority religion in Bulgaria. It is professed by the Turkish minority, the Muslim Bulgarians (Pomaks) and most of the Roma. The former two are concentrated in the Rhodopes, a massif in southern Bulgaria, but are present in clusters in other parts of the country, e.g. the Turks in the Ludogorie region and the Pomaks in the Rhodopes and some villages in northern Bulgaria.
Islam arrived with the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 14th-15th century. Turkish notables settled in the larger cities (Plovdiv, Sofia, Varna, etc.), while peasants from Anatolia arrived in the Ludogorie and the Rhodopes. Many Orthodox Christians and Paulicians converted to Islam, often voluntarily due to the peculiarities of the Ottoman millet system, but sometimes forcefully. After the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 many of the Muslims left Bulgaria, but others chose to remain.
Today, Muslims form the majority in Kardzhali Province and Razgrad Province (mainly by Turks) and Smolyan Province (by Bulgarians).
Read more about this topic: Religion In Bulgaria
Famous quotes containing the word islam:
“The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)