History
Islam arrived to the Balkans with the advancement of the Ottoman Empire.
Muslims of Serbia are of various ethnic backgrounds:
- Bosniaks and Muslims by nationality, mostly living in the Sandžak region, are South Slavs who converted to Islam during Ottoman administration.
- Albanians, a major part of the pre-Ottoman Catholic and Orthodox Christian inhabitants of what is now Albania and part of Kosovo were converted into Islam in the 17th and 18th century.
- The Slavic Gorani, who originating from southern Kosovo, were Christians before and were converted in the 18th, and particularly 19th century.
- Albanian speaking Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians who originating from Kosovo are Muslims, some Serbian speaking Roma are also Muslims (often tracing their previous settlement to Macedonia or Bosnia).
Historically, sizable number of Serbs converted to Islam during Ottoman administration.
Serbia has two rival Islamic communities, one based in Belgrade and the other in the mainly Bosniak Muslim southwest Sandžak region. The split between Muslim communities in Serbia dates back to 2007. The Islamic Community in Serbia, based in Novi Pazar, the biggest town in Sandžak, looks to neighbouring Bosnia for spiritual guidance and is led by Muamer Zukorlić. The Islamic Community of Serbia, based in Belgrade, is led by Adem Zilkić.
Read more about this topic: Islam In Serbia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)