Travel writing about Muslim Europe. A journey around Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, home to the largest indigenous Muslim population in Europe, following the footsteps of Evliya Celebi through Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro. A book that begins to decolonise European history.

This book shifts analytical focus from macro-politicization and securitization of Islam to Muslims' choices, practices and public expressions of faith. An empirically rich analysis, the book provides rich cross-country evidence on the emergence of autonomous faith communities as well as the evolution of Islam in the broader European context.

For over a century, Albanians have been urged to view religious differences as unimportant. But are they? By conducting an unique set of interviews with representatives of the country's high-ranking clerics, Cecilie Endresen tries to answer this question. The clerics speak of an interplay between nation and religion in the their own symbolic universes and expound on such themes as salvation, religious tolerance, historical developments, theological differences, and politics. While embracing national unity and religious tolerance as an overriding ethos, they nonetheless manifest a certain religious rivalry and a sense of unjust treatment. As such, they appear to contradict their own claims; at the same time, they are proud to be Albanian and intent on upholding national unity. Their perception of what it means to be "Albanian" is invariably related to the question of religious differences and inter-religious relations. Endresen's study investigates religion in multi-religious, post-atheist Albania by highlighting the fluidity and the extreme complexity of relations between nation and religion in Albania - compounded by the effects of global politics, local traditions, religious doctrine, personal experience, regional history, national myths, Communist propaganda, and conspiracy theories.

From the earliest times, also, many Balkan Muslim soldiers and bureaucrats, as well as scholars and poets, made an impact on the wider Islamic world, the most prominent being Mohammed Ali, the founder of modern Egypt.

This book explores the Christian caliphal provinces of Armenia and Caucasian Albania as part of the larger Iranian cultural sphere.

In Islamic Leadership in the European Lands of the Former Ottoman and Russian Empires the history and contemporary development of Islamic leadership in over a dozen of Eastern European countries is analysed. The studies are presented through a double prism: the institutional structures of the Muslim communities and the place of the muftiates in the current national constellations on one hand, and the dimension of the spiritual guidance emanating from the muftiates on the other. The latter includes aspects such as the muftiates’ powers and role in supervision of mosques and other religious institutions, production, dissemination and control of religious knowledge and discussions on traditional and non-traditional forms of Islam engaged in by the muftiates. This is the first comprehensive edited volume on the subject. Contributors are: Srđan Barišić, Ayder Bulatov, Marko Hadjdinjak, Olsi Jazexhi, Memli Sh. Krasniqi, Armend Mehmeti, Dino Mujadžević, Agata S. Nalborczyk, Egdūnas Račius, Aziz Nazmi Shakir, Vitalii Shchepanskyi, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Daša Slabčanka, Aid Smajić, Irina Vainovski-Mihai, Mykhaylo Yakubovych, and Galina Yemelianova.

Besa is a code of honor deeply rooted in Albanian culture and incorporated in the faith of Albanian Muslims. It dictates a moral behavior so absolute that nonadherence brings shame and dishonor on oneself and one’s family. Simply stated, it demands that one take responsibility for the lives of others in their time of need. In Albania and Kosovo, Muslims sheltered, at grave risk to themselves and their families, not only the Jews of their cities and villages, but thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis from other European countries. Over a five-year period, photographer Norman H. Gershman sought out, photographed, and collected these powerful and moving stories of heroism in Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II. The book reveals a hidden period in history, slowly emerging after the fall of an isolationist communist regime, and shows the compassionate side of ordinary people in saving Jews. They acted within their true Muslim faith.

Religion in Albania has had a complicated history, with Orthodoxy, Bektashi and Sunni Islam, Catholicism coexisting throughout much of the history of this Balkan nation. This book traces the rise of the Albanian Orthodox Church from the beginnings of Albanian nationalist movements in the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and the Communist takeover. It examines the struggles of the Albanian state and Church to establish the Church’s independence from foreign influence amid a complex geopolitical interplay between Albania, neighbouring Greece and its powerful Ecumenical Patriarchate; the Italian and Yugoslav interference, and the shifting international political circumstances. The book argues that Greece’s involvement in the Albanian "ecclesiastical issue" was primarily motivated by political and territorial aspirations, as Athens sought to undermine the newly established Albanian state by controlling its Orthodox Church through pro-Greek bishops appointed by the Patriarchate. With its independence finally recognized in 1937, the Albanian Orthodox Church soon faced new challenges with the Italian, and later German, occupation of the country during the Second World War: the Church’s expansion into Kosovo, the Italian effort to place the Church under papal authority, and, the ultimate threat, the imminent victory of Communist forces.

There are roughly eight million Muslims in south-east Europe, among them Albanians, Bosniaks, Turks and Roma -- descendants of converts or settlers in the Ottoman period. This new history of the social, political and religious transformations that this population experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- a period marked by the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires and by the creation of the modern Balkan states -- will shed new light on the European Muslim experience. Southeast Europe's Muslims have experienced a slow and complex crystallisation of their respective national identities, which accelerated after 1945 as a result of the authoritarian modernisation of communist regimes and, in the late twentieth century, ended in nationalist mobilisations that precipitated the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo during the break-up of Milosevic's Yugoslavia. At a religious level, these populations have re--mained connected to the institutions established by the Ottoman Empire, as well as to various educational, intellectual and Sufi (mystic) networks. With the fall of communism, new transnational networks appeared, especially neo-Salafist and neo-Sufi ones, although Europe's Balkan Muslims have not escaped the wider processes of secularisation.