Milletic Secularism in the Balkans: Christianity, Islam, and Identity in Bulgaria

Abstract

The article introduces the concept of “milleticsecularism” which invokes the Ottomanmilletsystem to refer to divergent and competing transnational collective identities, loyalties, and frames of reference coexisting within the same nation-state. These identities are conceptualized as resembling the way religious communities functioned under the Ottomanmilletsystem but in a reverse, upended way, as today Muslims are the minority in a pluralist society and secular state governed on the basis of non-Muslim procedures and values symbolically overarched by Orthodox Christianity. Foregrounding the case of Bulgaria, the article highlights the role of the Ottoman legacy vis-à-vis Orthodox Christian heritage for the accommodation of diversity. Milletic secularism draws on the implicit social knowledge that evokes differing antecedents and values underlying the shared identities of Christians and Muslims. Since the 1990s, after half a century dominated by the “secular religion” of Communism, the intersection of religion and politics in Bulgaria is reshaped by the reemergence of religion as a structural force. Milletic secularism has both integrative and emancipatory potential, fostered and challenged today by a variety of factors. Among them, this article foregrounds the increasingly transnational Sunnī Muslim identity and the ongoing re-Islamization in the form of Ḥanafism and Salafism.

Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective: A New Typology of National-Religious Configurations

“…Third, there is a body of scholarship focusing on religious exclusions within specific nation-states (Akturk 2009a; Katznelson 2010; Sehat 2011; Adida, Laitin, and Valfort 2016), and the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence (Varshney 2002; Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu 2013), especially in cases where the founding of the nation was based on a religious mobilization and exclusion (Marx 2004; Devji 2013; Akturk 2015; Walzer 2015), or when the collapse of democracy or the disintegration of the polity was related to ethno-religious conflict (Sells 1996; Kopstein and Wittenberg 2010). Relatedly, some scholars discuss the links between present-day national categories and premodern religious communal categories, for example in debating whether post-Ottoman Balkan nation-states are secularized versions of religiously defined millets of the Ottoman legal administrative system (Akturk 2009a; Mylonas 2019; Evstatiev 2019).…”