Magdalena Lubanska's Muslims and Christians in the Bulgarian Rhodopes is a careful, detailed study of mixed communities in southwestern Bulgaria. This is the kind of nuanced scholarship that is of extreme value to researchers in the immediate field of east European studies, and specifically those who are interested in the study of sectarian relations in Bulgaria. The author makes an analytic distinction between “deep” and “shallow” syncretism to elucidate the motivations and worldviews of different religious communities who nevertheless visit the same holy sites and the same healers. Lubanska argues that her observations of lived religious practices among Muslims and Christians in the Western Rhodope communities of Ribnovo, Satovcha, and Garmen provide evidence for a “shallow” syncretism, militating against the creation of a Muslim-Christian hybrid religiosity.
In the specific case of the Western Rhodope Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), Lubanska asserts that shallow syncretism “is a cultural strategy calculated to maintain an anti-syncretic attitude by protecting religious boundaries from infiltration” (301). Muslim religious elites in these communities are loath to be called “crypto-Christians,” and actively try to discredit Christian beliefs, even if lay Muslims visit Christian healers. And because of the conflation of Bulgarian ethnic identity with Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity, these Pomaks also reject their Bulgarian ethnicity. The author spends considerable time discussing the tensions between what she calls “Adat Islam” and “Salafi Islam.” The former represents the traditional, more syncretic forms of the religion traditionally practiced in the Rhodopes while the latter represents the influx of new, supposedly purer religious practices from the Arabian Gulf following the collapse of communism in Bulgarian in 1989.
The book is organized into eight substantive chapters with an introduction and conclusion. The empirical evidence presented in the chapters often takes the form of long verbatim quotes or excerpts of conversations with the author's informants. Lubanska claims that the book is “a modified version” (1) of her doctoral dissertation, which had already been published in Polish in 2012. The translation of this dissertation was funded by a special Polish government program to support Polish humanities, and the book is available for free in electronic form from the De Gruyter website. While I certainly applaud the translation of east European scholarship into English, this book would have benefited from a more fastidious language editor. Some of the sentences are unwieldy and tedious to read, such as this one: “Otherwise they feel uncomfortable in alien surroundings when wearing the traditional costume, which makes them feel uncomfortable” (9). The book also feels like a dissertation, and there has been little attempt to mitigate the pedantic tone of the scholarship. This may be the fault of the translator rather than the author, but it does make the book a bit of a chore to read for the native English speaker.
Despite these small qualms, the book makes a valuable contribution to the field of religious studies by turning attention to the practices of Europe's autochthonous Muslim population and their long-standing relations with Christian communities. As such the book will be of interest to specialists in anthropology, religious studies, and Eurasian Studies. Historians of Bulgaria and the Balkans might also find much useful material in this volume.
