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When the Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi passed through the Balkan city of Plovdiv in 1650, he pulled out all the organ stops of Ottoman panegyric to describe this ‘mighty city.’ He counted fifty-three mosques, seventy Qur’anic schools, nine madrasas, seven colleges for advanced Qur’anic recitation, eight public baths, and eleven Sufi lodges. Of the city’s neighbourhoods, thirty-three were Muslim, five were Christian, and one was Jewish. Nine caravansarays serviced the abundant trade which Muslim rule had brought to the city; in fact, it offered a picture of Islamic prosperity, a formerly insignificant town which had flowered under the aegis of the Sultan and the Islamic economic system.

Today, it is hard to make out even the outlines of this magnificent Muslim past. Attacked by Russia in 1878, amputated from Turkey and awarded to the new state of Bulgaria, most of its Muslim and Jewish population fled to what remained of the Ottoman lands. Horrific massacres claimed the lives of thousands, while many refugees who arrived in Istanbul bore signs of torture and mutilation, or carried harrowing tales of the slaughter of their families. The population dropped from 125,000 to less than 30,000. Today, the story of Plovdiv, or, as the Ottomans once called it, Filibe, evokes a shake of the head even among the most secularised Turks...........

In few countries did the dead hand of Communism fall more heavily than it did on Bulgaria. Under the thirty-five year rule of Theodor Zhivkov, parents whose children refused pork at school faced imprisonment or worse. Belief in God was considered a form of mental illness. Only Communist Party members could hope for a professional career, and membership was restricted to atheists alone. Christians, of course, faced numerous handicaps, but an enduring Islamophobia deeper than Communism ensured that it was the Muslim minority which felt the secularist yoke most heavily. During the Zhivkov years, most of the country’s remaining mosques were closed or demolished. Speaking Turkish in public incurred an automatic fine. All Muslim names were forcibly exchanged for Christian ones, while the circumcision of boys was criminalised. Over a thousand Muslim protesters died trying to resist this erasure of their identity, many of them perishing in the terrible conditions of Zhivkov’s forced labour camps.