Islam in Romania

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Muslims in Romania (2002)
Carol I Mosque in Constanța

The Islam in Romania , with a share of 0.3% (other claims to 0.7%) in the total population numerically small, but for the Dobrogea important region since the 14th century. The Muslims in Romania are almost exclusively Hanafi Sunnis . The center of Islam in Romania is the port city of Constanța , the fifth largest city in the country.

history

Dobruja districts Tulcea and Constanța with Muslim minorities for over 700 years
The mosque in Mangalia is the oldest surviving mosque in Romania and was built in 1525

From 1061 to 1171 Wallachia formed the core empire of the Turkic Pechenegs (where a Muslim minority had come to power in 1068), then from 1171 to 1240 Wallachia and Moldavia belonged to the empire of the Turkic Cumans , of whom a minority also belonged confessed to Islam . Some historians (including Romanian) claim that Romanians did not advance into the lower parts of Great Wallachia and Moldavia until these areas were cleared by Pechenegs and Cumans. Transylvania belonged to the Hungarian Kingdom , the kings of which were partly surrounded by Pechenegic and Cumanian body guards and auxiliary troops, and the Pechenegs also settled in Transylvania.

The Cumans were followed by the Mongols or Tatars , who under Nogai Khan ruled Bulgaria on the other side of the Danube from 1285 to 1300 . The settlement of the first Muslim Nogai people in the Tulcea Province ( North Dobruja ), who also populated the Ukrainian neighboring region of Budschak , but were subjugated by the Crimean Tatars , also fell during this period. Thus, Islam gained a foothold in northern Dobruja a few decades before the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldova even emerged (1330–1360).

Tatars in Dobruja

Under Bulgarian rule, Cumans had already been settled in Dobruja at the beginning of the 13th century, and a few decades later the Byzantines banished Anatolian Muslims there. This was followed by a short Wallachian interlude from around 1390 to 1417. The spread of Islam was promoted by the settlement of Islamic Budschak-Nogai and Crimean Tatars. In the coastal town of Mangalia (in the province of Constanța south of Tulcea ), a mosque was built in 1525 , which is considered the oldest surviving mosque in Romania and still serves 800 Turkish and Tatar families in the region to practice their religion. In 1599, the Ottoman Eyâlet Silistria , which also included the Dobrudscha and the Budschak, received a Crimean Tatar governor.

After Russia conquered the Crimean Khanate (1783), the Budschak (1812) and the Danube Delta (1829) , numerous Crimean Tatars emigrated to the Dobruja and supported the Turkish sultan in the fight against Egyptians , Janissaries and rebellious Balkan Christians . Although the Ottoman Empire had regained the Danube Delta again as a result of the Crimean War in 1856, after the Ottoman defeat in 1878 and the final loss of Dobruja, 100,000 Muslims had to flee again, this time to Anatolia ( Asia Minor ). "The relative majority of the population (the Dobruja) was Muslim at that time ..." In the Dobruja, the Romanian population made up no more than 28% of the total population in 1880. While Tatars and Turks were expropriated and expelled in Romania around 1885 (according to Meyers , only 2,000 residents declared themselves Muslims in 1888), the exiled community of the Muhajir (refugees) in Turkey also grew due to the influx of a few hundred Romanian Muslims. In 1895, 21% of the inhabitants of the port city of Constanța are said to have been Turks and Tatars. During the First World War , Romania and the Ottoman Empire faced each other again, after which another 80,000 Turks and Tatars from Romania fled to Turkey in 1918.

Prince Radu cel Frumos
Prince Mihnea Turcitul
The Bucharest mosque
The Timisoara Paschaluk

Muslims in Wallachia and Moldova

The Wallachia fell from 1391 in a dependent relationship to the Sublime Porte . For example, the princes of Wallachia paid tributes to the Ottoman Sultan in 1391, 1396 and 1415 in order to buy peace. From 1462, after the fall of Vlad the Impaler , Wallachia's dependence on the Ottoman Empire finally solidified and it became a vassal state . As the first Moldovan prince, Petru Aron (reigned 1451-1457) undertook to pay the Turks a "symbolic tribute" of 2,000 gold pieces in 1456 in order to prevent any Ottoman forays into his empire. Later the annual tribute increased to 10,000 gold pieces and more. From 1512 the princes of Moldavia recognized the Ottoman suzerainty over their territory, also paid tribute and also performed military service . The Moldovan tribute rose to 65,000 gold pieces in the 18th century, plus 7,000 gold pieces of tribute to the Crimean Tatar Khanate .

With the exception of Dobruja and parts of the Banat, there are hardly any historical traces of Islamic presence in Romania. This can be attributed to the contract concluded between the Porte and the Romanian principalities vassals ( "agreements capitulations traced"). According to them, the Ottoman subjects were forbidden to settle in the principalities, to marry there, to buy land or to build mosques . Furthermore, the Hohe Pforte was theoretically not allowed to maintain troops or garrisons on Romanian territory or erect military buildings. Nevertheless, small Muslim communities have also existed in Brăila (Ibrail), Giurgiu and Turnu Măgurele for centuries . These Wallachian Danube cities were Turkish enclaves from 1417 (Brăila from 1538) to 1829 , and Islam was able to establish itself there under direct Ottoman rule. Brăila was also the temporary storage facility for the tributes paid by Wallachia, which, like the other garrison towns, made it a number of Romanian-Russian targets.

Two rulers of Wallachia even converted to Islam: Prince Radu cel Frumos (1462–1475) and ex-Prince Mihnea Turcitul (1577–1591) converted, and the Moldovan Prince Iliaș II adopted Islam in 1546.

After numerous uprisings and Austro - Russian interference in the Danube principalities , the Ottoman sultan replaced the Moldovan and Wallachian rulers with Greek fanariots from 1711/1716 after his victory over the Russian Tsar Peter , but had to defeat the principalities after the Greek uprising and a defeat against Russia in 1829 again to allow their own choice of princes and more autonomy. The European revolutions of 1848 used the Turks 1849-1851 to occupy at least Wallachia. Under Ottoman patronage , over 6,000 fled Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries converted to Islam along with a few Romanians in Bucharest in 1849 .

After the Romanian conquest of Dobruja, despite the capitulations in 1878, Muslims also received equal constitutional rights. In the Parc Carol (Karlspark) in Bucharest , inaugurated on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of King Carol I's accession to the throne , a monument in the shape of a mosque was erected in 1906 - as a symbol of reconciliation after the war of 1877/1878.

In 2015, around 10,000 Muslims lived in Bucharest, many of whom immigrated as business people from the Middle East and Turkey after the Romanian Revolution in 1989 or were stranded in Romania as refugees.

Turks in the Banat and Crișana

In addition to the Dobrudscha and the garrison towns on the Danube, the Banat and parts of the Kreisch area were also under direct Ottoman rule. After the victory over Hungary in the first battle of Mohács (1526) , Transylvania became an Ottoman vassal in 1541 . Arad was conquered in 1551 and Temesvár on July 20, 1552 , and Oradea in 1661 . About 8,000 Muslims were settled in place of the Hungarians who fled .

In the second half of the 17th century, almost 23% of today's Romania was under direct Turkish-Muslim rule for almost four decades. (For more than a century and a half, Turkish Muslims ruled at least 15%, for over four centuries at least 9% of today's Romanian territory.)

  • Districts of Timiș and Caraș, 1551-1718 under Turkish-Islamic rule

  • Arad district,
    under Turkish-Islamic rule 1551–1699

  • Bihor district (Oradea), 1661–1699 under Turkish-Islamic rule

After the defeat of the Turks before Vienna (1683) and the victory of the Austrians in the second battle at Mohács (1687) , Hungary, Oradea and Arad were lost again in 1688 and 1699, Temesvár and the Banat (the Timiș and Caraș- Severin ) remained Ottoman until 1718. After that , all Turks who previously lived there emigrated to the rest of the Ottoman Empire or were expelled there (only on the Romanian Danube island of Ada Kaleh until 1968 there was a forgotten Turkish village), today there are no Muslims living in this region anymore.

present

Shop on the sunken Danube island Ada Kaleh , late 19th century
Distribution of the Tatars (yellow) and Turks in North Dobruja around 1903

One hundred years after the end of Ottoman rule (1878), 23,000 Tatars still lived in the Romanian Dobruja (1977). During the communist rule and especially under Ceaușescu , sacred buildings were destroyed. In the course of the democratization of Romania , civil liberties were reintroduced. According to the 2002 census, Romania has 32,000 Turks and 24,000 Tatars, who make up over 5% of the population in northern Dobruja (both counties).

In the northern district of Tulcea (former centers Babadag and Isaccea, where today 12% of all Romanian Turks and Tatars live) they make up only 2.4% of the region's population - compared to 21% around 1878. In the southern district of Constanța (between Medgidia and Mangalia , where 85% of all Turks and Tatars live), it is still over 6.6% today compared to almost 60% in 1878. In the 19th century there were Circassian and Arab settlements in Dobruja .

In northern Dobruja (Tulcea district) the proportion of Turks and Tatars fell as follows:

Survey year Turks Tatars
1880 18,624 (13%) 29,476 (21%)
1899 12,146 (4%) 28,670 (11%)
1913 20,092 (5.3%) 21,350 (5.6%)
1930 21,748 (5%) 15,546 (3.6%)
1956 11,994 (2%) 20,239 (3.4%)
1966 16,209 (2.3%) 21,939 (3.1%)
1977 21,666 (2.5%) 22,875 (2.65%)
1992 27,685 (2.7%) 24,185 (2.4%)
2002 27,643 (2.85%) 23,404 (2.4%)
2011 22,500 (2.5%) 19,720 (2.2%)

In addition to at least 56,000 Tatars and Turks (who are assumed to be all Muslims), around 12,000 other Muslims live in Romania : Albanians (one third of Romania's Albanians are Muslims), Muslim Roma (approx. 1% of Roma in Romania , all in the Dobruja). In the last few decades there have also been immigrants from the Arab states (especially from Syria , Iraq , Palestine , Jordan and Lebanon ) as well as from Turkey and smaller groups of immigrants from Iran and Pakistan . The imams are generally trained in Turkey.

Since 1990, 18 minority parties have been guaranteed a seat in the Romanian Senate (upper house) and in the people's assembly (lower house). B. for the Democratic Union of the Turkish-Muslim Tatars of Romania (Uniunea Democrată a Tătarilor Turco-Musulmani din România), the Turkish Democratic Union of Romania (Uniunea Democrată Turcă din România) and the League of Albanians of Romania (Liga Albanezilor din România). A few other Muslims sit in parliament and on city councils as members of Romania's major popular parties. The Islamic-Cultural League of Romania (Liga Islamică și Culturală din România) represents their purely cultural and traditional interests . The current Mufti of Romania is the Tatar Iusuf Murat.

Islamic Studies in Romania

The centuries-long contacts with Islam have led to the emergence of a long tradition of Islamic and oriental research in Romania. Starting with the Moldovan Prince Dimitrie Cantemir , who wrote treatises on the religion, history and music of the Turks at the beginning of the 18th century , through the historian Nicolae Iorga , who wrote a history of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, to the Religious scholars Mircea Eliade , Andrei Pleșu u. v. a. m. For the first time 1940-1944 there was an Orient Institute at the University of Iași, since 1957 an Arabic Studies department at the University of Bucharest. Since 2009 there is also an Institute for Turkish and Central Asian Studies at the University of Cluj.

See also

literature

  • Bibliographical Institute: Pocket Dictionary Romania. Leipzig 1985.
  • Lucian Boia: History and Myth - About the Present of the Past in Romanian Society. Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2003.
  • Thede Kahl: The Muslim Community of Romania. The path of an elite to a marginalized minority. In: Europa Regional 3–4 / 2005, Leipzig, pp. 94–101.
  • Günter Kettermann: Atlas on the history of Islam. Darmstadt 2001.
  • HT Norris: Islam in the Balkans - Religion and Society Between Europe and the Arab World. Charleston 1993.
  • HT Norris: Religious Quest and National Identity in the Balkans (Studies in Russian & Eastern European History). London 2001.
  • Josef Sallanz (ed.): The Dobrudscha. Ethnic minorities, cultural landscape, transformation; Results of a field course at the Institute for Geography at the University of Potsdam in south-east Romania. (= Practice cultural and social geography; 35). 2., through Edition, ISBN 3-937786-76-7 ( full text (contains link to PDF with 20.1 MB) ), Potsdam 2005.
  • Josef Sallanz: Change in the meaning of ethnicity under the influence of globalization. The Romanian Dobruja as an example. (= Potsdam Geographical Research; 26). Potsdam 2007.
  • Detlev Wahl: Lexicon of the peoples of Europe and the Caucasus. Rostock 1999.
  • Jürgen Henkel (ed.) Half moon over the Dobruja - Islam in Romania . Schiller Verlag Hermannstadt, ISBN 978-3-944529-58-5

Web links

Commons : Mosques in Romania  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frisch / Hengelhaupt / Hohm: Pocket Atlas European Union, page 203. Gotha 2007.
  2. ↑ Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. V: 1010b.
  3. ↑ Lucian Boia : History and Myth, pp. 140f.
  4. ↑ Primarily Pechenegen were settled in the south and west, Kumans in the center and north of Hungary .
  5. ↑ Lucia Boia: History and Myth, p. 167.
  6. ↑ Lucian Boia: History and Myth , p. 211.
  7. ↑ Lucia Boia: History and Myth , p. 211.
  8. ↑ Otto von Dungern: Romania , p. 26
  9. ^ Daniel Ursprung: Wallachia as a historical region - interface of European interdependencies on the periphery. In: Romania: Space and Population. History and images of history. Culture. Society and politics today. Economy. Law and Constitution , p. 42
  10. ↑ From the Ottoman point of view put these capitulations - Turkish : " ahdnâme " - a kind of Sultan oktroyierter decrees constitute They were probably the result of tough negotiations in the context of the respective political-military situation and changing alliances often defaulting prince.. The Sultan therefore reserved the right to invade the Danube principalities in an emergency and to occupy them temporarily (for the last time in 1854) or to cede Romanian territories without consulting the princes ( Little Wallachia , Bukovina , Bessarabia ), and in isolated cases Muslims allowed themselves in the longer term Romanian cities.
  11. ↑ This was due to the fact that the Romanian principalities were classified by the Ottomans as Dâr-al'ahd ( House of Peace ) because of their status as contracting parties to the ahdnâme . According to Islamic law , the world is divided into three categories: Muslim countries ( Dâr al-Islâm - House of Islam ), countries with which treaties exist ( Dâr-al'ahd - House of Peace ) and countries with which there are no treaties ( Dâr al-Harb - House of War ).
  12. ^ Parcul Carol ( Memento of July 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ^ The small mosque in Parcul Carol ( Memento from August 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). After the Second World War, the monument was moved to the Militari district of Bucharest.
  14. ↑ As early as 1916–1918, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire stood together again against Romania, Russia , Serbia and Greece in the First World War . After the defeat and fall of the empire , however , the successor to Turkey concluded another Balkan Pact ( Balkan Entente ) with Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia against Bulgaria in 1934 .
  15. ^ Controversial mosque construction in Bucharest. It is hunted like Pegida. In: taz of July 22, 2015
  16. ↑ Banat . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 2, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 308.
  17. ↑ The Constanța and Tulcea districts, in fact the entire Brăila district, about the Banat districts of Timiş and Caraş and the Crişana districts of Arad and Bihor, just under the southern half of the Giurgiu district and the city of Turnu - together about 54,600 km² of 238,390 km².
  18. ↑ the districts of Timiș, Caraș, Tulcea, Constanța and Brăila as well as Giurgiu and Turnu, together about 37,500 km².
  19. ↑ the districts of Tulcea, Constanța and Brăila as well as Giurgiu and Turnu, together almost 23,000 km².
  20. ↑ Between 1913 and 1940 the southern Dobrudscha and the 40,000 Turks living in Silistra (today 50,000) also belonged to Romania. Knaur's World Atlas for 1935 found a Muslim population in Romania of 1.0%. The Romanian queen had a mosque built in Balchik .
  21. ↑ a b G. Danescu, Dobrogea (La Dobroudja). Étude de Géographie physique et ethnographique .
  22. ↑ Nicolae Iorga. La population de la Dobrogea. D'apres le recensement du 1913.
  23. ↑ Sabin Mănuilă. The population of the Dobroudja. Institute Central de Statistique. Bucharest
  24. ↑ a b c d Populaţia după etnie la recensămintele din perioada 1930–2002 (PDF; 1 MB).
  25. ^ DATE "de la lume adunate si-napoi la lume DATE" ( Memento of February 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
  26. ^ Etnic compostion of Romania 2011. In: pop-stat.mashke.org
  27. ↑ Detlev Wahl gives the number of Turks at 150,000, Turkish nationalists estimate a maximum of 170,000. The pocket atlas European Union also mentions a total of over 150,000 Muslims in Romania.