Elbasani Arolda, Roy Olivier (ed.) The Revival of Islam in the Balkans. From Identity to Religiosity

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 267 р. — ISBN 978-1-349-57790-3The growing specter of Muslim migrants has triggered a bourgeoning research on processes of contestation, adaptation and manifestations of Islam in Europe. In contrast, the resurgence of Islam across the post-communist Balkans, the historical stronghold of Muslims in Europe, has gone largely unnoticed. If we heard about them, it was usually in the context of allegiances to the state, the rise of nationalism and violent conflicts brought to world attention by the media in the early 1990s.
The violent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia has certainly sparked some academic interest concerning the Muslim communities involved, but the ferocity of the various conflicts has contributed to constrain-ing research only to the most striking cases and particular moments in time (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997: 1). The occurrence of war and con-flict has, moreover, left the exploration of the Islamic phenomena to the mercy of nationalism and post-conflict paradigms, which have essential-ized religion in line with ethno-national divisions of the day (Henig and Bielenin-Lenczowska 2013). Consequently, mainstream research tends to analyze religious groups as a repository of clear-cut ethno-national identities, the ends of which are closely monitored by the state in the interest of imposing communal uniformity and charting well-defined criteria for inclusion and exclusion.