Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 29, No.

4, December 2009

Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria: Protected Minority

or National Citizens?

ANNA M. MIRKOVA

Abstract
The paper analyzes citizenship formation in Bulgaria between the two world wars.
The article approaches this process by studying the tension between national
minority and citizenship rights in regard to Bulgarias Muslim minority. In the
interwar period this tension was framed by the emergent regime of minority protec-
tion following the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and the crisis of liberal democratic
provisions for individual citizenship rights. I illustrate this tension by studying the
conflict between Kemalists and Old Turks over leadership of the Muslim minority in
Bulgaria. The conflict exposes how discourses of protection enabled a mode of
national minority governance, which defined Muslims rights in terms of reified
religion and culture. This kind of definition, I argue, fostered the disempowerment
of Muslims in the national public. On the other hand, the discontent with liberal
democracy in interwar Bulgaria discloses the apprehension of citizenship among
state authorities, Old Turks, and Kemalists as a practice of mediation; that is,
acquiring the authority to mediate a particular conception of collectivity, which
would be sustained by formal exercise of civil and political rights.

Introduction
How could post-World War I European nation-states uphold simultaneously the liberal
democratic framework resting on individual citizenship rights and protect collective
minority ones? This was a central question for post-World War I European governments.
The question was especially poignant in nation-states newly created after the fall of the
Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Obliged by the Paris Peace Conference to guarantee
democratic individual rights for all citizens, including members of the various ethnic
and religious minorities, the governments of post-imperial nation-states as well as
states that did not belong to the Great Powers, concluded bilateral treaties promising
the protection of minority populations. In this article I argue that minority protection
in effect disabled Muslims as citizens of the Bulgarian nation-state and unwittingly
supported undemocratic rule in the interwar years.
Questions of minority protection were not a completely new issue in the aftermath of
World War I. Their precursor was the Treaty of Berlin (1878). Composed by the Great
Powers, the treaty ended the war between the Ottoman and Russian empires and
created the Principality of Bulgaria, modified the borders of Serbia, and awarded com-
plete independence to Romania. The Great Powers demanded that these Balkan polities
would accept the standards of civilizationi.e. would adopt nineteenth century liberal
principles promoting civil and political rights for both the hegemonic nationality and
other ethnic and religious groups.1 To fulfill this demand, Bulgaria committed to the pro-
tection of the life, property, and religious freedom of the Ottoman Muslim population

ISSN 1360-2004 print/ISSN 1469-9591 online/09/040469-14 # 2009 Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs
DOI: 10.1080/13602000903411374
470 Anna M. Mirkova

that found itself in Bulgarian national territory. Governments worked out the particulars
of Muslim protection via special regulations and through diplomatic agreements with the
Ottoman and subsequently Turkish governments. Bulgarian governments also tended to
view Muslim protection in reciprocal terms, i.e. extracting commitments to protection of
Bulgarians in the Ottoman and Turkish territories.2 As a result Muslims in Bulgaria
became as important as territory to the elaboration of competing sovereignties.3
Safeguarding minority rights had thus been a thorny issue since the foundation of the
Bulgarian state. On one hand the protection of Muslims as a group harbored the potential
of secession, on the other hand the guarantee of individual civil and political rights held the
promise of political mobilization whereby Muslims could organize and demand political
autonomy. In short, the dilemmas of minority governance had thus already begun before
the post-World War I peace conference imposed the so-called minority treaties.
Nonetheless, the post-World War I peace conference circumscribed a different inter-
national environment. The signatory Great Powers decided to link minority protection
to the upholding of democratic principles of rule and individual rights thereby sharpen-
ing the already inherent tension between safeguarding individual and collective rights.4
For Bulgaria this linkage was important for a couple of reasons. First, the post-war
Bulgarian government endorsed in 1919 a Statute for the Religious Organization and
Rule of Muslims in the Bulgarian Kingdom, whose provisions were by far the most
democratic in comparison with previous regulations (which had always been envisioned
as temporary).5 The Statute detailed how Muslims would rule themselves democrati-
cally as a minority, though firstly acknowledging their obligations as Bulgarian citizens.
In practice the application of the Statute often prompted trampling of individual rights
and erosion of democracy thereby exposing the corporatist vision of citizenship that pre-
vailed in interwar Bulgaria. Secondly, the establishment of the Turkish Republic (1923),
as a potent, modern, secular nation-state renouncing the image of the Ottoman Empire
as the sick man of Europe, gave unexpected boost to those Muslims in Bulgaria, who
had been discontented with the particular way they had been governed as a minority.
These two changes, coupled with a string of nationalistic authoritarian governments,
provoked Muslims to contest and exercise citizenship rights, however not in public,
but only in strictly circumscribed separate administrative units, named Muslim Con-
fessional Municipalities (MCM). As will become apparent in the article, the national
(Bulgaria)/communal (MCM) division was difficult to sustain in practice for two
reasons: (1) Turkish nationalists in Bulgaria undermined it in their efforts to modernize
and nationalize Muslims and (2) authoritarian governments intervened in MCMs and
crushed internal democratic provisions whenever governments disregarded basic citizen-
ship rights for all Bulgarians. Studying the problems raised by this national-communal
division may also illuminate a key problem for national citizenship formation in post-
World War I Europe: the combination of upholding individual civil and political rights
and deploying minority protection encouraged corporatist citizenship.
I address the question of corporatist citizenship by analyzing the confrontations
between two social groups claiming the leadership and representation of Turkish-
speaking Muslims in the Kingdom of Bulgaria6the so-called Old Turks (term
coined by Bulgarian administrators) and Kemalists/Turanists.7 These conflicts routinely
involved the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs (MFCA), to which
all Muslims in the state were subordinated administratively. The conflicts unfolded in the
Muslim Confessional Municipalities. MCMs were officially set up after the promulgation
of the 1919 Statute. Yet, MCMs built on a type of administrative arrangement, which had
been developing since the Treaty of Berlin (1878). The first formal set of regulations on
 Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria 471

Bulgarias Muslims was promulgated by the liberal government of Dragan Tsankov in

1880.8 Most likely building on the Ottoman millet framework,9 the regulations also
extended to Orthodox Christians and Jews. But by the time the second set of regulations
concerning Muslims appeared in 1895, Bulgarian governments had already disaggre-
gated the governance of Muslims from that of Orthodox Christians and Jews.
I use citizenship in a couple of interrelated ways. My departure point is the liberal
conception of citizenship (which was upheld at least in theory during the interwar
period) as a body of individual rights and duties held equally by all legal members of
the nation-state.10 This is not sufficient, however, to enable one to reach over to
peoples subjective sense of rights or how they go about trying to realize claims for
rights;11 nor is it adequate to understand how in practice the state enabled or constrained
particular and contingent conceptualizations of citizenship. In the case of Bulgaria, the
Constitution (called the Turnovo Constitution), which was promulgated in 1879,
adapted (via the model of the Serbian constitution) the liberal framework of the
Belgian constitution thereby contouring Bulgarian citizenship as modern and liberal.12
Meanwhile international treaties, like the Treaty of Berlin and the Neuilly Peace
Treaty after World War I mandated minority protection and advanced the upholding
of collective rights along with individual ones. Muslim Bulgarian citizens were caught
in a conflicted situation as they were inscribed in two collectivities. The 1919 Statute
obliged Muslims to be members of Muslim Confessional Municipalities (MCM)
organizations that purportedly enabled Muslims to practice religion, customs, and
culture. The Turnovo Constitution had awarded to Muslims individual civil and political
rights while subordinating Muslims to Orthodox Christianity, Bulgarian language and
culture, which were universalized as the basis of liberal citizenship for the entire Bulgar-
ian nation. MCMs became, then, the sites of negotiating Muslim political belonging.
Moreover, these organizations mediated in effect between Muslims and the state and
even among Muslims themselves.

Minority Regulations and Representation

The language of protection in the post-World War I minority treaties obfuscated the
tension between democratic provisions for a collectives rights and democratic provisions
for individual rights.13 When the Bulgarian jurist Georgi P. Genov wrote about the legal
status of Bulgarias minorities a decade after the Paris Peace Conference, he emphasized
that the conception of protection was centered on the individual, not on the group. That
is, rights were extended to individual members of a minority, not to the minority in any
collective sense.14 Genov regretted that exceptions were nevertheless made in some cases
in Europe, granting, for instance, local administrative autonomy to ethnic minorities.15
Despite Genovs insistence, protection was not that straightforward, including in
Bulgaria where its diplomatic agreements with the Ottoman Empire in 1909 and
1913, and subsequently with Turkey in 1925 contained the same ambiguous under-
standing of protection.
The ambiguity, as far as Bulgarias Muslims were concerned, was already perceptible
in the Berlin Treaty and in those first sets of regulations from 1880 and 1895,16 when the
Ottoman Empire was still the suzerain. These regulations re-inscribed the Ottoman
Islamic religious institutions and hierarchy in the emergent nation-state bureaucracy
thereby subordinating the Muslim population as a putatively homogenous group to
the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs. This was an important step in claiming
national sovereignty. At the same time the Turnovo Constitution granted religious
472 Anna M. Mirkova

freedom, equality before the law, and political participation regardless of a subjects
ethnic and religious belonging. That is to say, the link between citizen and state was
classically liberalon individual (not group) basis. Simultaneously, Bulgarian govern-
ments quite likely drew on the Ottoman millet tradition, which governed Orthodox
Christians as a community partly by investing church functionaries with administrative
duties and broader responsibilities for a congregation.17 For example, the 1880 and 1895
regulations made district muftis responsible for a Muslim congregation, the maintenance
of mosques, and the supervision of waqfs.18 The 1895 regulations established community
councils which supervised all mosques, medreses, and other Muslim pious and charitable
foundations19 in each town or village; muftis (or their representatives) presided over the
councils while the Chief Mufti in the capital of Sofia, appointed by the Bulgarian Prince,
served as the religious leader of all Muslims.20 Muftis and community councils were
ostensibly elected according to liberal democratic principles: Muslims having the right
to vote according to the Bulgarian law elected both muftis and councils, though all
had to be confirmed by the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs as well as by
the Bulgarian Prince.21 At the same time, following the Ottoman recognition of full
Bulgarian independence in 1909, the Bulgarian nation-state recognized the authority
of the Sheykh-ul Islam in Istanbul to invest muftis with certain religious duties.22 The
1919 Statute empowered the Muslim Confessional Councils (MCC) that presided
over MCMs to act as the representative of the Muslim population from an administrative
district in every respect.23
This role of representation in every respect, which the Statute bestowed on MCCs and
by extension to the administrative-religious structure framed by Bulgarian governments,
had been evolving since the end of the nineteenth century as the previous paragraph
suggests. At the core of this understanding of representation was a notion of collectivity
centered on religious affiliation. Yet, already in the 1890s Young Turk activists in
Bulgaria had begun challenging the centrality of this structure to the articulation of
Muslim collective identification.24 Without rejecting Islam altogether, the Young
Turks criticized the vestiges of the Muslim Ottoman elite for preserving a putative
Ottoman Islamic culture and heritage, which kept Turkish-speaking Muslims at a
lower level of development with respect to Bulgarian Christians.25 Crucial to the mobil-
ization work of the Young Turk supporters, however, were the tropes of progress and
Turkish nation, for which the Young Turks in Bulgaria invited the wrath of both
Abdulhamid IIs Ottoman and Bulgarian state authorities. The Ottoman and Bulgarian
governments cooperated in suppressing Young Turk mobilization.26 Between the two
world wars, however, the Young Turk agenda of modernization and national mobiliz-
ation received unexpected boostthe establishment of the Turkish Republic.27 The
elaboration of modernity in the official Kemalist ideology of the Turkish Republic
emphasized thorough secularization. Hence a notion of collectivity defying the religious,
Ottoman basis of minority became prominent in Bulgaria; this notion stressed the
secular, modernist, future-oriented (rather than to the Ottoman past) Turkish nation.
How should MCMs be managed and who should be a member of an MCC became
tumultuous questions. At stake was the power to represent Turkish Muslims and to
define the relationship between national minority and national citizenship.
The conceptualization of Turkish-speaking Muslims as a Bulgarian national minority
had been grounded in religious belonging. This conceptualization stood at the center of
the conflict among Old Turks, Kemalists, and the state. In all regulations beginning with
that of 1880 through the 1919 Statute, the principle of differentiation between majority
and minority population was primarily religious affiliation. Yet, the nineteenth century
 Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria 473

Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat) coupled with the westernization of the Ottoman Empire,
had initiated a process of reconsidering the role of Islam for defining Ottoman subject-
hood, including for Muslims.28 Resulting in the polarization of the empires Muslim
population along tensions of secularity vs. religiosity and confessional vs. national
belonging, this period of reforms set the basis for the politicization of Islam in Muslim
minorities all over Southeastern Europe. In the early Turkish Republic the Kemalist
regime sought to radically resolve these imperial tensions (though continued them) via
a massive project of political and social secularization in which those Ottoman Islamic
religious institutions that were allowed to keep functioning became subordinate to and
re-inscribed in the republican bureaucracy.29 The tension was carried over to another
of the empires successors: the Bulgarian nation-state (though in different shape and
with different results).

The Challenge of Modernizers

Almost from the beginning of Bulgarias existence, there were conflicts between Muslim
supporters and opponents of the Young Turks modernization project.30 Its nationalistic
leanings frightened the Bulgarian state authorities. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and
the police monitored the activities of the Young Turks in Bulgaria and periodically closed
down their newspapers.31 This suspicion toward modernizing sectors among the Muslim
population heightened after the establishment of Turkey, when fears of Kemalist irre-
dentism moved state authorities to divide Muslim Turkish citizens into loyal Old
Turks and disloyal or potentially disloyal Young TurkscumKemalists.32 The distinc-
tion was being made, as will become apparent below, with the tacit assumption that
relation to Islam was the main axis of differentiation. Those who claimed to preserve
the Ottoman Islamic culture (under the auspices of the Bulgarian state) were deemed
to be less threatening to national sovereignty than those who worked to secularize and
nationalize Muslim identity by following the example of Turkey. In the confrontation
between Kemalist supporters and their opponents, however, Islam was made socially
and politically operative in pairs with other concepts, most prominently progress, back-
wardness, religious rights, constitutional and civil rights, and nation. These concepts had
wider significance for Bulgarian society in the interwar years. Then politics and culture
were marked by disenchantment with modernization and democracy, which prompted
searches for Bulgarian national authenticity. They, unlike the generally future-oriented
Kemalist national vision,33 tried to capture the uncontaminated essence of the Bulgar-
ian nation by turning to pre-modern forms of sociability.34
Turkish-speaking Kemalists in Bulgaria worked for national progress by advocating
uplifting the life of the Turk and fighting against ignorance and retrogradeness.35
For them the symbols of ignorance became the office of the Chief Mufti and the
entire religious-administrative hierarchy that staffed MCMs and MCCs and was obedi-
ent to the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs. The rhetoric centered on
becoming modern by adapting political, economic, and cultural models from civilized
Europe had existed at least since the 1890s.36 Much of that rhetoric had also been
directed against the remaining Ottoman elite, which the Young Turks accused of
holding on to tradition thereby perpetuating both their status and a mode of life
that reduced Muslims in Bulgaria to backwardness.37 The collaboration between the
Ottoman and Bulgarian states in curbing Young Turk activism became problematical
after the Young Turk coup in 1908 and even more so after the establishment of repub-
lican Turkey. The ideology of its ruling elite corresponded with that of the Muslim
474 Anna M. Mirkova

modernizing sectors of Bulgarian society. Organizations in Bulgaria which sympathized

with Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) had already been founded after the Balkan Wars of 1912
1913; in 1924 they coalesced into an organization called Turan.38 Toward the end of
1925 Kemalist groups began traveling from Turkey to Bulgaria for reconnaissance and
mobilization purposes.39 Furthermore a secret committee founded in the Turkish
border town of Edirne set as its long-term goal the acquisition of the bordering
Rhodope region.40
Meanwhile the Office of the Chief Mufti in Sofia was hostile to all Kemalist activi-
ties.41 The Chief Mufti accused in 1931 the board of the Turkish school in the city of
Kurdzhali42 of being an instrument of the Turkish government.43 This exactly was
the opinion of the Bulgarian governments as well. As will become apparent, Bulgarian
authorities considered the modernization discourse of Kemalist activists synonymous
with disloyalty, and, more extremely, with the rejection of Bulgarian national sovereignty.
Yet we would miss much about the formation of political belonging among Muslims in
the interwar period if we look at Turan and its supporters only through the prism of
loyalty/disloyalty to national sovereignty. The troublesome question that preoccupied
the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs, Kemalists, and the Islamic religious
establishment was what Bulgarian citizenship entailed for Muslims. This question
took shape in debates in the Muslim Confessional Municipalities particularly over
issues concerning education: curricula, the composition of school boards, the activities
of non-formal institutions and associations dealing with education, and the election of
official functionaries in various administrative posts in the MCMs. Kemalist supporters
and opponents clashed mainly over two educational concerns: (1) the mandatory
replacement in Republican Turkey of the Arabic alphabet with Latin script and
(2) the presence of religious instruction and western curricula.
In 1931 eight men from the district of Kurdzhali sent a worried telegram to the
Bulgarian Ministry of Education, to the Chief Mufti in Sofia, and to parliament repre-
sentatives from their region. The telegram censured the board of the Turkish school in
Kurdzhali for forbidding the Arabic script, the study of the Holy Quran and theology,
and for mixing boys and girls in the upper classes.44 The Chief Mufti concluded that
the board of the school was atheist and thus from religious point of view was
subject to discharge.45 Within few days the Chief Mufti informed the Ministry of Edu-
cation that the board would be dismissed and a temporary one would be formed until
proper elections for the school board could be held. The Chief Mufti proposed three
names and requested the Ministrys approval.46 In the same year people from two villages
in the southeastern Haskovo district and another village in the northeastern district of
Provadia protested against efforts (presumably of Kemalists) at introducing the Latin
alphabet. They demanded that the rights of the villages Muslim residents be
protected.47 The men from the Kurdzhali district, though, had been more explicit in
their indignation: they characterized the introduction of the Latin script as breach of
their religious and constitutional rights that are available to every Bulgarian citizen.48
Few years earlier a group of Turkish-speaking Muslim men in the northwestern city of
Vidin had formed around the reading room Shefkat and favored the study of European
natural and social sciences at the expense of religious instruction. They justified their
deeds by appealing to their constitutional rights, buttressed by the rule of law which
ostensibly characterized the Bulgarian state.49 In Vidin, conflicts between Kemalist sup-
porters and opponents sometimes became violent; a police report claimed that Kemalists
beat up and intimidated opponents.50 A very different understanding of citizenship was
promoted by the state administration. M. V. Marinov (chief of the Lom Township police)
 Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria 475

wrote in a report in 1939 that the primary goal of the education of Muslims had to be the
creation of obedient and loyal citizens, suffused with feeling of fidelity and attachment
to our state.51 He also noted that in the city of Vidin, loyal Muslims group and unite
themselves around the Muslim Confessional Municipality.52 The implication was clear:
MCMs produced Muslims loyal to Bulgaria as long as they were monitored closely in
cooperation with the Chief Mufti.

Competing Citizenship Conceptions

To state the obvious perhaps, we encounter here different conceptions of citizenship in
post-Ottoman Bulgaria, which expose a predominant tension between individual citizen-
ship rights and collective minority rights. Kemalist supporters and opponents struggled
over the affiliation of the Muslim Turkish population in Bulgaria by trying to mobilize
support around ideological platforms that viewed Muslim Turks, above all, as a cohesive
national community whose rights had to be protected. It seems that for the Chief Mufti
and for those who complained against the Kurdzhali school board, respect for the reli-
gious beliefs and traditions of the Muslim population53 formed the core of citizenship
rights for Muslims. The member of the MCM-Yambol, Reshad Zekirov, stressed to the
Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs and to the mayor of his town his right to
freedom of association in terms of religious expression. He claimed that pressure by
Turanist members prevented him from forming an association for the protection of
religion.54 Zekirov significantly tied in his letter religious practice with civic responsibil-
ity, understood as the financial, administrative and moral care for the MCM and good
governance of the MCC.55 To this end, the former treasurer of the MCM-Yambol
Iusein Iuseinov insisted to the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs that in
order to manage wisely the income from the waqf properties, on which also hinged the
maintenance of the schools in MCMs, there was need for intelligent people for the
religious, Turkish municipality of Yambol, not Turanists and other illiterate
people.56 The pleas of these former Yambol MCM functionaries are not as straightfor-
ward as they may appear. Zekirov wrote his letter a couple of months after a coup detat
that took place in Bulgaria on May 19, 1934; the coup was performed by the right-wing
nationalistic organization Zveno supported by the Bulgarian army. Within a year,
though, King Boris III ousted Zveno and effectively established monarchical author-
itarian regime well into World War II. The new political regime banned Turan and a host
of other Turkish nationalist organizations.57 In short, Zekirovs letter quite likely appeals
to the decision of the new government to support the establishment of associations for
the protection of the Islamic religion in Bulgaria at the expense of Kemalist and other
nationalist organizations.58 Religion, or rather this discourse of protecting religion,
framed Muslim Turks in Bulgaria above all as the keepers of their Ottoman past, as
political subjects residing in the separate communal, not in the national public space.
In the national public space Turkish Muslims were expected to profess loyalty to the
state. Performance of loyalty also entailed MCMs and MCCs which opposed Kemalist
mobilization. The public politicization of Muslims was not legitimate unless conducted
by the officially recognized Bulgarian parties. Yet after the 1934 coup, which forbade all
parties, even that kind of formally democratic political mobilization became impossible.
Precisely because there was no legitimacy for Muslim politicization in the national public
space, the communal sphere delineated by MCMs and MCCs proved to be the only site
where Kemalist activists could politicize and nationalize Muslims. In order to legitimize
their work as well as to avoid persecution, Kemalist activists strove to make communal
476 Anna M. Mirkova

affairs public. They thus defended themselves as wishing to govern [MCMs] for the
good of our co-nationals and to serve the Bulgarian state.59 The exhibition of loyalty
to the state, however, was central in the relations between state authorities and
MCMs even before 1934. For instance, during the brief respite between two right-
wing authoritarian regimes (1923 1931 and 1934 1939), the Ministry of the Interior
in the coalition government of the centrist National Block (1931 1934) charged the
State Press Service to monitor the periodicals of all national minorities.60 Accordingly
individual police files that were made for newspapers and journals published in
Turkish classified them as Young Turk/Kemalist, Old Turk, or independent.61 Newspa-
pers that published materials mobilizing Turkish national identification were scrutinized
and sometimes sanctioned. The Ministry of Interior even considered charging the Vidin-
based Turkish newspaper Istikbal with anti-state activities for an article published on
December 20, 1933 which called on Turkish youths in Bulgaria to unite, look to the
future, and become one nation.62 In other words, the state authorities viewed associa-
tional life and political mobilization outside the religious-administrative framework of
the MCMs as threats to national sovereignty.
Yet not all talk of nation or progress indexed challenge to national sovereignty (as was
the case with the Kemalists). The first national congress of the Turkish minority in
Bulgaria held in the Fall of 1929 in Sofia took place undisturbed. The newspaper
Rehber (characterized by the Interior Ministry as exhibiting nationalistic spirit63) pub-
lished information about the congress and called on all Turks who live in Bulgaria64
to unite and work together to resolve their problems. Participants in the congress included
serving and former parliament members, publishers, journalists, as well as regional
prominent figures. Judging by the congress resolutions, central on the agenda was
Muslim education, though not issues of Arabic vs. Latin script or the presence of religious
instruction.65 Insufficient funds to maintain schools seemed to remain as the main
problem, even though the government of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union
(19201923) had substantially increased state funds.66 The congress turned to the
Chief Mufti for procuring funds from waqfs so as to establish a Turkish pedagogical insti-
tute to train teachers for Turkish primary schools. The protocols of the congress show that
the participants condemned the burdensome reparations imposed on Bulgaria by the
Neuilly Peace Treaty and testified their fidelity and loyalty to the state. In other
words, the collective identityas a national minority, not as a nation in parity, mobilized
at the Congress was within the acceptable framework charted by the 1919 Statute and exe-
cuted by the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs and other administrative units.
Meanwhile the Kurdzhali school board, whose members, according to the Chief
Mufti, admired the reforms in republican Turkey, presented themselves as educators
who inspired respect for learning and for the Bulgarian state. The board depicted its
critics as urging the population to hate the school which not only had a teacher for
the study of the Holy Quran but whose curriculum had also been approved by the Min-
istry of Education.67 The board even intimated that the origin of all conflict had been the
incompetence and perhaps even the envy of the former district vice-mufti. Be that as it
may, the language of the board does not stress the importance of religious instruction
for sustaining the Muslim population nearly as much as the Chief Mufti. Instead, the
board highlighted its organization of informal meetings with parents, themed family
and school upbringing. 68 The meetings were intended to stimulate parents love for
the school thereby prompting them to raise their children as the state requires.69
This rhetoric of explaining the actions of Kemalists as serving the public good
dates back to the mid-1920s when the board of the reading room Shefkat in Vidin
 Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria 477

(which was part of the waqf brothers Halil and Ibrahim Ahmedbegovi founded in 1896)
refused to accept the authority of the Chief Mufti as the supervisor of all waqfs in the Bul-
garian Kingdom.70 This was a new rule mandated by the 1919 Statute. Shefkats board
insisted that as a place that promoted learning and held books that have aided the Euro-
pean world to reach its present elevated state, the reading room served all citizens,
regardless of ethnicity and religion.71 The expressly secular view of learning that the
men around Shefkat advanced, however, coupled with the openly hostile attitude of
the waqf founders to Islamic religious figures, produced sustained conflict with the
Old Turks and the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs.
Both the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs and the Old Turks sought to
discredit Shefkat and its self-presentation as the promoter of progress in Bulgaria.
That is, both tried to stop Shefkats efforts to blur the boundary between the public
(national Bulgarian) and the communal (MCM) domains. The Ministry and the
Chief Mufti insisted on Shefkats misuse of money, i.e. supporting only type of learning
and students going against Muslim tradition and the interests of Bulgarias Muslim
population.72 Here, similarly to the Kurdzhali board, unclear gender roles became a
strategy for de-legitimization. The daughter of one of Shefkats board members was
sent to study medicine in Berlin in the 1920s. During her study, she got involved with
communists and Bolsheviks. Apparently, she finally abandoned her studies and
devoted herself to supporting the Bolshevik cause.73 The Chief Mufti was scandalized.
The Ministry feared Bolshevik infiltration. But there is more here than the regular fear
of communist subversion. This anxiety that womens politicization as citizens brought
instability extended more broadly to participation in public life.74 But with respect to
Muslims instability was double. Politicization of Muslim women along secular, moder-
nist ideologies as well as the exhibition of public (male) rather than domestic (female)
practices, signaled identification with adjacent republican Turkey. For this reason, for
example, governments in the 1930s opposed Kemalist efforts to de-veil Muslim
Turkish women.75 The Stara Zagora provincial police inspector, St. Giurov, concluded
in his 1937 report to the police headquarters in Sofia that in areas inhabited by Muslims
the teaching profession is not suitable for women.76 Giurov explained that in this
region the morality of female teachers was questionable. Without being married, they
live together with some rich Turks.77 In so doing they discredit the Bulgarian auth-
orities and cause indignation and dissatisfaction among the Turks, because the morality
of this region is very different from the morality of the big city.78 There is presumption
of lack of modern sociability not only in countryside, but specifically among Muslims
there. The inspector suggested this sociability be preserved so as to ensure the legitimacy
of the Bulgarian government in the eyes of those who opposed Kemalists. State legiti-
macy and the reification of an Ottoman Muslim tradition reinforced each other
thereby perpetuating Turkish Muslim collectivity (Muslim Confessional Municipality)
which could not articulate with modern national citizenship.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs and, more broadly,
Bulgarian governments and parliaments in the interwar period were not consistent
opponents of the importation of reforms from republican Turkey. The wavering position
of Bulgarian governments on the script for the Turkish language reveals their selective
and contingent understanding of what tradition entailed for maintaining Turkish-
speaking Muslims as a national minority. The following example nicely illustrates
this point. During the 1935 36 academic year, Bulgarian school teachers from
regions bordering with Turkey and populated predominately with Muslims organized
a meeting to discuss education in their areas. The teachers expressed fear that
478 Anna M. Mirkova

well-educated subordinated national minority may pose a serious threat to the

state.79 This fear suffused the approach of the Ministry of Education toward Turkish-
speaking Muslims in the interwar period (and before); tacit support for Turkish ignor-
ance permeated the state administration.80 With the help of the associations for the pro-
tection of Islam (established after the 1934 coup), the Ministry of Education forced
Turkish schools that had adopted the Latin script to go back to the Arabic one.81 Yet,
possibly to appropriate some of the growing appeal of Kemalist ideas among Muslims,
the Ministry of Education reversed the official position until that point and mandated
in 1938 the introduction of the Latin alphabet.82 Muslim citizens of the city of
Shumen were mortified and protested that children were not psychologically strong
enough to deal with two alphabets for their mother tongue.83 Again protestors invoked
protection of religion and their rights as citizens to demonstrate the injustice of the
decision. Meanwhile the introduction of the Latin script was combined with the persecu-
tion of Kemalist supporters, which in turn stimulated talk of intervention within
Turkey.84 Protests like the one in Shumen had no consequences. The preservation of
the ostensible Ottoman Muslim tradition seemed no longer to include the Arabic
script; loyalty, or rather passive citizenship, could be inculcated through the medium of
Kemalist mobilization.
It is perhaps paradoxical that in the politically repressive 1920s and 1930s, Kemalist
supporters and opponents referenced their constitutionally guaranteed rights when
struggling to define the ideological boundaries of the Muslim Confessional Municipali-
ties. The invocation of rights perhaps partly constituted rhetorical strategies for legitimi-
zation in the sense of framing actions and ideas as politically and socially acceptable. In
practice MCMs were the main sites in which any debate among Turkish-speaking
Muslims over what constituted Bulgarian citizenship for them took place. It is not sur-
prising that religion figured prominently in such debates as an instrument employed
to accuse, defend, or rationalize efforts to use the Arabic or the Latin script, to craft
school curricula, or to elect MCCs. The issue was not simply adhering to Islamic
practice but accepting the authority of the religious hierarchyas it wereto mediate
between State and Muslim population as well as between Muslims.
Religious figures themselves were not always antagonistic to the importation of Turkish
nationalist and Kemalist ideas to Bulgaria. For instance, Hafuz Ismail Salilov was fired in
May 1938 from his posts as imam and reader of the Holy Quran for having written a poem,
entitled The Turk and Turan. In the poem he wrote that All Turks are Turanists,
Turan is my homeland, and the Turk is the purest servant of God/Oh, Lord!
Protect the Turk.85 In the following year, the mufti of Vidin apparently attended a mem-
orial service in the Yahya Pasha mosque in Vidin which ended up as a memorial service for
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.86 In his discussion of the Young Turks in Southeastern Europe,
Sukru Hanioglu argues that Young Turk supporters took more cautious secularist stances
and generally did not seek clashes with the religious establishment so as to attract wide
support among Muslims.87 This argument of accommodation may be extended to the
interwar period as Young Turk supporters tended to move seamlessly into support for
the Kemalist modernization project. But there is an additional element to the ambivalent
place of religion in the confrontations between Kemalist supporters and opponents. Kem-
alist supporters sought to occupy that role of mediation that the Bulgarian state had
bestowed on the religious hierarchy. This role of mediation enabled the Chief Mufti to
employ Islam as the measuring stick for loyalty or disloyalty to the Bulgarian state.88
Those who acknowledged the authority of the Chief Mufti and the central role of the
entire religious hierarchy in shaping political belonging got defined as good Muslims
 Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria 479

and hence loyal citizens. Meanwhile religious functionaries who deviated as well as
Kemalists got branded as serving interests that are foreign to the interests of the
Muslim population in Bulgaria as well as to the Fatherland and were thus against all
Muslims who are good and loyal Bulgarian citizens.89

Conclusion
The quote above sums up the official understanding of citizenship in the interwar years.
In this vision MCMs were positioned to ensure the unequivocal acceptance of Bulgarian
national sovereignty among the Muslim population. The 1919 Statute for the rule of
Muslims as minority (and its predecessors) were deployed by the Ministry of Foreign
and Confessional Affairs and Bulgarian governments generally to define the Muslim
population as collective repository of Ottoman culture and Islam. Hence, nationalist
mobilization and contestations over the centrality of Islam for shaping modern
Muslim identity only undermined the intended mission of MCMs (and by implication
the existence of Bulgaria itself). At the same time, the liberal political framework
enabled individual politicization and participation in the political process. In that
respect, at the beginning of the twentieth century there was an increasing number of
Turkish-speaking Muslim parliament members from various political parties.90 The
Bulgarian Agrarian National Union and the Communists were particularly successful
in attracting Muslim membership. There was even a Muslim communist organization,
Kzl Bayrak.91 But the Office of the Chief Mufti and the Ministry of Foreign and Con-
fessional Affairs were generally suspicious toward the individual politicization of
Muslims, instead advancing the putative religious cohesiveness evident in the minority
regulations, expecting passivity in public and retreat to the communal space of MCMs.
The efforts of the Chief Mufti, of the Ministry of Foreign and Confessional Affairs, and
of interwar Bulgarian governments to segregate Muslims to the communal (i.e. MCMs)
were especially forceful in turbulent political moments, like the coups in 1923 and 1934.
These were moments when the possibilities for upholding or taking down the minority
framework were most opportune. For instance, a week after the coup that took place
on June 9, 1923, the Chief Mufti sent a telegram to all regional muftis requesting that
they tell the Muslim population to remain calm. To obey governmental orders and to
pursue, peacefully and quietly, its private affairs . . ..92 The Chief Mufti reiterated its
demand again in October, this time specifically speaking against Muslims involvement
in the communist demonstrations against the coup.93 Significantly, the telegram also
characterized the Bulgarian state as the protector of the freedom, honor, and property
of Bulgarian citizens regardless of faith and ethnicity [narodnost].94 The telegrams
disclose fear of repression. But even more importantly, they succinctly illustrate the Chief
Muftis view of citizenship with respect to Muslims. The Office of the Chief Mufti advised
disengagement from the national public space, instead focusing energies on protecting
the domestic and communal space from secular, modernist, and Turkish nationalist
intrusion. Kemalist supporters, on the other hand, sought precisely the opposite:
making the communal public in order to undermine the mediation role of the religious
establishment and to be able to mobilize as many Muslims as possible. Ultimately
Kemalists worked to nationalize, modernize and thereby monopolize MCMs as sites
that would, nevertheless, continue to mediate between national minority and national
majority. It is this dynamic of mediation that the post- World War I minority protection
schemes in Europe encouraged, thereby perhaps unintentionally advancing corporatist
rather than individual underpinnings of citizenship.
480 Anna M. Mirkova

NOTES
1. Eric D. Weitz, From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled
Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions, The American Historical
Review, Vol. 113, No. 5, December 2008, pp. 13201321.
2. On this point see Kalina Peeva, Turtsiya vav vanshnata politika na Aleksandur Stamboliiski (Turkey
in Alexander Stamboliiskis Foreign Policy), Istorichesko Budeshte (Historical Future), No. 1 2, 2004,
pp. 179205; and Ankarskite spogodbidiplomaticheski uspeh ili otstaplenie ot bulgarskite inter-
esi (The Ankara AgreementsDiplomatic Success or Retreat from Bulgarian Interests), Istorichesko
Budeshte, No. 1 2, 2006, pp. 117 140.
3. On the importance of population (not just territory) to the articulation of national sovereignty, see
Weitz, From the Vienna to the Paris System, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. Ustav za dukhovnoto ustroistvo i upravlenie na miusiulmanite v Tsartstvo Bulgariia (Statute for the
Religious Organization and rule of Muslims in the Bulgarian Kingdom), Durzhaven Vestnik (The Offi-
cial Gazette), No. 65, 26, VI. 1919.
6. The Principality of Bulgaria officially became a Kingdom in 1909 when the Ottoman Empire recog-
nized Bulgarias proclamation of full independence.
7. The organization of Kemalists in Bulgaria was called Turan.
8. Ustav za dukhovnoto ustroistvo, Chapter II; Privremenni Pravila za dukhovnoto ustroenie na
khristiianite, na miusiulmanite, i evreite (Temporary Regulations for the Religious Organization
of Christians, Muslims, and Jews), Durzhaven Vestnik No. 56, 9. VII. 1880.
9. Briefly: each monotheistic religion was entitled to ecclesiastical autonomy. For the history and histor-
iography of the millet system, see Benjamin Braude, Foundation Myths of the Millet System, in
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (Volume One: The
Central Lands), eds Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers,
1982.
10. Margaret R. Somers, Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political
Culture in the Transition to Democracy, American Sociological Review, Vol. 58, No. 5, October 1993,
pp. 587620.
11. Peter C. Caldwell, The Citizen and the Republic in Germany, 19181935, in Citizenship and
National Identity in Twentieth Century Germany, eds Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 42 43.
12. On the intellectual and political sources of the Bulgarian constitution see Diana Mishkova,
Iz Natsionalnite ni kompleksi, ili belgiiska li e Turnovskata konstitutsiia? (Is the Turnovo Consti-
tution Belgian?), Istorichesko Budeshte, No. 2, 1997, pp. 100108.
13. Weitz, From the Vienna to the Paris System, op. cit., p. 1330.
14. Georgi P. Genov, Pravnoto Polozhenie na Maltsinstvata (s osoben ogled na Bulgarskite maltsinstva v
Susednite durzhavi (The Legal Status of Minorities (With Special Reference to Bulgarian Minorities
in Neighboring Countries)), Godishnik na Sofiiskiia Universitet (Iuridicheski Fakultet) (Annual Review
of the Sofia University (Faculty of Law)), Vol. XXIV, 1928 1929, pp. 185 186.
15. Ibid.
16. Vremenni Pravila za dukhovnoto upravlenie na miusiulmanie (Temporary Regulations for the Reli-
gious Rule of Muslims), Durzhaven Vestnik, No. 210, 26. IX. 1895.
17. During the Tanzimat, the confessional framework of the millet was gradually transformed into an
ethno-religious framework. This was a process initiated by the efforts of the various Orthodox
Balkan populations to found churches autonomous from the Patriarchate in Istanbul.
18. On the legacy of nineteenth century Ottoman millet arrangements in Greece and Bulgaria with respect
to Muslims, see Stefanos Katsikas, Millets in Nation-States: The Case of Greek and Bulgarian
Muslims, 19121923, Nationalities Papers, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 177 201.
19. Vremenni Pravila, Article 14.
20. Similar to the Patriarch in Istanbul. Ibid, Articles 2, 3, 14.
21. Ibid, Article 17.
22. Turksko-Bulgarski Protokol, Durzhaven Vestnik No. 13, 19. I. 1910, Article I.
23. Ustav za dukhovnoto ustroistvo, Articles 2, 4, 8, 10, 28, 168.
24. Sukru Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
25. Muvazene No. 287, 20 Rabiul-ahir 1321 (16 July 1903); No. 25, 3 Sevval 1315 (25 February 1898). I
also discuss this point in greater detail in my dissertation, Land Ownership and Modernization in
the Transition from Ottoman Imperial to Bulgarian National Rule (1877/78 1908).
 Citizenship Formation in Bulgaria 481

26. Hanioglu, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 165.

27. See Rogers Brubaker, National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External Homelands in
the New Europe, in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 55 79. There Brubaker discusses, though in a
very different international context, the ways in which national mobilization efforts of minorities
get shaped by the nationalist project of nation-states to which minorities are purportedly linked by
virtue of ethnicity and religion.
28. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, New York: Routledge, 1998 (1963); Kemal
H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the
Late Ottoman State, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
29. See for instance M. Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003, especially pp. 37 59; see also by the same author Islam and Nationalism: Yusuf Akcura, Uc
Tarz-i Siyaset, Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1993, pp. 175 207. See also Seyfettin
Ersahin, The Ottoman Foundation of the Turkish Republics Diyanet: Ziya Gokalps Diyanet Islahr
Nazarat, The Muslim World, Vol. 98, April/July 2008, pp. 182198.
30. For Young Turks in the Balkans see Hanioglu, The Young Turks, op. cit.; and Preparation for a Revolu-
tion; The Young Turks, 19021908, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
31. Hanioglu, The Young Turks, op. cit.
32. TsDIA (Central State Archive), F (Collection)-166 k, O (Catalogue)-2, AE (Entry No.)-121, L
(Page)-67.
33. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam, op. cit., pp. 353408.
34. On this see Ivan Elenkov, Rodno i diasno: Prinos kum istoriita na nesbudnatiia desen proekt v Bulgariia
ot vremeto mezhdu dvete svetovni voini (Contribution towards the History of Bulgarias Unrealized
Right-Wing Project in the Interwar Years), Sofia: LIK, 1998.
35. TsDIA, F-370 k, O-2, AE-1673, L-6.
36. Muvazene (Balance), No. 1, 4 Rabiul-ahir 1315 (2 September 1897).
37. Balkan No. 37, 13 Agustos 1322 (26 August 1906); No. 45, 9 Eylul 1322 (22 September 1906).
38. Mikhail Gruev, Bulgarite miusiulmani i kemalistkoto dvizhenie v Rodopite (Bulgarian Muslims
and the Kemalist Movement in the Rhodope Region), Moderniiat Istorik: vuobrazhenie, informiranost,
pokoleniia (The Modern Historian: Imagination, Knowledge, Generations), Sofia: IK Daniela
Ubenova, p. 220.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid, p. 201.
42. Southeastern Bulgaria, close to the Turkish border, and populated by a majority of Muslims.
43. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-41, L-117 (22. X. 1931).
44. Ibid., L-115 116.
45. Ibid., L-117 118.
46. Ibid., L-120.
47. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-3, AE-10.
48. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-41, L-115.
49. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-2, AE-121, L-26 27.
50. TsDIA, F-166 k, O-2, AE-121, L-68.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., L-67.
53. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-41, L-117.
54. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-115, L-7 (23. VII. 1934).
55. Ibid., L-11 (7. VIII. 1934).
56. Ibid.
57. Valeri Stoyanov,Turskoto naselenie v Bulgariia mezhdu poliusite na etnicheskata politika (The Turkish
Population in Bulgaria Caught in the Extremities of Ethnic Politics), Sofia: LIK, 1998, p. 84.
58. See Evgeniia Ivanova, Otkhvurlenite priobshteni ili protsesa, narechen vuzroditelen (1912 1989)
(Rejected and Assimilated or the So-called Re-birth Process), Sofia: Institut za Iztochnoevropeiska
Khumanistika, 2002, p. 25.
59. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-115, L-10 (10. VIII. 1934).
60. TsDIA, F-370 k, O-2, AE-1452, L-7.
61. F-370 k, O-2 contains about 40 individual files.
62. TsDIA, F-370 k, O-2, AE-1673, L-6.
482 Anna M. Mirkova

63. TsDIA, F-370 k, O-2, AE-1452, L-8.

64. Quoted in Huseyin Memisoglu, Bulgaristan Turklerinin Birinci Milli Kongresi (The First Turkish
National Congress in Bulgaria), Belleten, Vol. 54, No. 209, April 1990, p. 309.
65. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-2, AE-10.
66. Ibid., and Stoyanov, Turskoto naselenie, op. cit., p. 73.
67. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-41, L-121.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. TsDIA, F-166 k, O-2, AE-121, L-26 28.
71. Ibid., L-7.
72. Ibid., L-43 44.
73. Ibid., L-39 41.
74. Like in the legal profession, for instance, from which women were de facto excluded. The dominant
public discourse depicted women as not sufficiently rational to practice law. See Krassimira Daska-
lova, Smislite na Grazdanstvoto: Grazhdani i Grazhdanski Prava v Bulgariia (1878 1944) (The
Meanings of Citizenship: Citizens and Citizenship Rights in Bulgaria (18781944)), in Granitsi na
Grazhdanstvoto: Evropeiskite Zheni mezhdu Traditsiiata i Modernostta (The Borders of Citizenship:
European Women Between Tradition and Modernity), eds Krassimira Daskalova and Raina Gavri-
lova, Sofia: Bulgarska Grupa za Izsledvaniia po Istoriia na Zhenite i Pola and the Open Society,
2001, pp. 226244.
75. Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern
Bulgaria, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 124 125.
76. TsDIA, F-370 k, O-1, AE-572.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Quoted in Ivanova, Otkhvurlenite priobshteni, op. cit., p. 26.
80. Mila Mancheva, Image and Policy: the Case of Turks and Pomaks in Inter-war Bulgaria, 1918
1944 (with special reference to education), Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 12, No. 3,
July 2001, pp. 355 374.
81. Ivanova, Otkhvurlenite priobshteni, op. cit., p. 25.
82. A similar goal existed with respect to Bulgarian-speaking Muslims in the Rhodope region. There the
state-sponsored organization Rodina adopted a modernizing ideology fused with Bulgarian national-
ism aimed at assimilating Bulgarophone Muslims. See Gruev, Bulgarite miusiulmani, op. cit. and
Ivanova, Otkhvurlenite priobshteni, op. cit.
83. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-3, AE-10.
84. Stoyanov, Turskoto naselenie, op. cit., p. 88.
85. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-3, AE-6, L-1.
86. TsDIA, F-471, O-2, AE-121, L-68.
87. See Hanioglu, Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., pp. 15, 124, 203. For a Bulgarian example see
Balkan, No. 68, 6 Tesrin-i Evvel 1322 (19 November 1906).
88. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-1, AE-34, L-170.
89. TsDIA, F-166 k, O-2, AE-121, L-62 64.
90. Omer Turan, Bulgaristanda Prenslik Doneminde Turklerin Sosyal ve Siyasal Kurumlasma Calsma-
lar (Turkish Social and Political Organizational Efforts in the Principality of Bulgaria), Belleten, Vol.
LXIV, No. 239, April 2000, pp. 89 100.
91. Stoyanov, Turskoto naselenie, op. cit., p. 80.
92. TsDIA, F-471 k, O-3, AE-5, L-1.
93. Ibid., L-24.
94. Ibid.
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