Sufis in the Balkan

Balkan Sufism

Sufis are the mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes love, acceptance of others, and tolerance as a way of life. They are organized into orders named after their founders, each with its own unique practice, which often includes music, dance, prayer, meditation, and rituals called “Dhikr,” which take a variety of forms. Geographically, Sufis are organized into centers called “tekke,” which are like monasteries that usually contain a dervish lodge, a soup kitchen, a meeting house, study and retreat rooms, a library, a hostel, a holy spring, a tree, a rock, and more.

The Ottoman Empire ruled the Balkans for nearly 500 years. During this period, there was interfaith dialogue and magnificent cultural creation, especially by the Sufi orders: music, dance, poetry, fiction, moral teachings, philosophy, education, art, and architecture, thta expressed in the most beautiful way the condition of man as longing to reunite with God. The social fabric emphasized the importance of man. The Islam of the Ottoman Empire was largely Sufi Islam, which in part continued the mystery traditions of ancient times and the Christian mysticism of the Balkans.

It should be understood that from the end of the 14th century to the end of the 19th century, a period of 500 years, there was a central Muslim government in the Balkans, and a multicultural society in which Jews and Muslims concentrated in the cities and Christians in the countryside. During this long period of time, a large part of the population converted to Islam, for one reason or another, but the accepted Islam was, in nature, not the fundamentalist Islam that we know today. Local rulers built mosques, bridges, markets, but also Sufi centers that served as places of gathering, meditation, ceremonies, prayers, worship, and also as social centers where food was distributed to the poor, and matters concerning the community were discussed. The Islam that spread and found a home in the Balkans is a soft Islam, brought to the masses by holy people, miracle workers, who emphasized love and acceptance, brotherhood, and helping others as a way of life.

Note to the reader

Until a few years ago, the Western Balkan countries were the scene of brutal civil wars (Bosnia and Kosovo) or social unrest (Albania). The modern industrial revolution passed them by during Ottoman rule, and in the 20th century, they were part of an oppressive communist regime. With independence, old tensions surfaced—between Christians and Muslims, and between Serbs and Albanians—and the result was tragic. I hardly ever consciously address this side of history. My historiographical conception claims that the historian should find the bright spots and beautiful moments of history. When I was studying a philosophy of history course at university, I came across a theory by a professor named K. O. Apel that says the historian should be like a good psychologist: listen to the story and construct a narrative that leads to renewal and growth. I really hope that the Balkan countries have already gone through the difficult period and that they are on this path, that the civil wars are a thing of the past, and that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can be brothers and live in brotherhood as they once did.

Ottoman History

At its peak, the Ottoman Empire ruled over an area equal to that of the Roman Empire. In the 16th century, it had a population of about 30 million, while Greater Spain had no more than 5 million. It had the most advanced army and navy in the world, and it also had a magnificent legal and administrative system.

The Ottoman Sultan Orhan created the Janissary Corps with the blessing of Saint Haji Bektas, and it became the backbone of the empire. Initially, joining the military boarding schools was voluntary, with the government encouraging Christian children from poor families to join, as they were not bound by tribal or group ties and loyalties, and their whole lives became the state that gave them a second chance. This worked so well that, at the end of the 14th century, faced with the rapid expansion of the empire, Sultan Selim I decided to forcibly recruit children (the Devshirme) from among Christian subjects in the Balkans, and the ranks of the Janissaries swelled to tens and hundreds of thousands.

The Janissary Corps became the backbone of the Ottoman army, the bureaucracy, and the establishment. Education in the military boarding schools was entrusted to the Babas of the Bektashi Order, which is one of the reasons why this Order, despite being considered heretical by the ulama, became important and widespread in the Balkans, especially in Albania.

According to legend, Saint Said Ali and forty other heroes had a dream in which the Prophet commanded them to go to Haji Bektash in Cappadocia to receive a blessing from him. They went to the saint, who blessed their sword. At that time, Sultan Orhan dreamed that forty heroes would come to him and help him create a new type of soldier, with miraculous abilities and a deep religious drive — the new soldier: the Janissary. And so it was. The forty heroes crossed the Dardanelles and captured Gallipoli.

However, historically, the one who founded the corps was Sultan Murat I (son of Orhan), who in 1361 moved the capital from Bursa to Adrianople and began a campaign of conquest that eventually established a mighty Ottoman Balkan Empire. Murat I is an important figure in Ottoman history. He was tolerant in matters of religion and with his enemies, and granted rights to Christian institutions.

After him, Izmit I ruled, who some say was secretly a Christian. He granted additional rights to Christians and allowed them to hold senior positions in government. He completed the conquest of the Balkans, Bulgaria, and Albania, and turned against the Muslim kingdoms in the East. He defeated the Mamluks, but was captured and defeated by Timur Lang in 1402, and thus Constantinople was saved for another fifty years.

After the defeat by Timur Lang and the crisis that followed, new sultans arose who emphasized the centralization of Islam and fought to consolidate their rule and conquests. The sultan who actually founded the Ottoman Empire was Mehmet II, who conquered Istanbul and renewed the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. He confiscated lands from the nobles, strengthened the central government, established an efficient bureaucracy directly subordinate to him, built both an army and trade, and turned the Ottoman Empire into the leading power in the world.

The great sultans Izmit II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent continued his path. This was the Golden age of the empire — the period of conquests, the establishment of the new army, the writing of laws, the creation of the administration. A time of innovations and development.

It should be understood that the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans was at first a Muslim minority ruling over a Christian rural majority. The Ottomans were not necessarily eager to Islamize the peoples under their control, since Muslims paid fewer taxes to the state treasury. There are two places in the Balkans where Islam took hold and there was mass conversion, for different reasons. One is Albania and the other is Bosnia. This was not a one-day process, but rather a process that occurred over time and in different stages.

In Bosnia, Islam found a home from the beginning of the Ottoman occupation, and apparently, already in the 17th century, there was a Muslim majority in some of the districts. The main reason for this is probably that many Christians in Bosnia belonged to the heretical sect of the Bogomils, which was not recognized as an independent millet. Therefore, when the inhabitants were faced with the decision to join one or another millet, they preferred to become Muslims rather than Catholics or the hated Orthodox, especially since mystical Islam recalled the principles of the Bogomil religion.

In Albania, joining Islam was associated with the disintegration of society after the wars of Skanderbeg and with the perception of religion as secondary to the code of besa (humanity and dignity). Apparently, already in the 18th century, Albania had a Muslim majority.

The Ottomans developed the economy and brought about a period of peace and stability. They built religious institutions, roads, bridges, markets, and cities, and one of the glorious chapters was the bringing of Jewish Spanish exiles and their settlement in the Balkans at the end of the 15th century and during the 16th century.

However, after the Golden Age, things changed. At the end of the 16th century, the so-called “flower sultans” came to power—incompetent rulers who were effectively governed by their mothers. These were sultans who grew up in the harem, and because of the tradition of killing brothers, they were raised in an atmosphere of intrigue and fear. The Ottoman Empire continued to appear strong on the outside, but the rot had already begun inside. Nevertheless, religious institutions, poetry, and art continued to develop.

At the end of the 17th century, there was a last attempt to conquer Vienna, which ended in defeat. At the beginning of the 18th century, the military and governmental decline began—a decline that had not been felt until then, but occurred in secret. Once it became apparent, it was too late to stop the snowball.

The decline actually began with the defeat at the gates of Vienna. This occurred simultaneously with the rise of the West, the discovery of a bypass route to India—which made the Silk Roads and the strategic location of Istanbul redundant—as well as the development of America.

In the last two hundred years of their rule (18th and 19th centuries), Ottoman power declined dramatically, the economy collapsed, and corruption was rampant. Eventually, national struggles and rebellions led to their expulsion and the establishment of today’s Balkan countries.

For the last hundred years of its existence, the Ottoman Empire was artificially held together by Western powers, who prevented its collapse and conquest by hostile forces. During this time, the empire tried to renew itself through the Tanzimat reforms, but it was too little and too late, as the Christian Balkan peoples took advantage of the weakness and fought for independence. First, these were the Serbs and Montenegrins, then the Greeks, and finally the Bulgarians.

The peoples who remained under Ottoman rule or in connection with them were the Macedonians, Bosnians, and Albanians—the latter having become a Muslim majority. For this reason, they were integrated into the Ottoman army and administration, also in other places (such as Egypt — Muhammad Ali). It should be remembered that the Ottoman Sultan was the Muslim Caliph, the head of the Sunni Islamic world.

Inferiority to to the Western world led some sultans to adopt a pan-Islamic policy and to encourage political Sufi orders, such as the Naqshbandi. Bosnia passed to Austro-Hungarian rule in 1878, but the local population retained its ties to Istanbul and Islam. To this day, the streets of Sarajevo look like a quintessentially Ottoman city. Albania and Kosovo remained under Ottoman control until the Balkan Wars of 1912.

The early buds of local Bosnian and Albanian nationalism were encouraged and found a home in the Sufi orders, especially in Albania, where the creation of a new national identity was supported and led by individuals associated with the Bektashi order, such as the Frashëri brothers.

Ottomans in Albania

In the 15th century, while the whole world was surrendering to the military might of the Ottomans, the Albanians, led by Skanderbeg, waged an epic heroic battle for independence that ended in a severe defeat and the destruction of the country. The higher classes were annihilated or migrated to Italy, and the social structure broke down. The Albanians at that time were mostly Catholics, and this fact—along with Albania being a border state between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Empire—led to increased pressure on the inhabitants to convert to Islam.

In neighboring Balkan countries, the Greek Orthodox Church represented and protected the local population, while the established class moved to the villages and towns and continued to function as leaders of society. In post-rebellion Albania, there was no one to protect Christianity. In addition, the Albanians’ reliance on a code of conduct called besa, considered more important than religion, made it easier for people to convert to Islam.

Moreover, the Islam that the Albanians encountered was that of the Sufi orders, represented by holy men who resembled Christian saints and preached a similar doctrine. Albania is a poor country, and the temptation of tax relief or finding work as a soldier or government official caused many to become Muslims (especially in the 18th–19th centuries), even if only outwardly.

Ottomans in Kosovo

In the Ottoman Empire, Kosovo was part of a province called Kosovo, which also included parts of Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, and Macedonia. The province of Kosovo was ruled from the city of Prizren, which was the historical capital of the Balkans during the late Serbian Empire.

The Ottomans dismantled the Archangel Monastery of Serbian King Stefan Dušan and built the beautiful Sinan Pasha Mosque in the middle of Prizren from its stones. It was a symbol of what was happening in general.

An unsuccessful series of Serbian rebellions in the late 17th century led to a mass migration of Serbs to the Vojvodina region, and the country became a wasteland. The resulting void was filled by Albanian immigrants, who became the majority from that time on.

Albania and Kosovo are populated by Albanians—people who speak the same language and share a common cultural heritage. The Albanian national movement began in Kosovo at the end of the 19th century and was called the “League of Prizren.”

Ottomans in Bosnia

The Ottoman Empire was not a single entity; it was a huge country, extending at its peak from Yemen to Vienna, from Iraq to Algeria, from the Crimea to Egypt and Cyprus. Different parts of it were given different status and treatment. Bosnia is one of the exceptional cases of successful integration. The Ottomans preserved its territorial integrity and its historical name. They founded Sarajevo as the center of the state and established educational institutions, madrasas, and Sufi centers, a library, brought Jews there, and turned it into a bustling commercial center. They built bridges, such as the bridge in Mostar and the bridge over the Drina River. The remote valleys became the trade arteries of the new empire, and this brought prosperity and growth.

Unlike neighboring Serbia, the Ottoman conquest was welcomed relatively smoothly, despite the fact that King Tvrtko was the only one who enlisted to help the Serbian prince Lazar in the Battle of Kosovo. Bosnia had an independent church and a different type of Christianity that was influenced by the Bogomil movement. For this reason, and perhaps others, many Bosnians became Muslims. Many were taken or joined the Janissaries in Istanbul and became senior civil servants, while others served in the Ottoman army. Within one to two hundred years of the conquest, most of the Slavic population in Bosnia became Muslim, and on the other hand—the independent Bosnian Church disappeared.

The officials in the empire remained loyal to their homeland and invested in public projects such as building roads and bridges (as described in the book The Bridge on the Drina), or building educational and public institutions, especially in the large cities of Sarajevo and Mostar.

At the end of the Ottoman period, security and the economy deteriorated, and the Serbian-Christian population grew compared to the Muslim population. After the Herzegovina Uprising in 1875, the Austro-Hungarian Empire took control of Bosnia, but its rule was tyrannical. The Austrians oppressed both the Muslims, who identified with the Turks, and the Orthodox Serbs, who became their sworn enemies.

Sufi Centers

“Tekke” is a Turkish name for a Sufi center, called zawiya in Arabic or khanka in Persian. It is a place where Sufis meet to perform rituals, study, and worship God. Sometimes the sheikh and his followers live there, and it is also a social center for all believers, providing social services such as feeding the poor. In the past, it was customary to run a large kitchen for the poor in tekkes. Every tekke that respected itself had a place for guests, a place for study, and the tombs of saints. It resembled Christian monasteries—a socio-spiritual center where religious and social activity took place throughout the year.

The importance of the kitchen in a tekke stemmed not only from its role as a soup kitchen for the poor, but also from the very process of cooking, which is a symbol of a spiritual process. In the kitchen, raw, unripe material is cooked and transformed to a higher state—just like the murids, the students on the spiritual path. Cooking is a spiritual, alchemical process. Rumi says: “I was raw, I was cooked, I burned.”

In addition to hummus and vegetables, students would also cook in the kitchens of the tekkes as part of the initiation of young dervishes. Their transformation from boys to men took place through community service, especially kitchen work. In the order of the whirling dervishes, a novice must undergo almost three years of initiation and training in kitchen work before he is mature enough to join the ranks of the order.

In a spiritual sense, the tekke is a place of transition, where a gateway to the spiritual world opens for the student—where the person forgets their worries and can concentrate on the inner journey, ascending the spiritual ladder on the way to unite with God in the eighth heaven. The tekke encourages the student and assists him in this transition, which involves a difficult struggle. The tekke is a place of angels, who carry the throne of God, but it begins with simple things: becoming a human being—a place where people become responsible, and children become adults.

Once a week, usually on Thursday evening, the Sufis meet in silence to perform the central ritual: the Dhikr ceremony, the remembrance of God’s name (based on the verse: “Those who believe and whose hearts find satisfaction in the remembrance of God—surely in the remembrance of God do hearts find satisfaction.” Qur’an, Surah 13).

The Sufis believe that all knowledge, all truth, exists within us—we only need to remember it.