The Ethnogenesis of the Crimean Tatars. An Historical Reinterpretation

2001 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Glyn Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
General Public ◽  
The West ◽  
Greek Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
To Receive

AbstractWith the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe the west has been confronted with the existence of several, little-understood Muslim ethnic groups in this region whose contested histories can be traced back to the Ottoman period and beyond. Previously overlooked Muslim ethnies, such as the Bulgarian Turks, Bosniaks, Pomaks, Kosovars, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars, have begun to receive considerable attention from both western scholars and the general public. Much of the interest revolves around the question of the identity of these Muslim communities and the history of their formation as distinct ethnic groups. The history of the formation of these groups has in many cases been contested terrain as Bulgarian authorities, for example, attempted in the 1980s to prove that the Bulgarian Turks were actually “Turkified Bulgarians”, as the Greek government sought to demonstrate that the Pomaks (Slavic Muslims) were actually Islamicized Greeks, and as Bosniaks were labelled “Turks” by their Serbian nationalist foes in spite of their Slavic background.

scholarly journals Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282
Author(s):  
Laura Emmery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
New Wave ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comprehensive Discussion ◽  
Made In

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music (edited by Danijela Špirić Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen) is a fascinating study of how popular music developed in post-World War II Yugoslavia, eventually reaching both unsurpassable popularity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and critical acclaim in the West. Through the comprehensive discussion of all popular music trends in Yugoslavia − commercial pop (zabavna-pop), rock, punk, new wave, disco, folk (narodna), and neofolk (novokomponovana) − across all six socialist Yugoslav republics, the reader is given the engrossing socio-cultural and political history of the country, providing the audience with a much-needed and riveting context for understanding the formation and the eventual demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Between Others and Brothers

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-588
Author(s):  
Michelle U. Campos
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Education System ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The West ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identity Based

Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition “To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel” featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled “Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, “these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.” More damningly, he wrote that “the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.”

Excavations in Caria

1887 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 64-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. R. Paton
Keyword(s):  
Great Part ◽  
The West ◽  
The Road ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hill ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Way

Mr. Newton in his History of Discoveries, p. 583, gives the following account of an excursion to the peninsula which lies to the west of Budrum (Halikarnassus) where he was then excavating:—We next proceeded to examine the hill with the level top. This hill is called Assarlik.Ascending from this gateway we passed several other lines of ancient walls, and on gaining the summit of the hill found a platform artificially levelled. There are not many traces of walls here. The sides of the hill are so steep on the north and east that they do not require walls. The platform terminates on the north-east in a rock rising vertically for many hundred feet from the valley below. The top of the rock is cut into beds to receive a tower. The view from this platform is magnificent.[After brief mention of several tombs passed in the way down, Mr. Newton proceeds:]The acropolis which anciently crowned the rock at Assarlik must have overlooked a great part of the peninsula and commanded the road from Halicarnassus to Myndus and Termera. From the number of tombs here, and their archaic character, it may be inferred that this was a fortress of some importance in very early times.

The “New Eastern Europe”

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 763-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serhii Plokhy
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Distinct Region ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
Established Group

More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the region is still grappling with the problem of its new identity and the choice of an appropriate name to reflect it. There has been considerable talk about a “return to Europe,” as well as the emergence of a “new Europe” and, as a consequence of the latter, the birth of a “new Eastern Europe.” Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova are often viewed as the core of the “New Eastern Europe.” These countries have recently found themselves in a unique geopolitical position, sandwiched between the extended European Union in the west and Russia in the east. They had never been thought to constitute a distinct region and thus had no established group identity. This article explores the question of whether looking at the history of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as that of one region can help us better understand its past and explain its current situation.

scholarly journals Muslim Communities in North America

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-118
Author(s):  
Omar Altalib
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities

This book, which is a collection of 22 articles by 25 authors, is appropriatefor undergraduate courses on religion in the United States, religiousminorities, immigrant communities, the history of religion, and the sociologyof Islam and Muslims. The first part contains five articles on religiouscommunities, the second part has nine articles on the mosaic of Islamiccommunities in major American metropolitan centers, and the third partconsists of eight articles on ethnic communities in metropolitan settings.Each part should have been a separate book, as this would have made thebook less bulky and more accessible to those who are interested in onlyone of the areas covered.Reading this book makes it clear that there is great need for Muslimscholars to study and analyze their own communities, which have a richhistory and have only been studied recently. Books such as this are animportant contribution to the understanding of Muslims in the West andalso serve to clear up many misconceptions about Muslims, a developmentthat makes interfaith and intercommunity dialogue easier.Part 1 begins with an article on the Shi'ah communities in NorthAmerica by Abdulaziz Sachedina (professor of religious studies, University ...

Victorian Muslim

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Muslim Country ◽  
The West ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
Muslim Communities

After formally announcing his conversion to Islam in the late 1880s, the Liverpool lawyer William Henry Abdullah Quilliam publicly propagated his new faith and established the first community of Muslim converts in Victorian Britain. Despite decades of obscurity following his death, with the resurgence of interest in Muslim heritage in the West since 9/11, Quilliam has achieved iconic status in Britain and beyond as a pivotal figure in the history of Western Islam and Muslim–Christian relations. In this timely book, leading experts of the religion, history and politics of Islam offer new perspectives and shed fresh light on Quilliam’s life and work. Through a series of original essays, the authors critically examine Quilliam’s influences, philosophy and outlook, the significance of his work for Islam, his position in the Muslim world and amongst other Western Muslim communities, and his legacy. Collectively, the authors ask pertinent questions about how conversion to Islam was viewed and received historically, and how a zealous convert like Quilliam negotiated his religious and national identities, practiced his faith and sought to indigenize Islam in a non-Muslim country.

Democracy in Eastern Europe as a Civilising Process

2000 ◽  
Vol 48 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 288-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Wydra
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
The West ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
East And West ◽  
Western Experience

In this chapter, Harald Wydra argues that the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe has been a long-term social process interwoven with the collapse of communism whose origins are long before 1989. He challenges the vision of East and West as two isolated blocs that prevailed in the 1950s and the assumption of gradual convergence that became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. His main focus is upon the East where, he believes, dissident movements created a ‘second reality’, undermining the myths propounded by the official communist establishment. He argues that there was an increase in self-restraint on the part of the communist state accompanied by the growth of civil society and non-violent political opposition. The East experienced a feeling of ‘unrequited love’ in its relationship to the West. Dissidents took their standards and aspirations from Western experience but found themselves largely ignored by the West. Since 1989, democratisation has increased the influence of western models and standards but it has also led to a breakdown of self-restraint and an upsurge of violence.

Adam Michnik’s Understanding of Totalitarianism and the West European Left

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Brier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Central European ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Dissidents

There is a supreme irony concerning the history of the concept of “totalitarianism”: during the 1970s, many Western social scientists and intellectuals abandoned this concept, arguing that it was too rigid to account for the changes that were occurring in Eastern Europe at the time; one of the developments they cited was the rise of Central European and Soviet dissidents. At precisely this time, however, the dissidents themselves started to apply the adjective totalitarian to the Communist regimes they rebelled against. Focusing on Adam Michnik’s writings, the article assesses this seeming paradox by adopting a transnational perspective. The article’s main thesis is that, for Michnik, the value of “totalitarianism” did not lie in its analytical precision but in the discursive force the term acquired in transnational exchanges in which Michnik tried to mobilize the support of the Western left for the cause of the Polish opposition. The article substantiates this thesis with two case studies. Addressing West German Social Democrats, the concept of totalitarianism seems to have served as a means of convincing them that support for the Polish opposition was not detrimental to reforms in Eastern Europe and to international détente but a necessary precondition for any authentic peace. In addressing French audiences, Michnik seems to have used the adjective totalitarian to convince his interlocutors that human rights advocacy was not any kind of issue but that French and Polish democratic socialists faced a common threat.

The Roma in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Questions of Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Peace

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
Lengthy Process

The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe promised bold opportunities for the various ethnic groups populating that vast, diverse region. Yet if history had any lessons to teach these groups it was that democracy, or at least the political systems that emerged in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall between 1989 and 1991, was no guarantor of whatever idealized rights the region's ethnic groups hoped would come in the wake of the collapse of the communist dictatorships that had dominated these parts of Europe for decades. Communism, had, in many instances, done nothing more than stifle the festering ethnic tensions that had exploded in the nineteenth century and short-circuited the complex, lengthy process of resolving these conflicts. Consequently, for those knowledgeable about the essence of these conflicts, it should have come as no surprise that Yugoslavia, for example, was torn asunder by ethnic violence so terrifying that it took the intervention of the Western world's great powers to end the most violent aspects of these wars of ethnicity.

Local Knowledge: An Akuapem Twi History of Asante

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 169-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom C. McCaskie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Short Paper ◽  
The West ◽  
Written Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Selection Of

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I's eighty-nine page manuscript ‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself’ of 1907 was published in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of allied texts. The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing the four hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’ written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both of these texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources on the Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attention and treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source of this kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished in written form in Akan Twi in 1915.The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles northeast of Ghana's capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills on two parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There are more towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twentieth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speaking Akan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matrilineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this situation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These were military adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. The Akyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establish their own conquest dynasty in 1733.

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