The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria

Mary Neuburger. The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xv, 223 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $42.50, cloth.In the wake of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in the 199Os and the refugee waves that followed, minorities have become a focal point in the studies of Eastern Europe. It is in this context of volatile ethnic relations, contested national identities, and new critical scholarship that Mary Neuburger's The Orient Within fits so well. It revisits the historical experience of Slavic and Turkish speaking Muslims in Bulgaria (Pomaks and Turks), in particular their uneven and often turbulent relationship with a state that alternated campaigns of expulsion with tolerance or coerced assimilation. Although much of the author's gaze rests on the communist period, Neuburger takes a longue-duree approach that analyzes Muslim as entwined with evolving Bulgarian national consciousness of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neuburger asks the important question: How did the powerful obsessions of modernity laced with the intoxicating lure of the West shape the Bulgarian encounter with its Muslim minority? (p. 2).Although the monograph discusses many aspects of Muslim existence-relations with the authorities, communal structures, religion, education and material culture-it is not a work about minorities per se. The central theme here is the inner workings of Bulgarian nationalism. Neuburger asserts that the Bulgarian drive toward nation building and modernization, under the impact of West European Orientalism, demanded a negation of all that was Eastern within-an explicit rejection of Bulgaria's Ottoman past and its Muslim minority presence (p. 3). Employing postcolonial theory, Neuburger argues that Muslims constituted the colonial other against which Bulgarian national identity was formed. Yet, as Neuburger shows, in practice the attitude of political and intellectual elites toward Muslims was less clear-cut. Insecure about its own identity between the backward East and the developed West, Bulgaria's treatment of Muslims swayed between sameness and difference, brother and enemy (p. 6).The originality of Neuburger's analytical approach and her ambition to unravel the intricacy of being stranded between Orient and Occident is undeniable. But while her effort to examine the trajectory of a given nationalism via its minority policy is fascinating, it is also fraught with risks of overstretching one's claims. Driven by her theory, the author essentializes Bulgarian nationalism and fails to account for its changing elements and uses. In Neuburger's interpretation, twentieth-century Bulgarian history is driven by a modernizing push to eliminate detested Asiatic elements in society and culture. …

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