‎Islam in Romania

Sheik Omar Bakri, who has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists in Burgas, in Bulgaria, in July, said in an interview published in the Bulgarian press that both Romania and Bulgaria are legitimate targets for attacks, because they are ‘Islamic land’ and because troops from those countries are fighting in Afghanistan. 

"Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and the Muslim have the duty to liberate it some day. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia."

The head of Romania’s Intelligence Service (SRI), George Maior commented on this on television:

“We are not exempt from terrorist threats. It is increasing and we are on the map of terrorism organizations as a potential target because of our presence in Afghanistan and because of the anti-missile shield. And we are very careful. Omar Bakri was under analysis by the Service in the past, he tried to come to Romania, he has connections in Romania, he’s a man we are looking at carefully.”

Actually, the Sheik's history is not accurate, at least not about most of Romania, though he could have dragged in the Ukraine, Hungary, Greece and Southern Italy where Islam did enter (even Rome was sacked, but not occupied, by the Muslims). All of what is now Romania was, it is true, once in some sense part of the Ottoman Empire and shown as such on the maps, but Islam never 'entered' Romania, except for the Dobrudgea, the Bucovina and for 150 years the Banat. The great achievement of the Wallachians, Moldavians and Transylvanians was, when they could no longer resist the Turk by force of arms, to make terms and preserve their autonomy and the property of their landowners. Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece failed to preserve their system of landownership and government. The three principalities which made up most of what is now Romania simply paid tribute to the Sublime Porte and were untouched by Islam. They were always ruled by Christian princes, owned by Christian landlords and governed by their own laws. In fact, Wallachia and Moldavia were never territories of the Ottoman Empire but protectorates.The only other semi-detached part of the Ottoman Empire which had this form of self-government was the Lebanon. Romanian landlords and nobles were very lucky to escape the fate of their counterparts elsewhere in South-Eastern Europe.

Mosque at Constanza

Muslims were forbidden to settle in Wallachia and Moldavia to prevent them from appealing to the Sultan for protection against the Christian authorities. Ethnicity in the era before nationalism was less important than religion and every Christian who owned land was a citizen. Greeks, Serbs, Armenians and Albanians were magistrates and bishops. Jews could settle, but could not be citizens unless they converted.

It is not clear how we should describe the status of the Regat in English, but protectorate or suzerainty are inaccurate approximations. Home rule is not quite right for the Phanariot era in the 18th Century, when the principalities were ruled by Greeks, who bought their throne from the Sultan and did not last long, but would apply to the periods of native princes in the seventeenth century and after the Wallachian uprising of 1821. At any rate the Sultan played no part in ruling the Regat whose rulers had far more freedom from Constantinople than Romania now has from Brussels. Only in 1876 did the new Ottoman constitution for the first time enact that Wallachia and Moldavia were full parts of the empire. The War of Independence followed in 1877, a war, though, that was not really fought for de jure independence, but under compulsion from the Czar who would have marched his army across the principalities in any case.

Romanians tell me that Romania resembles other Balkan countries, especially Serbia and Greece, and they should know much better than me, but I always fancy that the Balkan feeling, which you get in other Balkan countries, Albania most of all, and which is really a Turkish feeling, is sensibly less in evidence here. This may be simply due to the fact that Romanian is, despite all attempts to deny it, a Latin language. But if I am right and it goes deeper than this, this would be the explanation. At any rate, there are no mosques here, except in the Dobrudgea.

Ali Ghazi Mosque in Babadag, built in the 16th century, is the oldest mosque in Romania. 

I first came to the Balkans in 1990 by train, hoping to see Europe morph into Asia. Strada Lipscani felt utterly sui generis and un-Western, with gypsy or Arab music playing from transistor radios, but, apart from the old town in Bucharest, Romania was Europe and so was Bulgaria, despite her statues of Lenin, mosques and the gypsy quarter in Plovdiv. In 1990, after Romania, Istanbul was almost a bore - it was back to capitalism and Mars bars and foreign newspapers - but it was Muslim and the East. It felt like Asia. Now that I have lived in the Balkans for fourteen years, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey feel as if they have very much in common. At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium. 

When I went to Constanza for the first time in 1999 and saw the mosque there, overlooking the Black Sea, I felt that I was in an odd, hybrid place. My generation was the last that could forget that there were large numbers of Muslims in Western Europe. That was in 1999 and we cannot forget them now. The roughly 20,000 Romanian Muslims, inaccurately labelled Turks, are a tiny number compared with the millions in England, France, Germany and Spain. The town where I was born, like Constanza, now has two mosques.

I have met three or four Romanian so-called Turks, who were all very nice people. The one I liked most was a very sympathetic young woman (she might have had gypsy blood) in Constanza who told me she had converted to Christianity and in her spare time went around Muslim villages, trying to convert other Muslims. She wanted, she said, to set them free. How different from the Anglican way of doing things. Something about her simplicity moved me a great deal.

Emil Perhinschi, to whom I am indebted for teaching me much about Romanian history, comments as follows (Ion Bratianu was Liberal Prime Minister during the War of independence and Mihail Kogalniceanu was a highly regarded former Prime Minister):

"At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium." 
that country was calling itself (herself ?) Romania, too ;) not Greater Greece, nor Byzantium, and the Romaioi and Rumanians North of the Danube were the last to abandon the original Megali Ideea, which was to restore the Eastern Roman Empire ... the former 48ers were still talking about a Greek-Rumanian confederation until close to 1860. At least they were accused by their enemies of having such plans ... Barbu Catargiu mentions this in his speeches.
"I suspect there were not very many Romanians in the Dobrudgea in 1878 and think it was poor substitute for Bessarabia which Alexander II and Disraeli ensured the Romanians lost." 
Very likely Bratianu traded Bessarabia for Dobrudgea when he made the secret deal with the Russians, but had to pretend he does not agree since his deal was not extremely popular. ... in 1877 there were hot debates against whom should Rumania go to war, and while the wives were entertaining Russian officers at court receptions the husbands were drilling the army in Oltenia and would have gone against the Russians but for the article 7 in the 1876 Ottoman constitution.
Rumania needed a useable sea port. Galatz and Ibrail were accessible to sea-going vessels, but only to small ships, and the Delta route was long, dangerous and infested with malaria ... around 1840s it was said that 1/10 of the sailors that crossed the Delta got infected. The Sulina channel was dredged since at least 1820, but the depth varied and at the mouth it was very low, ships had to be unloaded before crossing the bar then loaded back. Chilia was deeper, but lengthened very much the time needed to get to the Bosphorus.
Before 1878 Kustendge was a village of fishermen with very small docks, and the railway from Cernavoda was almost bankrupt because the docs in Kustendge were very poor and not protected, so very little traffic went that way. The port was built after 1878. 
During winter Dobrudgea was a popular destination for Rumanian shepherds, so there was a sizable Rumanian population, but no Rumanian majority, not even during the winter :). Dobrudgea was not very populated anyway: invasions and pitched battles fought in your backyard every 20 years took care of that. Some Circassian refugees were settled there after 1840, too. Taxes were much lower in the Ottoman Empire so when Dobrudgea became part of Rumania a lot of the natives sold their land and left before the government realized what is going on and lowered the land tax (Kogalniceanu took advantage of the sales then lobbied for a lower tax rate when he realized he sunk money in semi-desert).