The murder of over 120 people in Paris by Muslim gunmen at
the weekend raises the question: can the same thing happen in Romania? To which
the answer is, yes of course. Romania is a likely target and if the terrorists badly
want to stage an atrocity here they may succeed, but Romania is better
protected in some ways than France or Great Britain.
There have been attempts by Muslim fanatics to enter Romania
for at least fifteen years, but almost the only advantage of having been a police state is
that the secret service (SRI) is one of
the few effective Romanian institutions. M16 contacts tell me that the SRI know
how to do their job.
The Muslim community, even after the recent noticeable influx
of refugees from Syria, is very small. The Muslims live mostly in the Dobrudja, in other words the coast and its hinterland, reasonably law-abiding and loyal to the country.
Romanian Muslims consider themselves and are in all respects except ethnicity Romanians.
This makes it easier for the authorities to keep track of people. Unlike in multiracial
London and Paris extremists here, even were they to get in, would not find
vibrant Muslim communities in which to hide and be accepted.
Neighbouring Bulgaria was less lucky. A Muslim suicide
bomber exploded a bomb on a bus full of Israeli tourists in Burgas in 2012 and
six people were killed, over thirty injured.
Syrian Sheik Omar Bakri, who claimed responsibility for the
Burgas bomb, was carefully watched and prevented from entering Romania.
However, he said in an interview at the time that both Romania and Bulgaria were
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 Muslims 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."
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 Dobrudja,, 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.
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 Dobrudja,.
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 seventeen
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.
I didn’t know back in 1990 that the Moldavian and Wallachian landed class spoke Greek (and dressed like Turks) until the middle of the 19th century or that a Greek general, Alexander
Ypsilantis, raised a revolt in Moldavia in March 1821 against the Sublime
Porte in order to create a new Byzantine Empire, expecting to win support from Romanians,
only to be defeated by Tudor Vladimirescu, who fought for the Sultan. Historians speak of Ypsilantis's revolt as the start of the Greek War of Independence but the Greece he was fighting for was not a national idea but a multiracial Christian state united by Greek culture and religion, Byzantium in fact. Vladimirescu, by contrast, wanted to free Moldavia and Wallachia from both the Turks and the Greek
aristocracy. Nevertheless the idea of a Greek-Rumanian confederation still lingered
on even into the late 1850s.
When I went to Constanta 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, who live mostly in the Dobrudja, inaccurately called
Turks, are a tiny number compared with the millions in England, France, Germany
and Spain. The town where I was born, like Constanta, 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 Constanta 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.