Conversion to Islam in the Balkans

This volume offers a new approach to the subject of conversion to Islam in the Balkans. It reconstructs the stages of the Islamization process from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and examines the factors and stimuli behind it. The practice of accepting Islam in the front of the sultan, characteristic of the last period of Islamization, and granting to new Muslims an amount of money known as kisve bahası, is shown in the context of Ottoman social development. An innovative structural analysis of the petitions requesting kisve bahası leads to examining the origins of the practice and constructing a collective portrait of the new Muslims who submitted them. Facsimiles and translations of the most interesting petitions are appended.

Anton Minkov, Ph.D. (2000) in Islamic Studies, McGill University, is a part-time professor of Middle Eastern Studies at University of Ottawa. He is a contributor to Turkish Sources of Bulgarian History, vol. 8 (Sofia, 2001) and Balkan Identities (Sofia, 2003).