The Genealogy of Old Islam

The Greek revolution of 1821 which led to the independence of Greece (1830) from the Ottoman Empire was the first successful national movement in the Balkans, and it established a pattern that was followed by similar national re­volts on the part of other nations based on the belief that the ‘Christian na­tions’ had ‘awakened’ and thrown off the ‘Ottoman yoke’.

In 1830, Muslims constituted a very small group within the then borders of Greece with almost no special institutional protection. By 1881, with the annex­ation of Thessalia-Arta (1881), Muslim communities (numbering about 40,000 at that time) acquired protection as a minority by the Treaty of Constantinople (1881). In effect, the Ottoman millet system (ethno-religious communal institu­tional autonomy) was preserved and the local muftis acquired quasi-judicial authority in personal status matters. Muslim schools and religious foundations (yakif) were recognised in Greek law and were administered by local Muslim Community Councils. By the end of the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and with the annexation of the New Territories by Greece, the same status was extended to more than 500,000 Muslims who became Greek citizens. With the Treaty of Athens, signed between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in 1913, the legal status of the Muslim communities was consolidated. Community schools and the waqfs were kept under their authority, and the muftis acquired advisory jurisdiction on personal matters. It is worth noting that Crete, too, before its union with the Greek Kingdom in the same year and during its political auton­omy from the Ottoman Empire, offered a sophisticated legal framework to the Muslim community of the island which was elaborated mostly by Eleftherios Venizelos, future predominant political figure of Greece.^[232]

After the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, a compulsory population ex­change took place under the Lausanne Convention of January 1923 and 450,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey. According to the Convention, 92,000 Muslims of Western Thrace (Turkish-speakers and Bulgarian-speakers or Pomaks) were exempted from the population exchange, as a counter weight to the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul, Imvros and Tenedos who were also exempt­ed from the exchange.

Today, Muslims of Greek citizenship of Thrace (about 85,000) are the only recognised minority in Greece. They are mostly Turkish-speakers and many ex­press Turkish national feelings. About 20,000 of them have Pomak (a Bulgarian dialect) as their mother tongue, partly expressing an ethnic Pomak identity, often along with a Turkish (national) identity, and about 5,000 speak Romany (partly expressing an ethnic Roma identity), although most of the Muslim Roma are monolingual Turkish speakers. As religion and mother tongue ceased to be asked after in the national census after 1951, all the above figures are rough estimates. Minority Muslims are all Sunni except for 2,000 or 3,000 who are Bektashi. Today, Muslims from Thrace also live in Athens (15,000) and Thessaloniki (4,000), where they have migrated for economic reasons. In the Dodecanese Islands (Rodos and Kos) about 2,000 live on each island. During the Greek-Turkish confrontations of 1960s and 1970s, a wave of Muslims emi­grated from Thrace to Turkey, Germany and other countries for political and economic reasons.

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