Hybridizing Islam in the Balkans: The Rise of Salafi-Hanafism in Bulgaria

Abstract

The present study involves the context of Bulgaria, revealing cases of “non-occurrence” of violence through an analysis of local actors belonging to transnational Salafism and perceived by law enforcement, the media, and society at large as radicalized Islamists. The analysis tackles the concepts of Islamism and Salafism by focusing on court cases of 13 and 14 Muslims accused of “propagating war”. Their personal pathways are seen as indicative of a new trend—the convergent indigenization of Salafism through a hybridization with various Islamic trends in a local context dominated by Hanafism. The chapter thus introduces the concept of Salafi-Hanafism designating a hybrid combination between a Salafi creed and Hanafi practices which shifts the stress from activism to a more inclusivist approach to religion and society.

1 Introduction

The revival of Islam in Europe with its large-scale recent Muslim immigration in the West and the revitalized autochthonous Muslim populations in the East are in accord with the increasing religious and sociopolitical relevance of Islamic identity. In the post-9/11 era, this has coincided with a policy trend toward a “securitization of Islam” that is “grounded in subtle changes of mainstream policies or bureaucracies” and “tends to exacerbate the externality of Islam and Muslims within the European and American societies” (Cesari 2012, p. 433). In Southeastern Europe—Bulgaria and the Western Balkans alike—perceptions of a “traditional” as opposed to “alien” Islam “imported” mostly from the Arab world is ubiquitous. Within this dichotomous distinction, “Arab” Islam has been described by a plethora of terms with negative connotations (Lubanska 2015, p. 111) such as Wahhabism, Salafism, Islamism, and radical Islam (Evstatiev 2022, pp. 75–78).

In the post-Ottoman Balkans, religion—not only Islam—remains an essential part even of many non-believers’ identity (Evstatiev 2019). From the 1990s, the Yugoslav succession wars added violent connotations, portraying the region as distinct from Europe and affiliating it with the Middle East (Sadriu 2019) through Islam’s transnational community—the umma. Given the recent Islamist radicalization waves throughout the Balkans, it is important to understand when and why violence occurs and, respectively, does not occur. Who are the main actors of Islamism and how does their ideology contextualize through fluid and volatile goals against the backdrop of local Islam? The answers to such questions as well as the analysis of the expected developments in the near future require a two-fold enterprise: addressing, on the one hand, the issue of how state and society react to Islamism and, on the other hand, how their reactions transform Islamism itself.

Revitalized Islamic identity found itself enmeshed today in a plethora of contested concepts. Radicalization, Islamism, and Salafism are such concepts that have been, for years, at the heart of research and measures aimed at preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE). Violent extremism itself lacks a precise definition, being used synonymously with or as a replacement for radicalization and terrorism. Initially, the term appeared as the US President Barack Obama was reluctant to use the word “Islam” in any form when discussing al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. Washington thus adopted the term “violent extremism” to denote the jihadis, and the policy was, respectively, called “countering violent extremism” (Haykel 2016). In the Balkans, the issue of extremism became particularly pressing after the outbreak of the recent war in Syria, for violence occurred—mostly following the export of foreign fighters to the theatres of Salafi insurgency in the Middle East. Around 1,070 persons from the Western Balkans made their way to Syria and Iraq, joining the ranks of primarily IS and to a lesser extent al-Qaeda affiliates (Azinović 2018, pp. 3–6; Shtuni 2019, p. 18). Currently, the Western Balkans is the region with the highest number of returned foreign fighters in Europe.

What, however, is it that wards off decisive moments from tipping over into violence, and what prevents Islamic/Islamist radicalization? Cragin (2014, p. 337) suggests that it is impossible to understand pathways to radicalization, or design policies to preempt them, without a complementary knowledge of why individuals resist the influence of violent extremism. Overall, the often-cited drivers of violent extremism (socioeconomic deprivation, political grievances, and fundamentalist religious views) should in theory have led to a much higher number of people joining violent groups. Kurzman (2011, p. 11), however, indicates that, despite concerted attempts by violent extremists to recruit more broadly during all recent waves of Islamist terrorism, less than 1 in 100,000 Muslims has joined violent extremist movements since 9/11. Seeking to understand the non-occurrence of violence and resilience to it in the Middle East in the example of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Fahmi (2020, p. 7), in turn, outlines four main factors: legitimacy, social trust, institutional rules, and external pressure. In the Balkans, three major factors of resilience, and respectively non-occurrence, were identified in recent fieldwork-based research: (1) local communities exhibiting social cohesion and civic values; (2) the role of imams and individuals of authority; and (3) preventive measures (Evstatiev and Mishkova 2022, pp. 3–4).

The aim of the present chapter is to involve the context of Bulgaria, revealing cases of non-occurrence of violence through an analysis of local actors belonging to transnational Salafism and perceived by law enforcement, the media, and society at large as radicalized Islamists. In so doing, I first clarify the concepts of Islamism and Salafism vis-à-vis the notion of radicalization. I then tackle two court cases (of 13 and 14 Muslims) accused of “propagating war,” foregrounding the radicalization of two Salafi actors—a female Muslim known in the media as “Ms. Jihad” and the until recently imprisoned preacher Ahmed Moussa. His personal pathway is indicative of a new trend—the convergent indigenization of Salafism through a hybridization with various Islamic trends in a local context dominated by Hanafism¹—a tendency observed in the Middle East, West Africa, or Southeast Asia, where a convergence even with Sufism seems possible (Blank 2021, pp. 20–23). The high-profile lawsuits against Salafis together with the reactions to the news on global jihad by groups like IS and al-Qaeda brought about the shaping of a parallel media and analytical domain of public discourses on Islamism and radical Islam that also requires elucidation.

I argue that the notion of hybridizing Islam can help us understand how the actors of revivalist Islamic and Islamist currents pursue a contextualization strategy, allowing them to remain relevant to their target audiences by refashioning their legitimacy according to the given cultural and national settings. In particular, as a result of external (securitization) and internal (the Muslim community and its institutions) pressure, Salafis in Bulgaria have adopted a strategy to merge into the locally embedded Hanafi tradition. Sociologically, Salafis are becoming less exclusive, more flexible, and adaptable to the national context. Doctrinally, the outcome is a hybrid combination between a Salafi creed and Hanafi practices—a new phenomenon, which I define here as “Salafi-Hanafism.” Hybridized Islamism leaves less room for political Islam, shifting the stress from activism to a more inclusivist approach to religion, society, and communal life.

The reshuffling resembles what some recent studies (Merone et al. 2021) designate as “Salafi-Malikism” in Tunisia where the adaptation to the local Maliki² context allows Salafis to preserve their teaching and preaching activities within the securitization wave. Others (Gade and Palani 2022, p. 222) observe hybridized forms of Islamism and nationalism by which Salafis and movements influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood adopt “Islamo-nationalist stances.” In Bulgaria, as in other Balkan countries (Kursani 2018), these developments assume a situational “Hanafization” of Salafism. The paradox in this competition for autochthony amidst social and existential uncertainty (Bøås and Dunn 2013, p. 20), from which Salafism provides a way out, is that Salafism seeks to doctrinally assimilate Hanafism, getting in the same time locally legitimized through an adaptive hybridization with Hanafi discourses and practices. The trend entails entangled developments on two levels—doctrinal and political, which requires an analysis not only of the intra-Muslim processes of convergence but the perceptions thereof, often resorting to the concept of Islamism to describe reactions of state actors, the judiciary, key policy analysts, and the media.

2 Coming to Terms: Islamism, Salafism, and Radicalization

The understanding of Islamism and Salafism through the prism of radicalization is often thwarted from the confusions around these concepts. Radicalization, often used as a synonym for an “extremist” as opposed to a “moderate” worldview, is, in turn, a confusing term, used currently in relation to terrorism and violent extremism, as adopted by Neumann (2008), that emphasizes the individual and, partially, the ideology and the group and entails the understating of the wider “root causes.” Thus, intelligence agencies and law enforcement have adopted the notion of radicalization as constituting a direct or indirect security threat. However, as Sedgwick (2010, p. 491) writes, it is probably better to abandon the idea of “radical” and “radicalization” as absolute concepts as it is extremely difficult in this continuum to identify the dividing line between “radical” and “moderate.” The word “radical” has, in fact, no meaning on its own. Explaining the concept anew, Neumann (2013) stresses that no serious scholar argues that all—and even most—cognitive extremists will go on to embrace violence. He emphasizes that, without the term radicalization, policymakers and researchers can gain more clarity but at the price of neglecting non-violent extremists and their attempts to undermine democracy and social cohesion. If adopted carefully and without absolutization, radicalization can thus still be useful in understanding the non-occurrence of violence in combination with other factors.

To make things even more complicated, the term Islamism is used in at least two overlapping but still different ways—with a narrow and a broad meaning. In its first, narrow meaning, Islamism is understood as distinct from the concept of Islamic fundamentalism which is “the choice to return to the original foundations of Islam” (Cook 2014, pp. xviii–xix). Thus, Islamism denotes “Islam as a modern ideology and a political program” (Kramer 2003, p. 71) and in such a sense is a synonym of “political Islam.” In the modern age, Muslim activists seek to raise the political profile of Islam, usually by implementing the shari’a. Islamists agree on this overall objective but differ widely in many other matters: some of them would resort to violence but others would not (Bunzel 2017, p. 5). As Wagemakers (2021, p. 12) explains, fundamentalists can perceive the threat posed by modernity as political (Islamism) or as doctrinal (Salafism).

In its second, broader definition, Islamism is more pertinent to the conceptualization of the present study and simply denotes any form of Islamic activism that entails a “systematic religious effort which goes beyond the ritual observance of Islam and which is not organised by the state” (Hegghammer 2007, p. 91). Noting that such a definition encompasses transnational movements inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan-type), as well as Salafi movements, including quietist Salafis, Gade and Bøås (2022, pp. 173–174) also bring to the fore hybridity, stressing that Islamists “adapt their pathways to the political opportunities given by the political field,” though their ideology and identity constrain which opportunities and decisions are taken. I argue that the choice of non-violent pathways and the non-occurrence of violence among Islamists in Bulgaria are chosen in the decisive moments, such as the outbreak of the Syrian war, by hybridizing with the locally mainstream forms of Islam.

Doctrinally, what primarily identifies Salafis is their theology and understanding of tawhid—Allah’s oneness and unity. Seeking scriptural certainty, Salafis adopt a specific approach to the texts of revelation and definition of the true believers versus the unbelievers by setting thick doctrinal and communal boundaries. In matters of law and jurisprudence, Salafis pursue la madhhabiyya (“non-schoolism”), arguing that knowledgeable Muslims should transcend the boundaries of each of the four established Sunni legal schools (madhhabs). They emphasize the need to access the foundational sources of revelation directly—through independent reasoning (ijtihad) that bypasses the blind emulation (taqlid) of the chain of authorities within the schools of law (Evstatiev 2021, pp. 184–188).

3 Muslims in Bulgaria: Toward Hybridizing Islam

Predominantly an Orthodox Christian country, Bulgaria has the largest autochthonous Muslim minority within the European Union, making up around 10% of its population in the early twenty-first century, according to the most recent census (2011).³ Historically, when untangling from the Ottoman Empire after the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state in 1878, Muslims transformed from Ottoman subjects belonging to the larger imperial society into a minority community within a nation-state. Many Muslims declined to sign up as Bulgarian subjects and wanted to register as “Ottomans” and, on the other hand, trying to achieve national homogeneity, the new Bulgarian state devised policies toward the Muslim population ranging from educational and cultural measures to forced assimilation.⁴ Overall, Muslims in the country are ethnically non-homogeneous, encompassing mainly “ethnic Turks,” Bulgarian Muslims (known as Pomaks), and Roma.

Today, despite the intra-confessional diversity (0.5% are Alevis), the predominant number of Muslims (9.5% of the entire population) identify themselves as Sunnis, vis-à-vis 76% Orthodox Christians and others.⁵ Although the official 2011 census data does not allow for directly judging which identity is central for the different social, ethnic, and religious groups, some tendencies can be discerned from other studies. They indicate a trend of a strengthening Muslim identity and an increased communal convergence around some core Islamic values despite the still prevailing diversity in various other respects. Among the Pomaks, part of whom used to display a Turkish identity (even with no knowledge of Turkish), there is a persistently growing tendency for “ethnically” self-identifying as “just Muslims.” The increasingly transnational religious identities among parts of Bulgaria’s Muslims bring about the reemergence of an umma-consciousness competing with loyalty to the nation-state and even to the local Muslim community (Evstatiev 2019, p. 97). This universalizing appeal notwithstanding, Salafism which, together with Islamism more broadly, is today among the main vehicles of such “globalized” trends, gets “localized” and indigenized to remain relevant. The trend signals a change within the Sunni spectrum of Islam caused by a specific merging of universal religion and local culture within a process of “glocalization” understood as “a hybridization requiring the interplay of both ‘global’ and ‘local’ factors” (Roudometof and Dessì 2022, p. 3). Two key factors intertwine to shape how Salafism hybridizes: one is the ongoing intra-communal convergence caused by transnational Islam, and the other is embedded in the post-9/11 securitization.

In Bulgaria, though there have been no Muslim foreign fighters joining IS or al-Qaeda, preachers and activists have more than once attracted the attention of state institutions, the media, and law enforcement as well as the State Agency for National Security (SANS) and the Prosecutor’s Office, including in a high-profile court proceeding that started in 2012 on the basis of pre-trial proceedings from 2009 accusing 13 Muslims from various southern regions of Bulgaria. The “thirteen imams” as they were called by the media, though one woman was among the defendants, were accused of “propagating antidemocratic ideology manifested in opposing the principles of democracy, the separation of power, liberalism, statehood and the rule of law, and basic human rights, such as the equality of men and women, through propagating the ideology of the Salafist current in Islam and the imposition of a sharī’a state” (Indictment No 9 2009).

Among the predominantly Pomak group within this “trial against the thirteen imams” was the charismatic Salafi Muslim leader and preacher Ahmed Moussa from the Roma-populated Iztok neighborhood⁶ in Pazardzhik. In the mid-1990s, Moussa went to work in Vienna where he (re)-discovered Islam and eventually adopted a strictly Salafi doctrinal orientation.⁷ In 1999, Ahmed Moussa attended the one-year course of study at the School for Imams (Shkola za imami) in Surnitsa where his teacher was the major Salafi imam Said Mutlu, a graduate from Saudi Arabia. In 2004, he was given a three-year suspended sentence by the Pazardzhik Regional Court for spreading anti-democratic ideology and religious hatred. Moussa then engaged in the Islamist ideology of the Kaplanci movement,⁸ where he became widely known as an Islamist, passionately calling for the establishment of a caliphate after earlier arrests of which the media wrote that “in the prayer house established by him radical Islamic literature has been found, and he put an Islamic flag on the roof of his house” (24 Chasa 2014).

The Chief Muftiship, the official Muslim institution in Bulgaria, was engaged with the entire process of all these court proceedings. The defendants belonging to the Muftiship structures not only kept their positions but were often promoted. The Salafi imam Muhammed Kamber became a member of the Supreme Muslim Council (Vissh Myusyulmanski Suvet) at the Chief Muftiship, and, from the beginning of 2017, he became a member of the Editorial Board of its official monthly bilingual magazine—in Bulgarian, Myusyulmani, in Turkish, Müslümanlar. In 2014, another defendant in the Pazardzhik trial, the Imam of Rudozem, Khairi Sherifov, won the prize “Imam of the Year.” Until early 2021, Salafi Abdullah Salih remained at his office as Regional Mufti of Pazardzhik District, responsible for the area of Velingrad largely inhabited by Muslims in mixed or entirely Pomak localities (Evstatiev 2022, pp. 100–101). This was a significant stage signaling the institutionally fostered hybridization aimed at domesticating Salafism in Bulgaria, where it began to merge with the local Hanafi tradition.

Only Ahmed Moussa and his Roma following were reluctant to get overarched by the Chief Muftiship’s umbrella and continued privileging their distinct Salafi creed (‘aqida), which they claimed would not allow them to pray after the Chief Mufti as their imam. Among the local Muslims in the Rhodopes, the rumor was spread that “Ahmed Musa, and respectively his followers, accused the Chief Mufti of unbelief, thus applying to him the legally consequential Islamic procedure of takfir.”⁹ The Chief Mufti Mustafa Alish confirmed this evidence though phrasing it differently to explain that “the jemaats following Ahmed Moussa refused to accept the Chief Mufti as their Imam, because he is to them a representative of the unbelieving state and, as such, of the “satanic evil” (taghut).”¹⁰ In any case, Ahmed Moussa and his Roma following, unlike their Pomak co-religionists from the “trial against the thirteen imams,” were not covered by the Chief Muftiship’s institutional support. This is, however, not a real split, because, due to their distinct culture, the Roma have never gained full recognition as equals by mainstream Muslims in the Balkans—a situation dating back to Ottoman times (Evstatiev 2022, p. 103). The Roma communities, to which Moussa’s Salafi following from the Iztok (Tokayto) neighborhood in Pazardzhik belong, prefer to self-identify not as Roma, as they are identified by the neighboring populations, but as Turkish-speaking Muslims—a search for certainty and autochthony.

4 The Salafis: From Globalized Belonging to Local Allegiances

On November 25, 2014, SANS, assisted by the gendarmerie, mounted an operation at four Roma neighborhoods across the country’s south—in the areas of Pazardzhik, Plovdiv, Smolyan, and Haskovo—as part of a pre-trial proceeding instituted in connection with “the dissemination of an anti-democratic ideology and propagandizing war” (Mediapool 2014). The operation, in which 26 Roma Muslims were arrested in the end, was launched by the Pazardzhik District Prosecution Office following an alert about propagandizing ideas of IS. The official charges brought afterward against 14 members of those Roma communities inspired by Ahmed Moussa included incitement of religious hatred via social media by sharing photos and videos of IS fighters, jihad chants, and videos of IS executions (Stoilova 2016). These were the openly displayed signs of Islamist behavior—notwithstanding the doctrinal identity of the arrested activists.

4.1 “Ms. Jihad” and the Untenable Conceptualization of Islamism by the State

Among the defendants in that prolonged lawsuit was the indicative case of Alexandrina Angelova, often called in the media “Ms. Jihad” (Nova TV 2015). Taking part in the ongoing activities of Muslim women in Bulgaria aimed at a rediscovery of their religious roots, she was accused of “preaching hatred on religious grounds between November 2013 and November 2014 in Pazardzhik and the village of Startsevo¹¹ by translating and disseminating the book Nawaqidu’l-Islam (Apostasy)—Text and Explanation (Ibn Abdilwehhab 2014),¹² manifested in religious intolerance. […] By providing and displaying publicly a flag with the logo of the Islamic State (ISIS) in a room belonging to the mosque of the same village, she was propagating war breaching the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of the United Nations” (Okruzhna Prokuratura Pazardzhik 2015). The book is, in fact, a larger explanation of the short, several-page presentation of the Nullifiers of Islam (Nawaqid al-Islam) by Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), usually presented in various forms of commentary (sharh), which makes it a significantly larger volume, or as part of other larger collections, e.g., the one of Ibn Bishr (1928).¹³

The work of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab belongs to the Wahhabi classics and is one of its major explanations offered in the commentary of the influential Saudi Sheikh Salih Ibn Fawzan al-Fawzan (b. 1933) published in Riyadh (1425 AH/2004). Al-Fawzan is one of the most eminent and strict Salafi preachers in Saudi Arabia, who contributed to the contemporary emphasis on the doctrine of al-wala ’wa l-bara’ (“loyalty and disavowal”) by insisting that Muslims in non-Muslim countries should emigrate to the Islamic world, Muslims should not adopt the Christian calendar and should hate non-Muslims (Wagemakers 2009, pp. 89–90). Islamic texts such as Nawaqid al-Islam are convenient for Salafi Muslims because they usually synthesize in a very concise form long-standing and complex debates within the larger Islamic tradition. In this case, the text deals with the question of takfir (“accusations of unbelief”), which is legally consequential in Islamic law by envisioning the death penalty for the offender.¹⁴ The “nullifiers” (nawaqid) represent the types of behavior positioning a Muslim outside of Islam turning him/her into an unbeliever (kafir).

The sophistication and complexity of takfir procedures in Islamic jurisprudence notwithstanding, it is telling for the observed reactions of state institutions and law enforcement exacerbating the externality of “Islamism” (supposed to be a “political ideology”) as opposed to “traditional Islam” (supposed to be “a religion”) to compare two presentations of these “nullifiers” of Islam. The first is embedded in the ten nullifiers in the Sharh of Nawaqid al-Islam which provoked the law enforcement agency to arrest Alexandrina Angelova, while the second is the explanation of ten positions nullifying Islam provided by the official institution of Bulgarian Muslims, the Chief Muftiship, as evidenced a decade and a half ago in its official print publication, the bilingual magazine Musyulmani (Table 1).

Table 1 Nullifiers of Islam

The juxtaposition hardly needs further elucidation, as it reveals in a clear-cut manner the sharing of de facto one and the same religious principles for making judgments on the apostasy of a Muslim and the acts which, if performed, would eventually lead to his or her excommunication. However, when the principles are discussed by Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and commented on by contemporary Salafi scholars from Saudi Arabia, they are perceived as alien and “radical,” unlike their slightly re-ordered and edited, though only in terms of phrasing, version published by the Chief Muftiship’s official magazine, distributed and accessible in all Bulgarian mosques. Instead of providing any particular explanation of the “nullifiers,” the Muftiship’s version simply listed them—a Muslim endeavor within the rediscovery of Islamic teachings then unknown to many Muslims in post-Communist Bulgaria. The seized Bulgarian translation of Sheikh Salih Ibn Fawzan’s explanation of the “nullifiers,” in turn, offers precise explanations, some of which struck state law enforcement agencies and the Prosecutor’s Office to be dangerous.

Among this new court investigation’s expert witnesses was Alex Alexiev (1941–2019), then Chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and editor of a geopolitical website,¹⁹ former senior analyst for the Rand Corporation and the conservative Washington DC-based think-tank Center for Security Policy, which he represented in hearings before the U.S. Senate from the early 2000s onwards. Since then, Alexiev has vindicated with conviction the dichotomy of “radical Islam” versus “traditional Islam.” For Alexiev (2003), “radical Islam” underlies “the ideology of extremism,” drawing upon the teachings of “radical clerics” such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, whose “extreme doctrines contradicted and stood on their head major tenets of traditional Islam and in a real sense represent an outright falsification of the Muslim faith.”²⁰ In Bulgaria, Alexiev (2012) was one of the analysts who have persistently emphasized “radical Islam” as a threat imported by graduates from the Arab world who rejected “the traditional and moderate Bulgarian Islam of their parents.” At a court session, he commented that the Islam of IS “is of the type of the so-called Wahhabi or Salafi Islam which in this form of it does not have anything in common with traditional Islam” (Vichev 2017).

4.2 Ahmed Moussa and the Emerging Salafi-Hanafi Consensus

In a handwritten personal testimony carefully prepared for his own defense at the trial “against the 14 Roma Muslims,” Moussa (2016, p. 11) explains that: “If you mean that democracy is sovereignty of the people [his emphasis], each Muslim believing in Allah and accepting Islam knows that sovereign power belongs to Allah the Almighty. Even if all people gather at one and the same place, and the evil spirits (jinn) together with the good spirits (melek)²¹ also join to pronounce that interest is permitted,²² we, the Muslim community, do not accept that and reject it.” He then goes on, relating this comparison to the impermissibility of innovation (bid’a) and stressing that all human acts must be confined to the religious prescriptions as revealed in the Qur’an and hadith (Moussa 2016, p. 12). An example that indicates what Salafism usually defines as man-made laws contradicting shari’a is the so-called burqa ban in Bulgaria—once, he emphasizes, the Communist regime banned this type of Muslim women’s veiling, and now, in turn, democracy bans it, too, thus putting female Muslims under “home arrest” (Moussa 2016, pp. 14–16).

Even Moussa, who was accused of supporting IS’s Jihadi-Salafis, however, resorts to a convergent, less exclusive, and sometimes even inclusive, discourse when speaking of religious practices that Salafis share with local “traditional” Hanafis, thus accentuating the hybridization of Islam within the ongoing Sunni convergence. His preaching against the participation of Muslims in democratic elections, for which he has been defined as an Islamist, may thus even be incorrect as it implies the notion of political activism, whereas Moussa has been calling for refraining from enmeshment in what Salafis believe is infidel politics. He thus shares major points of IS’ and al-Qaeda’s creeds, which both accuse those who support democracy of unbelief,²³ and presents himself as a radicalized Salafi. At the same time, he does not publicly engage in supporting “revolutionary jihad,” but rather emphasizes the role of preaching in transforming the social world in which Muslims live.

Moussa quotes one of the witnesses who claims that, after Moussa’s preaching, there have been no thefts and drugs were no longer sold in the Roma neighborhood Iztok of Pazardzhik (Moussa 2016, p. 23), and, while emphasizing that killing is forbidden by Allah (Moussa 2016, p. 24), he certainly does not mean to deny the validity of jihad. Most strikingly, Moussa (2016, p. 33) not only mentioned the eponyms of the four Sunni legal schools as Salafis, but stresses that Abu Hanifa, in particular, “can be listed among the first names in the development of the Salafi idea.” He further explains to the judge that: “Each Muslim, who has accepted the Islamic religion by conviction, can be Salafi [in creed, i.e., theology] but the [method of] application [of this creed] can well be Hanafi.” In the first half of 2022, the Supreme Court of Appeal (2022, April 11) released Ahmed Moussa from jail by revoking the decisions, and respectively his and the other defendants’ sentences issued in 2019 by the Pazardzhik District Court and, subsequently, by the Court of Appeal in Plovdiv.²⁴ The motivation of the Supreme Court draws on the procedural inaccuracies of the lower instances and on the finding that Prosecutor Nedyalka Popova has been biased during the entire court proceedings at the lower instances.²⁵ The court proceedings have thus returned to the District Court in Pazardzhik, which is supposed to initiate a new investigation.

In a conversation often switching between Arabic and Bulgarian, Muhammed Kamber, one of the most educated Salafis, with a markedly academic profile, and a graduate from Saudi Arabia, in turn, emphasizes the figure of Abu Hanifa, “who is a salaf.”²⁶ Kamber carefully distinguishes a Muslim creedal affiliation from the identity in matters of Islamic law, in which he tolerates a taqlid (the blind emulation of the traditional authorities within the legal schools) for the “commoners,” though emphasizing that the knowledgeable should “with their reason” (sic) derive the best from the four legal schools. Thus, the boundaries of the madhhabs should be transcended (as Salafism requires) to achieve the best opinion on a specific case. These shared Salafi doctrines notwithstanding, Kamber openly opines that “a Muslim therefore could be Salafi in creedal matters (‘aqidatan) but Hanafi in jurisprudential matters (fiqhan).” During the conversation, he mentions many Muslim authorities, including Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), to support his argument. When he explains his approach in preaching, Kamber notes that his emphasis is more directed toward achieving religious and social reform through morality—people shall not steal, lie, etc. At the same time, he is deeply proud that his grandfathers were soldiers serving in the Bulgarian army, but frankly shares his suffering from the disrespect he feels nowadays. Kamber might be a revived Salafi but his somewhat paradoxical nostalgia of the local tradition is obvious. Especially when discussing veiling, he seems deeply touched, displays on his phone various photos of traditionally veiled women from the past, even though their dress code contradicts what is the full-face veiling norm in Salafi circles.

Another Salafi preacher, Ushev (2021, April 19), also a very well-educated graduate from Saudi Arabia, who was among the defendants in the “trial against the 13 imams,” in one of his recent video lectures tackled the question of whether women have to fast when having their menstrual period (hayd). Tellingly, he refers to the multivolume Encyclopedia of Islamic Jurisprudence (al-Mawsu’a al-Fiqhiyya) published in Arabic in Kuwait from 1990 onwards as a point of departure for elaborating his thesis of the necessity to search for a legal consensus (ijma’) between the four schools of Islamic law. Even though he first mentions Abu Hanifa, the eponym of the Hanafi school, while Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), whose theology influenced the Salafi creed, is mentioned last. Ushev thus draws on the Hanafi anticipations to develop his argument by theologically overarching it under the Salafi creed without even mentioning the latter explicitly. This “Salafi-Hanafi” approach might eventually turn out situational, but it is a development that fosters the Sunni convergence via a new type of hybridizing Islam.

5 State and Society Reactions to Transnational Islamism

The emerging new “Islamic consensus” embraces the Salafis privileging a hybridized “common Muslimness.” Together with the lawsuits against “the 13 imams,” followed by the trial against “the 14 Roma Muslims,” the recent years have signaled an increasing public attention in Bulgaria to a variety of regional and global issues with a regional impact, such as the impact of IS and Al-Qaeda, the changes in neighboring Turkey, its religio-political influence on the Chief Muftiship and the system of Islamic religious education in Bulgaria. Under the leadership of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) gained an unprecedented role in the domestic, regional, and international policies of Turkey. The Diyanet’s members have been increasingly active among the Muslim communities in the Balkans, where, along with other Turkish foundations competing with the influence from the Arab world and various Salafī circles, they “can operate in a cultural climate to which they are more accustomed” (Öktem 2012, p. 57). Bulgaria, where Diyanet has funded major Islamic activities and educational centers of the Chief Muftiship, is no exception.

Increasingly stronger with the support of the Diyanet, the Bulgarian Chief Muftiship today seeks to effectively embrace all Muslims under its umbrella and has achieved much of this goal (Evstatiev 2022, p. 102). At the same time, some Bulgarian politicians of Turkish origin have tried to gain political support from the Turkish AKP-led government in order to change the post-Communist status quo where a large part of the Turkish and Muslim population of Bulgaria is represented in national politics after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 by the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF). In 2016, a new political party, DOST,²⁷ was established by Lyutvi Mestan and other former members of the MRF. Mestan himself, before being ousted from the MRF in December 2015, was its second chair following the well-known secularist politician Ahmed Doğan, who resigned while remaining “honorary chairman.” DOST involved some Muslim activists whose individual pathways crisscrossed religious and political agendas, such as the former spokesman of the Chief Muftiship, then the DOST Vice-Chairman, Hussein Hafuzov, perhaps the country’s first post-1989 religious activist and politician constantly and openly evoking Islam in his political activity (Evstatiev 2019, p. 87). In so doing, DOST drew on the undisguised ideological animosity of Ahmed Doğan toward Islamism and the lack of AKP support for his party. Although DOST initially gained some support from Turkey, it failed during the next general elections in 2017, and, subsequently, the new leadership of the MRF managed to keep its influence and even diplomatically warm up the relations with the AKP.

Politicians, intellectuals, policy analysts, and the media have put on the table of public discussion different options on how Bulgaria should cope with those new challenges and how the state shall supposedly distinguish between its indigenous Muslim population and those recent transnational developments. The public and policy debate on Islamist radicalization has been evolving as far as to reach the parliament in the form of a proposed law for “criminalizing radical Islam.” In 2016, a group of members of the Bulgarian parliament from the Patriotic Front (PF) initiated a series of law proposals and amendments involving—implicitly or explicitly—members of the Muslim community. Thus, a Bulgarian version of the so-called “burqa ban” perceived by local Muslims as “discriminatory law” (Evstatieva 2022, p. 183) was proposed and finally approved by the parliament in September 2016 (Krasimirov 2016). Among other issues, such as gender equality and some security concerns around the possibility of identifying citizens in public spaces, the motivation for that new law was that “radical Islam is an ideology, and not a religion, which has purely political aims, propagates violence against non-Muslims and is the main factor for the self-segregation of the Muslim communities. Imposing in one way or another the manner of constantly wearing burqas and other similar [attire] in a country is directly related to the threat of terrorism on jihadist grounds” (Bill 654-01-58 2016, p. 4).

The various bills invoked vivid public discussions (Petkova 2016b),²⁸ and, though all of them were interconnected, the proposal to criminalize the “ideology” of “radical Islam” seems the most controversial. The proposal of the Patriotic Front as a bill amendment to the Penal Code (Proposal 654-01-54 2016, pp. 2–3) stated:

§1. In Article 93,²⁹ a new Item 31 is created with the following text: “The ideology of ‘radical Islam’ is propagated by a person when s/he agitates with words, actions or spreading of texts or symbols for one of the following ideas: for the establishment of an Islamic state (Caliphate); for imposing shari’a laws over the secular [laws]; for forcibly imposing religious principles and norms of behavior peculiar to Islam or propagating violence in the form of holy war (jihad) against non-Muslims. The same act is present when recruiting followers or fundraising in support of a terrorist organization whose ideology is based on Islam, or when agitating in favor of such an organization”.

The motivation section of the proposal indicates that, according to its initiators: “There are two types of Islam—traditional Islam characteristic of Muslims in Bulgaria for centuries, and the new type of radical Islam which is a modern phenomenon dating back from no more than three decades. The first is religion, the latter is a radical ideology based on Islam” (Proposal 654-01-54 2016, p. 4). This attempt to frame the concepts matches some of the basic formulations suggested by Alexiev (2011, p. 13), who draws a dividing line between what he calls “Islamist definitions” and “reformist definitions.” The former assumes that shari’a is the “sacred Islamic law as revealed by God,” while the latter defines shari’a as a “man-made, post-Quranic invention designed to serve the political purposes of Islamic rulers after Muhammad.” This approach justifiably brings to the fore the role of ideology, but the method of differentiating “traditional” from “radical” Islam is too controversial, as it is irrelevant to the way Muslims themselves understand Islamic law.

The proposers of the bill criminalizing “radical Islam” further stated that international terrorism today is a direct consequence of the spread of “radical Islam,” which underlies 66% of the world’s terrorist activities. These members of parliament point explicitly to “four major organizations—the Taliban terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the IS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Qaeda. All of them function through an ideological motivation based on radical Islam” (Proposal 654-01-54 2016, p. 5). Such a view alludes to some debates among politicians and security analysts trying to “prove” that IS is “not Islamic” or at least a manifestation of “deviant Islam”,³⁰ in contradistinction to “traditional Islam.” Though understandable as a pursuit to justify some policy options of the day, such approaches are conceptually problematic. It is not the task of a secular, non-Muslim scholar to interfere in intra-Muslim discussions and, instead of analyzing them in a non-biased manner, to pronounce a decision on who among the Muslim adversaries is “right” and who is “wrong.” Not surprisingly, the efforts of the bill’s proposers to prevent radicalization were not successful, due to the way the initiative was inexpertly framed and the lack of a tenable definition of concepts such as “radical Islam.” The idea of the Patriotic Front to criminalize “radical Islam” as an “anti-democratic ideology” under the Penal Code eventually fell into oblivion and has not been resumed since 2016.

6 Conclusion

In Bulgaria, throughout the recent years, Salafis have been the main actors of Islamism in the broader sense of the term, as adopted here. In terms of their ethnic identity, most of them were Pomaks and Roma Muslims. As a rule, the Pomaks embraced the Salafi creed in the Arab world while many Roma were “Salafized” mostly via European channels of communication and the Turkish language. The shared primary goal of those Salafi actors is first and foremost religious. Salafis in Bulgaria have been, in principle, quietist and do not engage in politics in its modern, participatory sense. Moussa has even openly propagated that Muslims have to refrain from participation in general elections, which is a typical Salafi quietist stance. Avoiding this type of political participation, some Salafis in Bulgaria have distinguished themselves as social reformers transforming first and foremost their local community, living according to the shari’a and avoiding becoming enmeshed in the affairs of the secular society at large.

Salafis in Bulgaria have used both formal and informal primary means to achieve their religious goals. The formal means have been at the disposal of those among them who belong to the official Muslim institution in Bulgaria, the Muftiship, serving as imams. They thus draw on their position in the mosques to spread Salafi teachings. The informal means include more subtle forms of communication—social media, YouTube videos, and meetings outside of the mosque where the leaders can preach outside of the established form. The dissemination of Salafi literature, including the translation of books and brochures from Arabic, is also a widely practiced activity. Working with and among women is a distinctive feature of the Salafis in Bulgaria and elsewhere, by which the “Salafization” takes the form of a specific “dress code.” Informal education in religious circles or Qur’an courses is also a major tool. In the areas where Salafi preachers have been successful, the impact is enormous in that it entails an identity shift—from the local ties that usually bind people, to those who rediscover Islam through Salafism and are usually orientated toward the transnational umma. The localities get symbolically transformed in terms of how Muslims behave socially and dress.

In Bulgaria, no major security risks stemming from Islamism have been established so far as there are no foreign fighters who—like their coreligionists from the Western Balkans—have made their way to join Salafi insurgencies in the Middle East. However, there are still some risks, which are primarily social but also entail some political implications. The main long-term social risk stems from what can be described as a “self-ghettoization” that shapes emerging communities whose members would prefer to separate themselves from the larger society. This is therefore an issue related to social integration and cohesion, which assumes also a potential political risk—the disloyalty to the nation-state under certain circumstances and in decisive moments (external pressure, conflicts, and transnational allegiances). Part and parcel of the immediate and mid-term societal problem are the local social conflicts—between generations of Muslims or between “Salafized” and secularized citizens with a shared Muslim identity. The split is thus on two major social levels: on the one hand, between “Salafized” Muslims and the mainstream society, and, on the other hand, between Salafis and the rest of Muslims.

The non-occurrence of violence among radicalized Muslims in Bulgaria proves that the reasons for that are similar to what shapes resilience both in the Middle East and the Western Balkans. Hybridizing Islam by merging Salafism into the local Hanafi mainstream, which brought about the phenomenon of Salafi-Hanafism, was perhaps an initially unexpected development that strengthened the local legitimacy of the new Salafi actors. They merged—doctrinally and institutionally—with the Hanafi tradition, thus achieving a higher level of social trust. Most of the Salafis already follow the institutional rules of the Muftiship, which are shaped by Hanafis, often under Turkish control and influence. The external pressure, including that of securitization, made Salafis and their teaching increasingly flexible and inclusive. However inappropriate they might have been sometimes, the reactions of the state and society were a pressure that prevented further radicalization.

This is a major shift in Islamist pathways, signaling a new stage of hybridity, convergence, and adaptability. In the years to come, the number of subtle, hybrid actors will most probably increase at the expense of the actors that are easier to categorize in a straightforward manner. Strengthening social integration and cohesion requires decision-makers in Europe to be context-attentive but without forgetting the “big picture” as well as the volatility of Islamism in general and, in particular, Salafism as a transnational movement engaging in a shared umma-consciousness. To successfully navigate this subtle intersection between local, national, and transnational levels in the constantly evolving Islamism, governments and European institutions should build on the lessons learned to devise strategies of “soft pressure” and integration that prevent “self-ghettoization” as much as possible.