Imperial expansion, colonization, and conversion to Islam in the Islamic world's 'Wild West': The formation of the Muslim community in Ottoman Deliorman (N.E. Balkans), 15th-16th cc

This dissertation takes up the task to describe and analyze the main aspects of the broad demographic, ethno-religious, and socio-cultural transformation that took place in a geographically limited region of the Ottoman Balkans---the Deliorman (Wild Forest, mod. Ludogorie) in today's northeastern Bulgaria, which led to the formation of one of the most sizable Muslim, Turkish-speaking communities in the Balkans that is still prominent today and is the only one with a very significant heterodox Muslim element. The nature of this community's formation, which was influenced by the dynamic interplay of Turcoman colonization from Anatolia and to a lesser degree from Thrace, conversion to Islam, and the gradual ethno-linguistic assimilation of parts of the local, Orthodox Christian and Slavic-speaking population sets Deliorman apart from most of the other regions in the Balkans with sizeable Muslim communities, like Bosnia, Albania, and the Rhodope mountains, where the formation of Muslim communities was related primarily to conversion to Islam only.;Annexed by the expanding Ottoman state in the late fourteenth century from the remnants of the medieval Bulgarian state, and characterized by a hilly, wooded terrain, Ottoman Deliorman was traditionally a place of refuge for all kinds of political and religious refugees, especially during the early centuries of Ottoman rule (15th to 17th cc.). It was from here that the famous fifteenth-century Ottoman religious rebel and reformer Sheykh Bedreddin started his activities in the Balkans in 1416, which later led to a large-scale revolt suppressed by the Ottoman state. While many scholars have asserted that it was Sheykh Bedreddin's rebellion that was instrumental in the formation of the Muslim community in Deliorman, I argue that the latter's essential emergence and rapid growth occurred in the sixteenth century when considerable numbers of Shi`ite "heretics" (widely known as kyzylbath, and later Alian, Alevi) from Anatolia were either forcibly deported by the Ottoman government (which officially endorsed Sunni Islam as the official religion of state) or fled to the Balkans on their own to escape large-scale persecutions as these were seen by the Ottoman state as a the enemy's "fifth column" on Ottoman soil on account of their sympathies for the emerging (and neighboring) Safavid Empire of Iran, where Twelver Shi`ism had been proclaimed the official religion of state. By the late sixteenth century Deliorman was relatively densely populated predominantly by Turkish-speaking Muslims and became one of the few parts of the Balkans largely populated by heterodox Muslims, while there was also a significant Sunni community, especially in the urban centers, as the Ottoman state took special measures to strengthen Sunni Islamic culture in Deliorman's urban centers. My research and arguments are based on an array of Ottoman administrative sources (above all tax registers, but also registers of imperial decrees, etc.), legal sources (esp. Ottoman provincial law codes) most of which little or never utilized hitherto, as well as Ottoman, Western and Slavic historical narratives and travel accounts. It is hoped that this study will not only significantly contribute to the modern scholarly debate on Muslim communities in the Balkans, but will also stimulate further comparative discussion on the expansion of the Islamic world and the role colonization and conversion to Islam played in the process.