Talk:Islam in Greece

Muslim Greeks in Dodecanese? I really do not think so. Look again, bring evidence!

• Well, next time when you pop in Kos check it for yourself.

Between the Asklepion and Kos Town, at Platani, roughly halfway to dine at one of two excellent Turkish-run tavernas; as on Rhodes, most local Muslims have chosen to emigrate to Turkey since the 1960s. link Apostolos Margaritis 12:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Merger

I've proposed that the article on the Greek Muslim minority be merged into this article.

Islam in Greece is a more general and generic title and would allow for a more in-depth survey of Muslims in Greece as well as the history of Islam in the territory that now constitutes the Modern Greek state. This would not have been possible under the heading Greek Muslim minority.

If this article was developed and expanded, it could link to more detailed articles on the different Muslim communities in Modern Greece today.--Damac 13:44, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Of course! this article belongs to Greek Muslim minority. Why is there duplication? Politis 18:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that in Greece, the term Greek Muslim minority is usually and legally (under the terms of the Lausanne Treaty) used to describe the Muslim community of Thrace. When the Greek state refers to the Greek Muslim minority, it is referring to Greek citizens of the Muslim faith (who are in the main Turkish-speaking) and not for example Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Athens. There is a difference.

The reason behind the article Islam in Greece is that it is more general, encompassing Muslims of all backgrounds and legal status. The Islam in Greece article is part of the wider Islam in Europe series.

WHile I proposed and supported the merger initially, I would now argue that the two should be maintained. --Damac 23:32, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Athens News on Janina's Minarets

Yannina, City on the Lake By Diana Farr Louis Athens News (see original link)

Beautifully situated, the capital of Epiros maintains imposing relics of its glory time when it was a centre of culture and trade rivalled only by Salonica. "The first thing you notice about the capital of Epiros (Ipeiros) is that it does not look Greek. The old city of Yannina (officially Ioannina) juts into a large green lake surrounded by even greener trees. Needle-sharp minarets and slate-domed mosques break through the foliage; snow-capped mountains embrace the lake, which sends back their reflection. It could be Geneva on the Bosphoros.

If you think that Yannina was Turkish for almost five hundred years and that the male population wore fezzes until 1913, this Anatolian heritage is not surprising. Even so, when freedom came elsewhere in Greece, minarets were toppled as the symbol of the oppressor. Except for those in Thrace, which still supports a Muslim minority, I cannot remember seeing any others intact on the mainland." Apostolos Margaritis 10:50, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

The muslim population of Ioannina until 1913 was solely enclaved in the area of the old Byzantine castle, and there also was a dishevelled 2-room/2-floor building in the island of lake Pamvotis, the oppresing pigs during the times of turkocracy used when their furs were about to get scorched. And eventually, their furs got scorched pretty bad. Indeed.

Truly, there are 2-3 mosques we keep up here in Ioannina. Yet there shouldn't be any; mosques are the symbols of the creed of backward imbecile sand-humans and as such those monstrosities should be torn down. What would the reaction of the sand-people be? Mayhaps, they'd throw sand or rocks against us or blow themselves up amid our cities. But they'd definately throw sand to us. (that was POV, the POV of Sshadow.) 87.203.85.138 14:57, 6 July 2006 (UTC) — Sshadow 15:08, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

There was no need to post this here. Nobody denies that Greece is dotted with former mosques, and it is true that very few minarets survived the various stages of expansion of the Modern Greek state and the journalist above explains why. --Damac 12:40, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Which commmunity is bigger in number really?

I one don't believe the recently arrived Muslims in Greece outnumber the autochtonous Muslims of Western Thrace. Those who do should bring arguments in favour of their 'guesswork'Apostolos Margaritis 12:18, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Here you are:

• "The large number of underground mosques in Athens is the most tangible indication of the growing size of the local Muslim community - made up of over 100,000 mainly Arab, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Afghan and Indian immigrants." (Athens News, 11 October 2002)
• "No mosque has officially operated in the Greek capital since the Greek War of Independence ended Ottoman occupation. The city's estimated 120,000 Muslim immigrants currently pray in basements and other rented spaces, which members of this growing community have converted into makeshift mosques." (Athens News, 2 April 2004)
• "Unofficial estimates put the number of Muslims in Athens at around 150,000." (Contained in news report circulated by Greek Helsinki Monitor, 12 April 2004)
• "A mosque has long been planned for the estimated 150,000 Muslims living in Athens .." (Daily Times (Pakistan), 4 March 2006)
• "Although the actual numbers are uncertain, there are an estimated 370,000 Muslims in Greece, approximately 3.5 percent of the population. Most are from Albania, although there is an indigenous Muslim community in Thrace of about 120,000 persons." (http://euro-islam.info/pages/greece.htm GSRL (IRESCO) Euro-islam.info)

Part of the problem in establishing reliable statistics is the fact that immigrants are not asked to declare their religion when applying for residency permits or asylum. Indeed, ID cards for Greek citizens no longer contain a rubric declaring the religion of the card holder. The move away from religious profiling was done under pressure of the EU and in the face of intense opposition from the Orthodox Church. While official statistics are hard to come by, the Athens News has done great work for the immigrant community in Athens and is a reliable source. Therefore, I would argue that the the immigrant Muslim population is larger than the indigenous one.--Damac 13:42, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Cornucopia on the Turks of Western Thrace

The Turks of Western Thrace

FORGOTTEN CORNER OF A FOREIGN LAND

Abandoned in Greece at the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks of Thrace cling defiantly to their old ways. By Owen Matthews Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson

The Turkish cemetery at Yassioren in the Rodop Mountains of northern Greece, close to the Bulgarian border Apostolos Margaritis 12:33, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

The Turks of Western Thrace have reached a 180,000 strong community. The Greeks of Constantinople have reached from 250,000 to barely 2,000 today. Even if we made the comical assumption that all those Greeks were sexually incapable of reproduction, and that the Turks were super-human sex machines, it's still mathematically impossible to naturally end up with such numbers within 80 years. Maybe you need to re-consider which group has opressed which. If you can't reach a logical conclusion from the data I gave you, then I'll simply demonstrate it by citing some credible sources on the topic. By the way, the fact that Greeks don't officially recognise Turks as "Turkish" but as a "Greek muslim" community, is supposed to be a liberal policy in the Western World. People in undevelopped countries are of course unable to see this, and cite it as an accusation. The Muslim (Arab) population in France, is not recognised neither as Muslim nor as Arab, but only as French. And they're very proud of that political equality. In everyday life, both Turks and Arabs in Greece and France respectively, are recognised by their ethnic origin, without being officially labeled as something "foreign". Maybe one day you'll understand the value of that. Miskin 17:40, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree to a certain extent, Miskin. However, while the Greek policy may appear modern by today's standards, the Lausanne definition of people according to their religion (i.e. Greek Muslim minority and the Christian minority in Turkey) is a reminent of the Ottoman Millet system, which also persists in other post-Ottoman states such as the Lebanon. I don't think the architects of the Treaty wrote it in the spirit of the French ideals of citizenship. --Damac 23:38, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Nevertheless, it was a policy introduced by the Turks themselves, so I don't see how it can be neglected when used on the Greeks (or any Christians whatsoever), and suddenly viewed as a "bad thing" when used on the Turks (who were the inventors). Miskin 14:22, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I take the view that it is simply untenable in this day and age to deny the people defined as "Christians" under the Lausanne Treaty to call themselves Greeks, and for their counterparts in Greece, officially "Muslims", to call themselves Turkish.

Citizenship and nationality can be treated seperately. For example, the Sorbs of Germany are Sorb nationality but German citizens. Similarly, Germany's Danish minority are Danes by nationalisty but German citizens at the same time.

The problem in Greece and Turkey is that at the time of the Lausanne Treaty, the political leadership in neither country wanted to recognise "national" minorities and not much has changed since.

On Wikipedia, we should recognise the legal terminology of international agreements but also reflect the reality of how minorities view themselves in each state and name them accordingly. --Damac 15:07, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

It's much more complicated than that. The treaty of Lausanne took place during the transition of the Ottoman Empire into Turkey, and most importantly, the creation of a Turkish nation. The concept of the Greek nationality was already over 100 years old, Greeks would not profit from a population exchange (which was marked as "the Great disaster"), nor an ethnic identification based on religion. The legal system of the Ottoman Empire didn't make distinctions between Greek-speakers and Ottoman-speakers, it only made a distinction between religions i.e. Greek Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim. The Greek Orthodox milaet (=nation) comprised all Slavic Orthodox communities under the rule of the Greek patriarch of Constantinople, hence why many Balkanites hated the Greeks in the aftermath. The Kemalist regime which supposedly modernised the country by separating religion from state, did in fact use the Muslim faith as a criterion of "Turkish nationality". Greece had just lost the war and couldn't have a say on this. So let us not generalise, this practice of putting religion over nationality is the result of a 600 year old Ottoman law. Miskin 13:13, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

That was my original point - Lausanne had nothing to do with French republicanism as you claimed.

True, the concept of Greek nationality was a 100 years old but how much different was it to the Millet understanding of nation? Look at the first consitutions of Greece in the 1820s where it says Greeks are Christians. There was little room for Greek-speaking non-Orthodox. (Talk to Greek Catholics for some contemporary evidence of this). Venizelos and Ataturk had very similar views on the nation-state and nationality in the 1910s, as Mark Mazower has shown. He was more than happy to get rid of Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete in 1923 (who many would argue were ethnic Greeks), while Ataturk was more than willing to expel Turkish-speaking Christians.

The Orthodox millet did originally encompass all Orthodox Christians until the creation of the Bulgarian Orthodox millet in 1879. --Damac 13:39, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

It does in the sense that if you don't know the root of the phenomenon, it doesn't differ at all to modern Western practice. It's not true that there was little room for Greek-seaking non-Orthodox. There used to be (and still exist) important Greek Catholic communities in some Aegean Greeks islands, notably the Francosyrians of Syros. As far as I know, the community was never discriminated. Have you ever heard of Markos Vamvakaris? It's true however that there was little room for Greek-speaking Muslims, which at the time was identified by everyone as "Ottoman". They had different status and different rights within the Empire, hence they could not be regarded as equals. Greek Orthodoxy had to be used however as the main means of national recognition due to the supremacy of the patriarch of Constantinople within the Orthodox millet. The small number of Turkish-speaking Orhodox christians who were expelled by Kemal Ataturk, could have been nothing but Greeks who had lost their language over time, and did indeed identify themselves as such. This is again concluded by the nature of the Ottoman law, which would enforce (but not force) Christian to Muslim conversion, but would forbit conversion from Muslim to Christian and punish it by death. The Greek-speaking muslims of Crete could have been either Islamised Greeks or Hellenised Ottomans, and they probably regarded themselves as the latter. Either way, the exchange was enforced by the Turks, and was based on Turkish POV of nationality. Venizelos had lost the war, he had no right nor reason not to comply. If it were up to the Greeks the exchange would have never taken place, unless of course you think that 1,5 million people were willing to give away their houses and live as immigrants in a "motherland" they had never seen. Miskin 14:00, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

re: Muslims in Crete, can I conclude that the "Turks" mentioned in "Christ recrucified" ("The Greek Passion") by Kazantzakis were Greek-speaking? Andreas 14:37, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

My point exactly. Miskin 15:28, 15 March 2006 (UTC)