Bulgaria: Saudi NGOs create new masculine/feminine identities for Slavic Muslims

Bulgaria: Saudi NGOs create new masculine/feminine identities for Slavic Muslims


For more on the work of Saudi NGOs in Bulgaria see Ghodsee's lecture from 2007: Headscarves and Hotpants: Islam, Secularism and Women's Fashion in Southeastern Europe


--------------


Professor Kristen Ghodsee from the Bowdoin College in Maine, USA, presented her initial research findings on foreign Islamic aid in South-Eastern Europe. She aims to expand the field of inquiry on foreign aid and NGOs in the post socialist context by examining a little-studied but very important alternate source of funding for civil society in the former communist countries – the Middle East.


On the basis of four months of fieldwork in Bulgaria in 2004 and 2005 and a series of interviews with high-ranking officials in the Muslim hierarchy Ghodsee explained that the Islamic aid has been inserted into the Bulgarian context at a historic moment of time as masculine and feminine identities are being reimagined in the wake of the collapse of communism and the rapid disappearance of Bulgaria's industrial and mining sectors in a rural area heavily populated by Slavic Muslims.


Consequently, she argued that "Islamic NGOs may have been successful in creating new masculine identities for men displaced by economic restructuring and unemployment while at the same time constructing an appropriate femininity for women that erodes their position in the public sphere while strengthening their role in the home."



Source: CORDIS (English), h/t Islamization Watch


--------------


Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.


Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region's state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women's embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks' new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria's Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.

Source: Princeton

--------------


See also:
* Bulgaria: Gov't approves school headscarves ban
* Bulgaria: Mayor,teacher arrested for teaching radical Islam
* Bulgaria: Claims of new radical Islam
* Bulgaria: Weddings

No comments: