Book Review: Balkan Muslims, a Community in Danger?

Minarets in the Mountains recounts a road trip Hussain and his family took in the summer of 2016 through the former Yugoslavia and Albania in search of Europe's indigenous Muslim communities, their history and heritage.

Using as his guide the travel writings of the 17th-century Ottoman explorer,  Evliya Çelebi, he compares the state of Muslim communities at the peak of  Ottoman rule in the Balkans to their present situation, 30 years after the demise of  communism, secularization and enforced atheism, and after the more recent Balkan wars, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

While Hussain doesn't say that Islam is alive and well in the Balkans, he found surprisingly thriving pockets - and not always in the places one would expect.

The Balkans has been tackled by its fair share of adventurous Western European travel writers, most notably Edith Durham, an Edwardian-era British traveler who wrote about Albanians and Serbs in equal measure.

Later on, Rebecca West, another Briton, journeyed across Yugoslavia in 1937, gathering material for her vast thousand-page classic Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. The Nineties saw a whole slew of titles on the Balkans, mostly aiming at making sense of the latest Balkan conflagrations. However, little has emerged of late. Minarets in the Mountains fills a niche.

Exterior of the famous Bosnian mosque, in Sarajevo. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR

What makes this book unique is that it is written from the perspective of a Muslim in England, writing about "what is generally seen as a white person's territory". Hussain's book is the first account of the Balkans from a Western Muslim, maybe the first since Evilya Çelebi.

Hussain embarked on his trip in 2016, a trying time...