Post by JustJohn or JJ on Mar 17, 2016 4:14:49 GMT -7
Poland’s Tatars Feel Uncertain as Anti-Muslim Sentiment Grows
By RYAN SCHUESSLER
MARCH 16, 2016
Dzenneta and Tamara Bogdanowicz, Polish Muslims, visited the grave of Tamara’s husband in Kruszyniany, Poland,
last week. He died in October after 58 years of marriage.
Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times
KRUSZYNIANY, Poland — Though she is a Polish Muslim, Dzenneta Bogdanowicz had never felt threatened living in the small village of Kruszyniany a few miles from the border with Belarus.
That is, until the Paris attacks in November, when Europe was swept up in the migrant crisis and the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party had just won control of Poland’s government. As it happened, on the same day as the attacks, Kruszyniany was celebrating the opening of its first cultural center for Ms. Bogdanowicz’s community, the Lipka Tatars, a tiny Muslim minority with 600-year-old roots in Poland.
Xenophobic, threatening comments poured in to Ms. Bogdanowicz’s email account and cropped up on the comment threads of news articles about the center. “Poland is for Poles,” not for Tatars, one comment said.
Dzemil Gembicki, caretaker of the Lipka Tatars mosque in Kruszyniany, locked up on Sunday.
Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times
“Usually,” Ms. Bogdanowicz said, “it’s normal and we feel safe,” but “that day, I did not feel safe.”
These are uncertain times for Poland’s Tatars, a largely overlooked group who now find themselves navigating between their religion and their nationality, as Poland’s new nationalist government resists the European Union’s refugee resettlement mandates and right-wing Christians take aim at Islam generally.
Yet, even as anti-Muslim sentiment builds in Poland and the Lipka Tatars occasionally find themselves the target of hatred, the Tatars themselves largely support the government’s harsh stance against the mainly Muslim migrants who are pouring in to Europe.
About 30,000 Muslims have entered Poland since the fall of Communism. Already outnumbered 10 to one, the 3,000 or so Tatars worry that any further influx of Muslim migrants could threaten their six-century-deep monopoly on Polish Islam, and with it their identity and tradition of stability.
Inside the 18th-century Lipka Tatar mosque in the village of Kruszyniany.
Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times
“There is a huge group of Muslims that are not Tatars,” said Dzemil Gembicki, caretaker of the mosque in Kruszyniany. “We want to stick with our own traditions. We are afraid that the huge group of Muslims from other places may cause us to lose the traditions of Polish Tatars.”
Tomasz Miskiewicz, the mufti of Poland and a Lipka Tatar, said that “the situation of Tatar society here in Poland is on the edge.”
“A lot has changed,” he said in an interview in the eastern city of Bialystok.
Lipka Tatars are descended from Turkic people from Central Asia who migrated to the Baltic region in the 14th century. Those who live in what is now Poland have historically been centered in the Podlaskie region, a heavily forested area in the northeast where bison and wolves still roam and where the countryside is peppered with Orthodox and Catholic churches, synagogues and mosques. The religious diversity is striking for a country that is otherwise 94 percent Roman Catholic.
“I am Muslim, I am Tatar, I am Polish,” said Ms. Bogdanowicz, who runs a Tatar restaurant in Kruszyniany. “It cannot be divided.”
Mass at a Catholic church in Bialystok. Poland is 94 percent Roman Catholic. Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times
In the years after secular Communism collapsed in Poland, many of the country’s Tatar families sent their young men abroad to study Islam in Paris, Sarajevo, Medina or other cities. The idea was that these men, Mr. Miskiewicz among them, would return to Poland to help rebuild the country’s Islamic institutions on Polish terms. Wealthy Muslim countries poured resources into reviving Islam in Eastern Europe, but Poland’s Tatars largely abstained from those efforts and preferred to manage their country’s Islamic renaissance themselves.
“We try to keep our tradition, our culture,” said Maciej Szczesnowicz, president of the Muslim community in the village of Bohoniki. “We have our own way of thinking and religious traditions.”
The Tatars revived cultural and religious festivals and restarted the teaching of their language and of Arabic. The two remaining centuries-old, traditionally constructed mosques in Poland, which had survived World War II and the Communist years, were renovated, and new ones were opened. An Islamic education center is scheduled to be built in the village of Sokolka this year, and another is planned for Bialystok in 2017.
“We want to awaken the precious traditions, before they are forgotten,” said Roza Chazbijewicz, chairwoman of the Tatar cultural foundation in Poland. “The identity must be kept.”
The Tatars’ traditional practice of Islam differs from that of many recent Muslim arrivals in Poland. At the historic Bohoniki mosque, one 70-year-old Tatar woman talked about the niqab, the veil worn by women from some conservative Muslim countries that covers the whole face except for the eyes. “What would I do in all of that — sit around and pray all day?” said the woman, Eugenia Radkiewicz. “Can you imagine that in Bohoniki?”
While they tend to stay clear of partisan politics, many Polish Tatars echo the nationalist and antimigrant sentiments of the new Law and Justice government. The party’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has said that the flood of migrants would bring a host of ills to Europe, including infectious diseases.
“Poland is not ready for immigrants,” said Mr. Miskiewicz, the mufti.
On the other hand, the brewing Catholic nationalism that has grown alongside Poland’s antirefugee stance has taken aim at Muslims, at times including the Tatars, whose uniquely Polish roots are not well known outside the Podlaskie region. When politicians paint Islam itself as a threat to Poland, the Tatars say they feel targeted.
“We hear this,” said Ms. Bogdanowicz, the restaurateur. “We don’t know which way it’s going to go.”
There have been flashes of anti-Tatar violence in recent years as the migrant crisis has mounted. The mosque in the port city of Gdansk, built by Tatars in 1991, was firebombed in 2013. In Kruszyniany the following year, vandals painted anti-Muslim slogans, a pig and a red X on the 18th-century mosque and vandalized the adjacent cemetery, painting wartime resistance symbols and covering Islamic religious script on Tatar tombstones.
“It’s hard to say if there are going to be more of these incidents, because of the situation with the immigrants,” Mr. Miskiewicz said. “On this huge wave of negative feelings about Islam, all are being thrown into one pot.”
