Bulgarian police and prosecutors yesterday searched a village prayer house and the homes of two Muslim brothers suspected of spreading “radical Islam,” in the second investigation of its kind this year.
Ali and Yuzeir Yuzeirov, who run the prayer house in Slavianovo, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of Sofia, are also being investigated for setting up a political party allegedly based on religious grounds, which is banned by Bulgaria’s constitution, regional prosecutor Stefan Hristov said.
“We have suspicions about the spreading of radical Islam and expect to find certain books during today’s search,” Hristov told Reuters. “Experts will say whether these books contain radical ideas or not.” He said the prayer house, which was also fitted with computers and used for social gatherings, was visited mainly by young people. No arrests or charges have so far been made.
Ali Yuzeirov denied any wrongdoing and told Reuters the Muslim democratic party he set up last week was based on the same principles as Christian democratic parties in Europe.
New Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, whose center-right GERB party won July elections, has ordered the national security agency to investigate Yuzeirov’s party.
Muslims make up about 12 percent of the Balkan state’s 7.6 million population, with most of the rest belonging to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Religious leaders deny the existence of radical Islam and say that cases such as Slavianovo are threatening the culture of tolerance in mixed communities.
“The problem is that such accusations turn against the whole Muslim community,” said Hussein Hafazov, aide to Bulgaria’s top Muslim cleric. “This is a dangerous tendency.” In March, security services, acting on the complaint of a rightist politician, launched a probe into a local mayor and an Islamic studies teacher on suspicion of receiving Saudi funds to spread radical Islam. No charges have been filed but the case filled media chat rooms with anti-Muslim messages such as “Bulgaria for the Bulgarians.”
The rise of the ultra-nationalist Attack party and growing resentment among Christian Bulgarians against the ethnic Turkish MRF party, due to allegations of corruption while in government in the past eight years, have added to tensions.
Bulgaria has avoided ethnic clashes since the end of the Cold War, in contrast to the former Yugoslavia. It is the only EU country where Muslims are not recent immigrants but a centuries-old local community, mostly ethnic Turkish descendants of the Ottoman Empire’s reach into Europe. A “revival process” launched by late communist dictator Todor Zhivkov to assimilate Muslims culminated in a campaign to force them to change their names to Bulgarian ones and the exodus of some 300,000 Muslims to neighboring Turkey in 1989.