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.
“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.
“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.
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.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Uncertain Times for Poland’s Tatars .
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