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In May 1989, two series of demonstrations in Turkish villages of northeast Bulgaria was followed by a massive gathering of more than 50,000 Muslim Turks in the town of Shumnu in the same area. The Turks had converged to Shumnu from the surrounding villages and smaller towns in order to protest the forced changes of names and the bulgarization imposed by the government of Todor Zhivkov, then undisputed ruler of Bulgaria. The demonstration was put down in the usual brutal Bulgarian way; some twenty to thirty-five demonstrators were killed and hundreds were injured. However, the Turks had made their point; they were not going to give up, however fierce the official terror, their Islamic identity and culture.

Examines efforts of the Bulgarian government to expel Turkish minority populations. It is argued that the decision to expel the Turks was a reaction to Turkish resistance to Bulgarian nationalist government policies in the 1970s & 1980s, but also a departure from previous government strategies. Secondary historical research suggests a pattern of efforts in recent decades to marginalize Turks, culminating most recently in programs to encourage Turks to adopt Christian-sounding names. Within the academy, historiographies by ethnic Bulgars, refuted here, argued that Turks in Bulgaria were forced to convert to Islam. The Bulgarian government's attempt to homogenize Bulgaria, however, were coupled with a refusal to permit Turkish emigration. Demographic economic factors drawn from secondary empirical research suggest that Bulgaria's Turkish population was essential to its economy, but the high birthrate of the Turkish population threatened to make ethnic Bulgarians a minority within two decades. 4 Tables, 47 References. C. McSherry

Kemal Karpat, Les relations de Yakub Bey avec les sultans ottomans : réinterprétation.
Yakub Bey a créé un État relativement moderne dans le Turkestan oriental au cours des années 1870 et il accepta peu après la suzeraineté du sultan-caliphe ottoman Abdulaziz. Il renouvela ses vœux d'allégeance lorsque Abdulhamid II monta sur le trône en 1876. Son acte de soumission valut à Yakub Bey de lire la khutba du vendredi et de frapper des pièces au nom du sultan. Ce fut le seul cas de l'histoire du mouvement panislamique du XIXe siècle où un dirigeant alla jusqu'à accepter officiellement la suprématie du caliphe d'Istanbul. L'État ottoman offrit en retour des armes et des officiers à Kachgar. Parmi les raisons qui amenèrent Yakub Bey à soumettre son État à Istanbul figurent la nécessité pour Kachgar de se prémunir contre la Chine et contre la Russie (une fois l'espoir d'un soutien britannique perdu), mais aussi les liens culturels et religieux qui existaient depuis longtemps entre Istanbul et Kachgar, ainsi que l'attachement personnel de Yakub Bey à l'idée d'une union musulmane. Un motif puissant et décisif - rarement mentionné - pouvait être le désir de légitimité éprouvé par Yakub Bey. Ce dernier avait remplacé Buzurg Bey lequel appartenait aux dynasties khodjas qui avaient gouverné le Turkestan pendant des siècles et s'étaient posées en détentrices Je jure de l'autorité. Seul le caliphe possédait une autorité supérieure à celle des khodjas. Aussi la reconnaissance accordée à Yakub Bey par le caliphe se substituait-elle à toute autre autorité et légitimait-elle pleinement la domination de Yakub Bey sur la Kachgarie.

Students of Middle Eastern, North African, and Balkan history of the period extending roughly from the middle of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of World War I ought to know about the vital developments that have occurred since 1985 in the Turkish Archives or Başbakanlik Arşivleri (prime minister's archives). These materials were to be moved to the central archive building in Ankara, but the ultimate decision was made to keep the Ottoman documents in Istanbul and to use the large Ankara archive building for preserving the material accumulated during the Republic.An international conference was convened by the Turkish government in 1985 to discuss the situation of the Ottoman archives. The meeting was opened by Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, who promised on behalf of the government to do whatever was necessary to expedite the classification of the existing material and facilitate its use. After the conference, Professor Halil Inalcik and I were invited to Ankara to discusss with Mr. Hasan Celal Güzel—then prime minister's aide, currently minister of culture—the measures necessary to train archivists. Later, in the summer of 1986, I participated in several working sessions presided over by Mr. Güzel to discuss various technical questions, such as the administrative framework of the archives, the training of personnel both at home and abroad, and so on. In a recent visit to the archives (November 1988), I was able to assess on the spot the work carried out since 1986 under the supervision of Professor Ismet Miroglu, the current director general of the archives.

Population movements have always played a major role in the life of Islam and particularly the Middle East. During the nineteenth century, however, the transfer of vast numbers of people from one region to another profoundly altered the social, ethnic, and religious structure of the Ottoman state—that is, the Middle East and the Balkans. The footloose tribes of eastern Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula were spurred into motion on an unprecedented scale by economic and social events, and the Ottoman government was forced to undertake settlement measures that had widespread effects. The Ottoman-Russian wars, which began in 1806 and occurred at intervals throughout the century, displaced large groups of people, predominantly Muslims from the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands. Uprooted from their ancestral homelands, they eventually settled in Anatolia, Syria (inclusive of the territories of modern-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel as well as modern Syria), and northern Iraq. These migrations continued until the time of the First World War. In addition, after 1830 waves of immigrants came from Algeria—especially after Abdel Kader ended his resistance to the French—and from Tunisia as well. These people too settled in Syria at Damascus.