Islam in the Baltic: Europe's Early Muslim Community

摘要

This is an intriguing and fascinating book, on a topic till now hardly explored, sc. the Tatar, i.e. ethnically Turkish, communities of what was in mediaeval European times the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (which in its heyday of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries stretched from what is now the southern fringes of Latvia through Lithuania and eastern Poland and modern Belarus, to the western Ukraine and shores of the Black Sea and the Crimea). Professor Norris is to be congratulated for throwing such a detailed light on to what has been so obscure. Although in recent decades there has been much writing on various minority Muslim communities outside the core regions of the faith stretching from Saharan Africa to Indonesia, anyone seeking information in western languages on these old-established but low-profile groups of Eastern Europe has had to resort to a very exiguous number of highly scattered articles, mainly in the East European languages.