There are roughly eight million Muslims in south-east Europe, among them Albanians, Bosniaks, Turks and Roma - descendants of converts or settlers in the Ottoman period. This new history of the social, political and religious transformations that this population experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - a period marked by the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires and by the creation of the modern Balkan states - will shed new light on the European Muslim experience.

Southeast Europe's Muslims have experienced a slow and complex crystallization of...