‘Minarets in the Mountains’: new travel book explores the Muslim communities of Europe

Travel writer Tharik Hussain talks about the road trip that inspired his guide

By Giovanna Dunmall

(THE NATIONAL NEWS) It was in 2014, during a summer family holiday in the hilly village of Palamartsa, north-eastern Bulgaria, that travel writer Tharik Hussain came up upon the idea for a road trip that would eventually became the book Minarets in the Mountains.

“We were driving in from Romania and started seeing all these minarets, domes and mosques,” says Hussain. They stopped at a couple of the mosques, peered in and realised some of them were still in use. “It was such a surprise and very exciting. I had some inkling that Muslim heritage remained in the country, but I wasn’t expecting there to be entire Muslim villages with historic mosques just sitting around in the countryside.”

During the rest of the holiday the family went on day trips to several Muslim villages and towns nearby. Their favourite was Shumen, home to the stunning Ottoman-era multi-domed Sherif Halil Pasha Mosque – also known as the Tombul Mosque – set in lush green hills on the eastern edge of the city and Hussain made a plan to come back to the region.

Minarets in the Mountains is the story of a road trip Hussain and his family made a few years later, in 2016 and 2017, through the Western Balkans, and more specifically to three Muslim-majority countries – Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo – and three neighbouring countries with rich Muslim heritage and communities – Serbia, North Macedonia and Montenegro.

What made the encounter with these communities so special for Hussain was the fact that they were not the result of post-colonial migration as in western Europe. “They don’t remember a time when they weren’t Muslim,” he says. As he writes in the introduction to his book: “They were Muslims whose identity had been forged in and of Europe. It was an identity entrenched fully in local society. They were as European as they were Muslim.”