Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 2 – Today marks
the 620th anniversary of the arrival of Tatars on the territory of
what is now Belarus, a community that now numbers 10,000 and that has survived
not because of its language but rather because of its close attachment to its
religion, Islam, according to Dmitry Radkevich, the head of Council of Imams of
Belarus.
The event is being marked in Minsk’s central mosque as well as in
mosques in the regions where the Tatars are most numerous, and for this
celebration, diplomats and Muslim leaders from Russia, Poland, Turkey, Lebanon,
and Palestine have come to take part (belsat.eu/ru/in-focus/tataram-v-belarusi-620-let/).
The first Tatars came to what is now
Belarus at the time of the Golden Horde at the invitation of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania. They were committed Muslims at the time, but they showed themselves
then and later quite prepared to fight against their fellow followers of Islam
in defense of their homeland.
More recently, many have called all
Muslims in Belarus Tatars although in fact many of them are ethnically distinct.
Before World War II, they were a dynamic community with some 40 mosques and an
active publishing program. But with the Soviet occupation, almost all of this
disappeared. By 1991, there was only one mosque left, in the town of Ivye.
Ivan Shabanovich, the head of the
Ivye Muslim Religious Community, says that the Tatars have always lived in a compact
settlement there which they call Muravshizna; and they are proud that even
during the worst periods of Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign, they
continued to attend services.
At the same time, he and other Tatar
leaders there stress, the Tatars of Belarus have always gotten along well with
other Belarusians, are loyal to the Belarusian state, and accept that the Tatars
are part of the Belarusian ethnos, however proud of their distinctive history
they remain to this day.
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