Socio-Political, Religious, and Economic Reasons for Macedonians’ Movements to Turkey
Socio-Political, Religious, and Economic Reasons for Macedonians’ Movements to Turkey

Summary/Abstract: The massive movement of the Islamic population from Macedonia to Turkey started immediately after the Liberation, to reach its culmination in the early 1950s. Migration was the most actual question in almost all places inhabited by Muslims (mostly Turks and Islamized Macedonians). This movement was due to the new political and social changes in Socialist Yugoslavia and its communist system. The attitude of the new authorities toward religion endangered religious freedom, which enjoyed full respect by the State until World War II. For Muslims, their Islamic rules were far more important than the new rules established by the Government, e.g. regarding political, national and sexual equality, etc. Another reason was the new economic policy, i.e. the transformations of land and property relations that started with the agrarian reforms. The State’s relation toward private ownership, collectivity, and other such issues affected big landowners, private owners, tradesmen and craftsmen, who were not willing to give up their properties. Affected by the economic measures of the Government, afraid of losing their religious freedom and of disintegration of patriarchal family life by the forced unveiling of women, Islamic people were looking for solution in migrations.

• Details
• Contents