Minarets in the Mountains : A Journey into Muslim Europe
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides
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Winner of the BGTW Members' Excellence Award: Travel Narrative Book of the Year – The Adele Evans Award. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2021. Shortlisted in the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2022: Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.
A magical, eye-opening account of a journey into a Europe that rarely makes the news and is in danger of being erased altogether. Londoner Tharik Hussain sets off with his wife and young daughters around the Western Balkans, home to the largest indigenous Muslim population in Europe, and explores the regions of Eastern Europe where Islam has shaped places and people for more than half a millennium.
Encountering blonde-haired, blue-eyed Muslims, visiting mystical Islamic lodges clinging to mountainsides, and praying in mosques older than the Sistine Chapel, Hussain paints a picture of a hidden Muslim Europe—a vibrant place with breathtaking history, spellbinding culture, and unique identity. Following in the footsteps of renowned Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi, he and his family remind us that Europe is as Muslim as it is Christian, Jewish or pagan.
The first English travel narrative by a Muslim writer on this subject, Minarets in the Mountains also explores the historical roots of European Islamophobia while discovering what it means to be British, European, and Muslim. Like William Dalrymple's In Xanadu, it unveils forgotten Muslim communities, empires and their rulers; and like Kapka Kassabova's Border, it is a quest that forces us to consider what makes up our identities, and more importantly, who decides?
