Reply #24: The Balkans were a very strange case.

[Igel]

The Ottomans didn't really colonize most of the peninsula, and they were, of course, Turks.

Still, there was a child levy on Christian villages at times; churches were forced to have entrances low enough to force the worshippers to stoop, a sign of humility. The Ottomans also nicely played ethnicities against each other, and even imported Turks into Bosnia. And Muslims had pride of place in society, with all the advantages, and with non-Muslims having to show due deference, their word not counting for much in court against a Muslim, and the like--so that a Muslims could extort from non-Muslims in the right circumstances, and in a he-said/he-said legal case, the Muslim had to win (and in 2 non-Muslims against 1 Muslim, it was a tie, which wasn't really a tie). There's a reason that the Croats and the Serbs both hated the Muslim Bosnians, and don't much like the Albanians: it's centuries old.

Fortunately for the Balkans, the number of Muslims was kept relatively small, many of the rules not enforced well, and it was easy for the Orthodox and Catholic churches to maintain their flocks and language. The Qur'anic language was Arabic, but that wasn't the language of the conquerors, so Arabization couldn't occur, and Turkicization didn't, either. It was also the wrong kind of Islam, in many respects more tolerant than the variety dominant from S. Turkey to Morocco. And until recently there was no attempt by Muslims to deny the people their history, unlike what was done in most of the Middle East. The Turks were newcomers to the region, and everybody knew it--they couldn't try to say that some shrine in Greece was actually Turkish.

It was about the same in India and points east: it was hard for non-Arabs, without the linguistic/cultural support of the Qur'an, to reshape all of society, and they didn't have quite enough time to do it in isolation like the Arabs and Persians did, taking centuries to wipe out the peoples and cultures that preceded them.