Americas In his book ''God's Shadow'', historian
Alan Mikhail posits that the 1492
voyage to the Americas by Columbus was driven in part by
Islamophobic views. European Christians arriving in the Americas perceived local customs as being Islamic and used this as a rationale for genociding the indigenous people. Muslims who were brought to the region as slaves, though mistreated, found several ways to hold onto aspects of their faith.
Bulgaria Muslim refugees in Shumla from
The Illustrated London News, 17 November 1877 Half a million Muslims succeeded in reaching Ottoman controlled lands and 672,215 of them were reported to have remained after the war. Approximately a quarter of a million of them perished as a result of massacres, cold, disease, and other harsh conditions. According to Aubaret, the French Consul in
Ruse in 1876, in the
Danube Vilayet which also included Northern Dobruja in today's Romania, as well as a substantial portion of territory in today's southern Serbia, there were 1,120,000 Muslims and 1,233,500 non-Muslims of whom 1,150,000 were Bulgarian. Between 1876 and 1878, through massacres, epidemics, hunger, and war, a large portion of the Turkish population vanished. In
1950-1951 around 155,000 left Bulgaria as a result of Islamophobia and Anti-Turkish sentiment.
Cambodia The
Cham Muslims experienced serious purges in which as much as half of their community's entire population was exterminated by authoritarian communists in Cambodia during the 1970s as part of the
Cambodian genocide. About half a million Muslims were killed. According to Cham sources, 132 mosques were destroyed by the
Khmer Rouge regime. Only 20 of the 113 most prominent Cham clerics in Cambodia survived the rule of the Khmer Rouge.
China , the capital of the Pingnan Sultanate in
Yunnan, from the set
Victory over the Muslims The Dungan revolt erupted due to infighting between Muslim Sufi sects, the Khafiya and the Jahariyya, and the
Gedimu. When the rebellion failed, mass-immigration of the
Dungan people into
Imperial Russia,
Kazakhstan, and
Kyrgyzstan ensued. Before the war, the population of Shaanxi province totalled approximately 13 million inhabitants, at least 1,750,000 of whom were Dungan (Hui). After the war, the population dropped to 7 million; at least 150,000 fled. But once-flourishing Chinese Muslim communities fell 93% in the revolt in Shaanxi province. Between 1648 and 1878, around twelve million
Hui and Han Chinese were killed in ten unsuccessful uprisings. The
Ush rebellion in 1765 by
Uyghur Muslims against the
Manchus of the
Qing dynasty occurred after Uyghur women were gang raped by the servants and son of Manchu official Su-cheng. It was said that ''Ush Muslims had long wanted to sleep on [Sucheng and son's] hides and eat their flesh.'' because of the rape of Uyghur Muslim women for months by the Manchu official Sucheng and his son. The Manchu Emperor ordered that the Uyghur rebel town be massacred, the Qing forces enslaved all the Uyghur children and women and slaughtered the Uyghur men. The Manchu official Shuxing'a started an anti-Muslim massacre which led to the
Panthay Rebellion. Shuxing'a developed a deep hatred of Muslims after an incident where he was stripped naked and nearly lynched by a mob of Muslims. He ordered several Hui Muslim rebels to be slowly sliced to death. The revolts were harshly suppressed by the Manchu government in a manner that amounts to genocide. Approximately a million people in the
Panthay Rebellion were killed, and several million in the Dungan revolt Many Muslim generals like
Ma Zhanao,
Ma Anliang,
Ma Qianling,
Dong Fuxiang,
Ma Haiyan, and
Ma Julung helped the Qing dynasty defeat the rebel Muslims, and were rewarded, and their followers were spared from the genocide. The Han Chinese Qing general
Zuo Zongtang even relocated the Han from the suburbs
Hezhou when the Muslims there surrendered as a reward so that Hezhou (now
Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture) is still heavily Muslim to this day and is the most important city for Hui Muslims in China. The Muslims were granted amnesty and allowed to live as long as they stayed outside the city. Some of the Muslims who fought, like General Dong, did not do it because they were Muslim, rather, like many other generals, they gathered bands of followers and fought at will. Zuo Zongtang generally massacred New Teaching Jahriyya rebels, even if they surrendered, but spared Old Teaching Khafiya and Sunni Gedimu rebels. Ma Hualong belonged to the New Teaching school of thought, and Zuo executed him, while Hui generals belonging to the Old Teaching clique such as Ma Qianling, Ma Zhan'ao, and Ma Anliang were granted amnesty and even promoted in the Qing military. Moreover, an army of Han Chinese rebels led by
Dong Fuxiang surrendered and joined Zuo Zongtang. General Zuo accepted the surrender of Hui people belonging to the Old Teaching school, provided they surrendered large amounts of military equipment and supplies, and accepted relocation. He refused to accept the surrender of New Teaching Muslims who still believed in its tenets, since the Qing classified them as a dangerous heterodox cult, similar to the
White Lotus Buddhists. The Qing authorities decreed that the Hui rebels who had taken part in violent attacks were merely heretics and not representative of the entire Hui population, just as the heretical White Lotus did not represent all Buddhists. Qing authorities decreed that there were two different Muslim sects, the "old" religion and "new" religion. The new were heretics and deviated from Islam in the same way that the White Lotus deviated from Buddhism and Daoism, and stated its intention to inform the Hui community that it was aware that the original Islamic religion was one united sect before the advent of new "heretics", saying they would separate Muslim rebels by which sect they belonged to. Zuo also stated that he would accept the surrender of New Teaching Muslims who admitted that they were deceived, radicalized, and misled by its doctrines. Zuo excluded khalifas and mullas from the surrender. During the
Cultural Revolution, mosques along with other religious buildings were often defaced, destroyed, or closed and copies of the
Quran were destroyed and cemeteries by the
Red Guards. During that time, the government also constantly accused Muslims and other religious groups of holding "superstitious beliefs" and promoting "
anti-socialist trends". The government began to relax its policies toward Muslims in 1978, and supported worship and rituals. Today, Islam is experiencing a modest revival and there are now
many mosques in China. There has been an upsurge in Islamic expression and many nationwide Islamic associations have been organized to co-ordinate inter-ethnic activities among Muslims. However, restrictions have been imposed on Uyghur Islamic practices because the Chinese government has attempted to link Islamic beliefs with terrorist activities since 2001. Numerous events have led the Chinese government to crack down on most displays of Islamic piety among Uyghurs, including the wearing of veils and long beards. The
Ghulja Incident and the
July 2009 Ürümqi riots were both caused by abusive treatment of Uyghur Muslims within Chinese society, and they resulted in even more extreme government crackdowns. While Hui Muslims are seen as being relatively docile, Uyghurs are stereotyped as
Islamists and punished more severely for crimes than Hui are. In 1989, China's government banned a book which was titled
Xing Fengsu ("Sexual Customs") and placed its authors under arrest after Uyghurs and Hui Muslims protested against its publication in Lanzhou and Beijing because it insulted Islam. Hui Muslims who vandalized property during the protests against the book's publication were not punished but Uyghur protestors were imprisoned.
Fascist Italy . The
Libyan genocide was the systematic destruction of the indigenous Libyan
Arab people and culture in
Italian Libya by the
Italian colonial authorities from 1911 to 1943, using the wider definition of
genocide, where an estimated 250,000-750,000 Libyans died as a result of colonial-related causes. The most severe and frequent episodes of Italian atrocities against the locals came during the conflict between Italy and the indigenous rebels of the
Senussi Order that lasted from 1923 until 1932, when the principal Senussi leader,
Omar Mukhtar, was captured and executed. Italy committed major
war crimes during the conflict; including the use of
chemical weapons, episodes of refusing to take prisoners of war and instead executing surrendering combatants, and mass executions of civilians. During this period, an estimated 83,000-125,000 Libyans were massacred or died in Italian concentration camps. By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830. A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking a French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, "we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him." As a French statistical journal urged five years later, "the system of extermination must give way to a policy of penetration." During the French conquest from 1830 to 1875, the native Algerian population fell by up to one-third due to war, massacres, famine and disease. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Algerians, out of a total of 3 million, were killed. Atrocities committed by the French during this period include wholesale massacres of civilians,
scorched earth tactics, destroying mosques and converting them to Catholic churches, burying people alive, and French horse units throwing boiling water on Algerians perceived to be resisting in any way. During the period of 1954-1962, in the
Algerian War, an estimated 400,000-1.5 million Algerians lost their lives. Atrocities committed by French troops include massacres of civilians, (perhaps most infamously the
Setif and Guelma massacre, where 3,000 to 45,000 Algerian civilians were massacred by French troops and
Pied-Noir vigilante mobs), rape, torture by electric shock, burning and beating, burial alive,
death flights, sexual assaults, and the use of napalm to indiscriminately burn villages and towns. The French sent over 2 million Algerians to concentration camps, where they were kept in deplorable, prison-like conditions, and destroyed over 8,000 villages during the war. In 2018, France admitted torture was routine and systematic during the Algerian war of independence. Algeria became the prototype for a pattern of French colonial rule which has been described as "quasi-
apartheid".
Napoleon III oversaw an 1865 decree that allowed Arab and
Berber Algerians to request French citizenship – but only if they "renounced their Muslim religion and culture": by 1913, only 1,557 Muslims had been granted French citizenship. Despite periodic attempts at partial reform, the situation of the ''
Code de l'indigénat'' persisted until the
French Fourth Republic, which began in 1946, but although Muslim Algerians were accorded the rights of citizenship, the system of discrimination was maintained in more informal ways. This "internal system of apartheid" met with considerable resistance from the Muslims affected by it, and is cited as one of the causes of the
1954 insurrection. In response to France's recognition of
Armenian genocide, Turkey accused France of committing genocide against 15% of Algeria's population. In October 2021, the office of Algerian president
Abdelmadjid Tebboune stated that 5.6 million Algerians had died during the country's 132 years under French colonial rule, while historian Mohammed Al-Amin estimated that the total Algerian death toll could be as high as 10 million. It is estimated that between 27,000 and 60,000 Algerians were affected by radiation from French nuclear weapons tests in the
Algerian Desert, with thousands having long-lasting health effects and deformities due to radiation exposure.
French Morocco Generally speaking, French colonialism in Morocco was highly discriminatory against indigenous Moroccans and was detrimental to the Moroccan economy. Native Moroccans were treated as second class citizens and discriminated against in nearly all aspects of life. Additionally, land in Morocco was far more expensive for Moroccans than for French settlers. Various historians have estimated that around 100,000 Moroccans were killed during the
French conquest of Morocco between 1907 and 1934. Around 8,000 French soldiers and 12,000 native Moroccans soldiers in the French army were also killed. Historian Daniel Rivet adds that the tally would be significantly higher if including the enormous suffering of the Riffian tribes during the
Rif War between 1921 and 1926. During this period, approximately 220,000 Rohingyas are believed to have migrated the border into
Bengal, in British ruled India, to escape the ordeal. After the defeat of Burmese forces approximately 40,000 Rohingyas fled to
Chittagong after communal violence and discrimination by Japanese forces. Japanese forces also carried out massacres, torture, and atrocities on
Moro people in
Mindanao, and
Sulu. A former Japanese Imperial Navy medic,
Akira Makino, admitted to carrying out dissections on Moro civilians while they were still alive.
Panglong, a Chinese town in
British Burma, was entirely destroyed by the Japanese forces during the
Japanese invasion of Burma. The Hui
Ma Guanggui became the leader of the Hui Panglong self-defense guard created by Su who was sent by the
Kuomintang government of the
Republic of China to fight against the Japanese forces of
Panglong in 1942. The skirmish resulted in driving out the over 200 Hui households out as refugees. Yunnan and Kokang received Hui refugees from Panglong driven out by the Japanese. One of Ma Guanggui's nephews was Ma Yeye, a son of Ma Guanghua and he narrated the history of Panglong including the Japanese attack. An account of the Japanese attack on the Hui in Panglong was written and published in 1998 by a Hui from Panglong called "Panglong Booklet". The Japanese attack in Burma caused the Hui Mu family to seek refuge in Panglong but they were driven out again to Yunnan from Panglong when the Japanese attacked Panglong. 's film. On 13 December 1937, about 30 Japanese soldiers murdered all but two of 11 Chinese Hui Muslims from the Ha family in the house at No. 5 Xinlukou. A woman and her two teenaged daughters were raped, and Japanese soldiers rammed a bottle and a cane into her vagina. An eight-year-old girl was stabbed, but she and her younger sister survived. They were found alive two weeks after the killings by the elderly woman shown in the photo. Bodies of the victims can also be seen in the photo. During the
Second Sino-Japanese war the Japanese destroyed numerous religious sites. According to Wan Lei, "Statistics showed that the Japanese destroyed more than 200 relgious sites and killed countless Hui people by April 1941." After the
Nanjing Massacre many monasteries in
Nanjing were found to be filled with corpses. They also tried to corner Hui communities economically by destroying factories which resulting in many Hui becoming jobless and homeless. Soldiers also desecrated religious sites forcing Hui to feed pork to the soldiers, and forcing girls to supposedly train as geishas and singers. Hui cemeteries were also destroyed for military reasons. The Japanese brought Indonesian Javanese girls to British Borneo as comfort women to be raped by Japanese officers at the Ridge road school and Basel Mission Church, and the Telecommunication Center Station (former rectory of the All Saints Church) in Kota Kinabalu as well as ones in Balikpapan and Beaufort. Japanese soldiers raped Indonesian women and Dutch women in the Netherlands East Indies. They got infected with STDs. Sukarno prostituted Indonesian girls from ethnic groups like Minangkabau to the Japanese. The Japanese massacred Hui Muslims in their mosques in Nanjing and destroyed Hui mosques in other parts of China. Shen Xi'en and his father Shen Decheng witnessed the corpses of Hui Muslims slaughtered by the Japanese in Nanjing, when he was asked by Hui people to help bury their relatives. The Hui security maintenance leader Sun Shurong and Hui Imams Zhang Zihui, Ma Zihe, Ge Changfa, Wang Shouren, Ma Changfa were involved in collecting Hui corpses and burying them after the Nanjing massacre. The Ji'e lane Mosque caretaker father Zhang was in his 60s when killed by the Japanese and his decomposing corpse was the first to be washed in accordance with Islamic customs and buried. They buried the Hui corpses in Jiuhua mountain, Dongguashi, Hongtu Bridge (where Guangzhou road is now located), Wutai mountain, Donguashi (where Nanjing Normal University is located). Shen Xi'en helped bury 400 Hui bodies including children, women and men. Shen recalled burying a 7 or 8 year old boy in addition to his mother among the Hui bodies. Japanese used machine guns to massacre Muslim Suluk children and women at a mosque in the aftermath of the
Jesselton revolt.
Indonesia The
Walisongo school massacre was the slaughter carried out by
Christian militants on May 28, 2000, upon several predominantly villages around
Poso town,
Central Sulawesi,
Indonesia as part of a
broader sectarian conflict in the Poso region. Officially, the total number killed in the attacks is 367.
Syria Ba'athist writings on the walls of
Hama city following the
Hama Massacre in 1982. The propaganda slogan, which translates to "There is no god but the homeland, and there is no messenger but the Ba'ath party", denigrated the
Shahada (Islamic testimony of faith). after the massacre The
Hama massacre was a
genocidal campaign of extermination launched by
Ba'athist Syria in February 1982, under orders of Syrian dictator
Hafez al-Assad to crush an uprising by the
Muslim Brotherhood in
Sunni-majority town of Hama. Hama was
besieged for 27 days by
Syrian military and
Ba'athist paramilitaries, during which period the city was isolated from the outside. The ground operations of the massacre were supervised by
Rifaat al-Assad, the brother of
Hafez al-Assad, who commanded sectarian
Alawite deathsquads such as the
Defense Companies. The indiscriminate bombings and
mass-shootings by paramilitaries had razed much of the city to the ground and killed tens of thousands of civilians.
Patrick Seale, reporting in
The Globe and Mail, described the operation as a "two-week orgy of killing, destruction and looting" which destroyed the city and killed a minimum of 25,000 inhabitants. The massacre is the "single deadliest act" of violence perpetrated by any Arab regime upon its own population, in
Modern Arab history. The attack has been described as a "
genocidal massacre" Memory of the massacre remains an important aspect of Syrian culture and evokes strong emotions amongst Syrians to the present day. Women, children and all Hama inhabitants irrespective of their political leanings were targeted indiscriminately during the military onslaught. Even Ba'ath party members and their families became victims of slaughter and mass-shootings of Rifaat al-Assad's paramilitaries.
Myanmar Myanmar has a
Buddhist majority. The
Muslim minority in Myanmar mostly consists of the
Rohingya people and the descendants of Muslim immigrants from
India (including the modern-day nations of
Bangladesh) and
China (the ancestors of
Chinese Muslims in Myanmar came from
Yunnan province), as well as the descendants of earlier
Arab and
Persian settlers.
Indian Muslims were brought to Burma by the British in order to aid them in clerical work and business. After independence, many Muslims retained their previous positions and achieved prominence in business and politics. At first, the Buddhist persecution of Muslims arose for religious reasons, and it occurred during the reign of King
Bayinnaung, 1550–1589 AD. He also disallowed the
Eid al-Adha, the religious sacrifice of cattle, regarding the killing of animals in the name of religion as a cruel custom. Halal food was also forbidden by King Alaungpaya in the 18th century. in Bangladesh, October 2017 When General
Ne Win came to power in 1962, muslims numbers were reduced in the army and marginalized. Many Rohingya fled Burma as refugees to neighboring Bangladesh including 200,000 who fled Burma in 1978 as a result of the
King Dragon operation in Arakan followed by 250,000 in 1991. During the
2012 Rakhine State riots, a series of clashes followed that primarily involved the ethnic
Rakhine Buddhist people and the muslims in the northern
Rakhine State which resulted in an estimated 90,000 people getting displaced.
Nazi Germany The
Nazi ideology's
racial theories considered
ethnic groups which were associated with Islam, particularly
Arabs, "
racially inferior". During the
invasion of France, thousands of Muslims, both Arabs and
sub-Saharan Africans, who were serving in French colonial units were captured by the Germans. Massacres of these men were widespread, the most notable of these massacres was committed against Moroccans by
Waffen-SS troops during the fighting which occurred around Cambrai, the Moroccans were killed on mass after they were driven from the outskirts of the city and surrendered. During
Operation Barbarossa, the
Einsatzgruppen engaged in the mass execution of over 140,000 Soviet
prisoners of war, many of whom were killed because they had "Asiatic features". Many were often mistaken for Jews and were executed. In 1942 in
Amersfoort in the
Netherlands, 101 Soviet
Uzbek soldiers were massacred by Nazi Germans after they were forced into a concentration camp and displayed to the local
Dutch people as proof the Soviets were made out of "untermenschen". Various Muslim ethnic groups were targeted for extermination, such as the
Turkmens.
Philippines in 1906 The
Philippines is a
predominantly Christian society with a complicated history of relations between Islam and Christianity. Despite historic evidence of
Islamization spreading throughout the islands in the 13th–16th centuries, the archipelago
came under Spanish rule in the 16th century. The Spanish proselytized many natives, and labelled those who remained Muslims as
Moro, a derogatory term recalling the
Moors, an Islamic people of
North Africa who occupied parts of Spain for several centuries. Today, this term
Moro is used to refer to the indigenous Muslim tribes and ethnic groups of the country. When the Spanish came to the Philippine islands, most of the natives in Luzon and Visayas were pagans with Muslim minorities, and while Spanish proselytized many natives, many Muslims in Luzon and Visayas were not exempted by the Spaniards from the
Spanish Inquisition, wherein Muslims to become Catholics or else die for their faith. Those who remained Muslims are only the natives of
Mindanao and
Sulu which the Spaniards failed to subjugate, or had control of only briefly and partially. The
Spanish–Moro Wars between Spanish colonial authorities and the indigenous Sultanates of the
Moro peoples (the
Sultanate of Sulu, confederation of sultanates in Lanao and
Sultanate of Maguindanao) further escalated tensions between the Christian and Muslim groups of the country. The Moros fought in the
Moro Rebellion against the Americans during which Americans massacred Moro women and children at the
Moro Crater massacre,
against the Japanese in World War II, and are
waging an insurgency against the Philippines. The pro-Philippine government
Ilaga militia, composed of Catholic and other Christian settlers on Moro land in Mindanao, were known for their atrocities and massacres against Moro civilians. The Ilaga's bloodiest attack happened in June 1971 when they slaughtered 65 Moro civilians in a Mosque during the
Manili massacre. On 24 September 1974, in the
Malisbong massacre, the
Armed Forces of the Philippines slaughtered about 1,500 Moro Muslim civilians who were praying in a Mosque, in addition to
mass raping Moro girls who had been taken aboard a boat. Polls have shown that some non-Muslim Filipinos hold negative views directed against the Moro people.
Russia Russian Empire The period from the
conquest of Kazan in 1552 to the ascension of
Catherine the Great in 1762, was marked by systematic repression of Muslims through policies of exclusion and discrimination as well as the destruction of Muslim culture by elimination of outward manifestations of Islam such as mosques. The first wave of persecution and forced conversions of Muslims to Christianity occurred soon after the Russian conquest of the
Kazan and
Astrakhan Khanates. Another period of intense mosque destruction and anti-Muslim oppression from the Russian authorities occurred during the 18th century. During the reign of
Anna of Russia, many Muslims were forced or pressured to convert. New converts were exempted from paying taxes, were granted certain privileges, and were given better resources for the learning of their new faith. Many continued to secretly practice Islam and were
crypto-Muslims. However, Russian policy shifted toward weakening Islam by introducing pre-Islamic elements of collective consciousness. Such attempts included methods of eulogizing pre-Islamic historical figures and imposing a sense of inferiority by sending Kazakhs to highly elite Russian military institutions. While total expulsion as in other Christian nations such as Spain, Portugal, and Sicily was not feasible to achieve a homogeneous
Russian Orthodox population, other policies such as land grants and the promotion of migration by other Russian and non-Muslim populations into Muslim lands displaced many Muslims making them minorities in places such as some parts of the South Ural region to other parts such as the
Ottoman Turkey, and almost annihilating the
Circassians,
Crimean Tatars, and various Muslims of the Caucasus. The Russian army rounded up people, driving Muslims from their villages to ports on the Black Sea, where they awaited ships provided by the neighbouring
Ottoman Empire. The explicit Russian goal was to expel the groups in question from their lands. They were given a choice as to where to be resettled: in the Ottoman Empire or in Russia far from their old lands. Only a small percentage (the numbers are unknown) accepted resettlement within the
Russian Empire. The trend of
Russification has continued at different paces during the remaining Tsarist period and under the Soviet Union, so that today there are more Tatars living outside the
Republic of Tatarstan than inside it. Alexander Suvorov announced the capture of Ismail in 1791 to the Tsarina Catherine in a doggerel couplet, after the assault had been pressed from house to house, room to room, and nearly every Muslim man, woman, and child in the city had been killed in three days of uncontrolled massacre, 40,000 muslims dead, a few hundred taken into captivity. For all his bluffness, Suvorov later told an English traveller that when the massacre was over he went back to his tent and wept. During the
Circassian genocide, general
Grigory Zass in sent the severed Circassian heads to Berlin for anatomical studies. The
Decembrist said that Zass cleaned and boiled the flesh off the heads after storing them under his bed in his tent. He also had Circassian heads outside of his tent impaled on lances on a hill. Circassian men's corpses were decapitated by Russian-Cossack women on the battlefield after the battles were over for the heads to be sent to Zass for collection. Zass erected Circassian heads on poles outside of his tent and witnesses saw the wind blowing the beards of the heads. Russian soldiers and Cossacks were paid for sending Circassian heads to General Zass. Besides cutting Circassian heads off and collecting them, Zass employed a deliberate strategy of annihilating Circassian en masse, burning entire Circassian villages with the people in it and encouraging violation of Circassian women and children. Zass' forces referred to all Circassian elderly, children women, and men as "Bandits, "plunderers", or "thieves" and the Russian empire's forces were commanded by ferociously partholofical officers who commanded political dissidents and criminals. Cossacks raped Circassian women and impregnated them with children. Circassian children were scared of Zass and he was called the devil (Iblis) by the Circassians. Russians raped Circassian girls during the
1877 Russo-Turkish war from the Circassian refugees who were settled in the Ottoman Balkans. Circassian girls were sold into Turkish harems by their relatives. Circassians also raped and murdered Bulgarians during the 1877 Russo-Turkish war. Circassian women in the Balkans were raped by Russian soldiers in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877.
Soviet Union The Soviet Union was hostile to all forms of religion, which was "
the opium of the masses" in accordance with
Marxist ideology. Relative religious freedom existed for Muslims in the years following the revolution, but in the late 1920s the Soviet government took a strong anti-religious turn. Many mosques were closed or torn down. During the period of
Joseph Stalin's leadership,
Crimean Tatar,
Chechen,
Ingush,
Balkar,
Karachay, and
Meskhetian Turk Muslims were victims of mass deportation. Though it principally targeted ethno-religious minorities, the deportations were officially based on alleged
collaborationism during the
Nazi occupation of Crimea. The deportation began on 17 May 1944 in all
Crimean inhabited localities. More than 32,000
NKVD troops participated in this action. 193,865 Crimean Tatars were deported, 151,136 of them to
Uzbek SSR, 8,597 to
Mari ASSR, 4,286 to
Kazakh SSR, the rest 29,846 to the various
oblasts of the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. From May to November, 10,105 Crimean Tatars died of starvation in Uzbekistan (7% of deported to Uzbek SSR). Nearly 30,000 (20%) died in exile during the year and a half by the NKVD data and nearly 46% by the data of the Crimean Tatar activists. According to Soviet dissident information, many Crimean Tatars were made to work in the large-scale projects conducted by the Soviet
Gulag system of slave labour camps.
South-eastern Europe (Balkans) in
Bosnia As the
Ottoman Empire entered a permanent phase of decline in the late 17th century it was engaged in a protracted state of conflict, losing territories both in
Europe and the
Caucasus. The victors were the Christian states, the old
Habsburg and
Romanov Empires, and the new nation-states of Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Rival European powers encouraged the development of nationalist ideologies among the Ottoman subjects in which the Muslims were portrayed as an ethnic "fifth column" left over from a previous era that could not be integrated into the planned future states. The struggle to rid themselves of Ottomans became an important element of the self-identification of the Christians of the
Balkans. Following the Habsburg and Holy League victory in the
Great Turkish War, the second Ottoman failure to take Vienna, and other major battlefield defeats to Habsburg Austria and its allies in the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire fell into a state of decline in Southeastern Europe. During this period, the Habsburg, Venetian, and other allied Holy League troops committed widespread atrocities against the Muslim population, coinciding with the Ottoman withdrawal from the area.
Hungary,
Croatia,
Dalmatia, and
Slavonia were all lost to the advancing Habsburg and Venetian troops, and the Muslims in these areas were massacred, enslaved, forcibly converted to Catholicism, or banished to Muslim-ruled lands such as
Bosnia. Nearly all Ottoman-Islamic infrastructure and religious sites in Croatia, including mosques and graveyards, were destroyed or repurposed following the expulsion of the Ottomans from the area. These events “enjoyed the benediction of the Catholic Church.” For example, cities like
Skopje (1689) and
Sarajevo (1697) were sacked and burned to the ground by Habsburg troops, causing widespread devastation and killing tens of thousands of people. After
Zenta and the burning of Sarajevo to the ground, Habsburg forces of
Prince Eugene of Savoy laid waste to Bosnia during their retreat, destroying Turkish settlements along the line of his retreat and taking the women and children as slaves. Following
the reconquest of Buda in 1686, the Habsburg Austrian and other Holy League troops likewise took their fury out on the hated “heathens” of the city, massacring around 3,000 Muslims and enslaving another c. 6,000. According to Mark Levene, the Victorian public in the 1870s paid much more attention to the massacres and expulsions of Christians than to massacres and expulsions of Muslims, even if on a greater scale. He further suggests that such massacres were even favoured by some circles. Mark Levene also argues that the dominant powers, by supporting "nation-statism" at the
Congress of Berlin, legitimized "the primary instrument of Balkan nation-building":
ethnic cleansing. Hall points out that atrocities were committed by all sides during the Balkan conflicts. Deliberate terror was designed to instigate population movements out of particular territories. The aim of targeting the civilian population was to carve ethnically homogeneous countries.
Muslims were forced to leave Principality of Serbia in 1862. Muslim Albanians, along smaller numbers of urban Turks (some with Albanian heritage),
were expelled by the
Serb army from most parts of the
Sanjak of Niş and fled to the
Kosovo Vilayet and Macedonia during and after the
Serbian–Ottoman War (1876–78). An estimated 49–130,000 Albanians were either expelled, fled and/or retreated from the captured areas seeking refuge in
Ottoman Kosovo. Justin McCarty estimates that between 1821 and 1922 around five and a half million Muslims were driven out of Europe and five million more were killed or died of disease and starvation while fleeing. Cleansing occurred as a result of the Serbian and Greek independence in the 1820s and 1830s, the
Russo-Turkish War 1877–1878, and culminating in the
Balkan Wars 1912–1913. Mann describes these acts as "murderous ethnic cleansing on stupendous scale not previously seen in Europe" referring to the 1914
Carnegie Endowment report. It is estimated that at the turn of the 20th century there were 4,4 million Muslims living in the Balkan regions under Ottoman control. More than one million Muslims left the Balkans in the last three decades of the 19th century. Between 1912 and 1926 nearly 2.9 million Muslims were either killed or forced to emigrate to Turkey. and 30,000 Turks were killed in
Tripolitsa by Greek rebels in the summer of 1821, including the entire Jewish population of the city. Similar events as these occurred elsewhere during the Greek Revolution resulting in the eradication and expulsion of virtually the entire Turkish population of the
Morea. These acts ensured the ethnic homogenization of the area under the rule of the future modern Greek state. According to claims by Turkish delegations, in 1878 the Muslim inhabitants in
Thessaly are estimated to be 150,000 and in 1897 the Muslims numbered 50,000 in Crete. By 1919 there were virtually no Muslims left in Thessaly and only 20,000 in Crete. In the
Bulgarian insurgency of the
April Uprising in 1876 an estimate of 1,000 Muslims were killed. During the
Russo-Turkish War large numbers of Turks were either killed, perished, or became refugees. There are different estimates about the casualties of the war. Crampton describes an exodus of 130,000–150,000 expelled of which approximately half returned for an intermediary period encouraged by the
Congress of Berlin. Hupchick and McCarthy point out that 260,000 perished and 500,000 became refugees. The Turkish scholars Karpat and Ipek argue that up to 300,000 were killed and 1–1.5 million were forced to emigrate. Members of the European press who covered the war in Bulgaria reported on the Russian atrocities against Muslims. Witness accounts from Schumla and Razgrad describe children, women, and elderly wounded by sabres and lances. They stated that the entire Muslim population of many villages had been massacred. Recently uncovered photographs in the archive of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Russo-Turkish War 1877–1878 show the massacre of Muslims by the Russians in the region of
Stara Zagora claiming to have affected some 20,000 Muslim civilians. Massacres against Turks and Muslims during the
Balkan Wars in the hands of Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians are described in detail in the 1912 Carnegie Endowment report. The Bulgarian violence during the
Balkan War included burning of villages, transforming mosques into churches, rape of women, and mutilation of bodies. It is estimated that 220,000
Pomaks were forcefully
Christianized and forbidden to wear Islamic religious clothing. During
World War II, the
Chetniks, a Yugoslav Royalist and Serbian nationalist movement, committed numerous
war crimes primarily directed against the non-Serb population of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia explicitly ordering the ethnic cleansing, mainly 29,000–33,000 Muslims were killed. Also during World War II, Muslims faced sporadic but significant and violent persecution at the hands of the Croatian fascist
Ustaše movement in the
Independent State of Croatia. Despite Ustaše overtures and positive propaganda towards Muslims, the government in Zagreb in reality staunchly favored Catholics in the military, government and ministry positions, with Muslim militias being regarded as little more than cannon fodder with little to no combat effectiveness. Catholics held the vast majority of high ranking government offices, leading to complaints and protests from Muslim religious leaders. The archbishop of Sarajevo had stated that the situation had become critical for Muslims due to violent persecution from both the Serbian Chetniks and Croatian fascists. According to some reports, as many as 100,000 Muslims had been killed and 250,000 displaced by the Ustaše by 1943. There were also reports of forced conversions of Muslims to Catholicism. One German officer reportedly remarked that "the Muslims bear the special status of being persecuted by all others."
Tatarstan The 1921–1922 famine in Tatarstan was a period of mass starvation and drought that took place in the
Tatar ASSR as a result of
war communism policy, in which 500,000 to 2,000,000 peasants died. The event was part of the greater
Russian famine of 1921–1922 that affected other parts of the USSR, in which up 5,000,000 people died in total. According to
Roman Serbyn, a professor of Russian and East European history, the Tatarstan famine was the first man-made famine in the Soviet Union and systematically targeted ethnic minorities such as
Volga Tatars and
Volga Germans. The 1921–1922 famine in
Tatarstan has been compared to
Holodomor in
Ukraine, and in 2008, the
All-Russian Tatar Social Center (VTOTs) asked the
United Nations to condemn the 1921–22 Tatarstan famine as genocide of Muslim Tatars.
Turkey During
World War One, both
Turks and
Kurds were killed by
Russians,
Assyrians and
Armenians in the eastern provinces of the
Ottoman Empire, however, this was mainly in retaliation for Turkish persecution of Christians (
Armenian genocide and
Greek genocide). On 14 May 1919, the Greek army landed in
İzmir (
Smyrna), which marked the beginning of the
Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). During the war, the Greek side committed a number of atrocities in western provinces (such as İzmir, Manisa, and Uşak), the local Muslim population was subjected to massacre, ravaging and rape. The Republic of Turkey was founded on a strict interpretation of secularism by the war-hero turned statesman,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In the early republican era, the revolutionary Kemalist government had sought to actively de-Islamize society and turn Turkey into a fully Westernized country. The Kemalists had perceived religion, Islam in particular, to be a force of backwardness. As such, they cracked down on many outward expressions of Islam, whether orthodox or heterodox-folk manifestations of it. They wanted religion to be solely limited to the "conscience of individuals". The fifth Turkish prime minister,
Şükrü Saracoğlu, had allegedly desired the abolition of religion altogether through government restrictions. The government had all shariah courts (including those relating to personal civil law) and traditional madrasas dissolved. The teaching of Arabic, and the Arabic adhaan, was also banned. However, the military regime under
Kenan Evren had softened its stance on Islam, seeing it as an alternative to communism. The Turkish generals had also promoted Turkish-Sunni Islam to counter Islamism, amidst the Iranian Revolution.
Vietnam The Vietnamese Emperor
Minh Mạng unleashed persecution of Cham Muslims after he conquered the final remnants of
Champa in 1832. The Vietnamese coercively fed lizard and pig meat to Cham Muslims and cow meat to Cham Hindus against their will to punish them and assimilate them to Vietnamese culture. ==Current situation==