Headscarves as Politics: Gender, Islam and Shifting Discourses of Social Justice in the Balkans

In Bulgaria, the so-called emancipation of Muslim women was a particularly urgent goal and a litmus test for the triumph of scientific socialism over what was considered the feudal backwardness of Islam. For over four decades, all of the coercive powers of the centralized state were funneled into suppressing local Islamic traditions and radically reimagining gender norms among the country’s sizeable Muslim minority. After the collapse of communism in 1989, Bulgaria’s Muslims were free to embrac