page_title: Islam in Romania
section_title: Kingdom of Romania
hierarchical_section_title: Islam in Romania / History / Kingdom of Romania
caption_attribution_description: Ethnic map of northern Dobruja at the beginning of the XXth century.
context_page_description: Islam in Romania is followed by only 0.3 percent of population, but has 700 years of tradition in Northern Dobruja, a region on the Black Sea coast, which was part of the Ottoman Empire for almost five centuries. In present-day Romania, most adherents to Islam belong to the Tatar and Turkish ethnic communities and follow the Sunni doctrine. The Islamic religion is one of the 16 rites awarded state recognition.
  According to tradition, Islam was first established locally around Sufi leader Sari Saltik during the Byzantine epoch. The Islamic presence in Northern Dobruja was expanded by Ottoman overseeing and successive immigration, but has been in steady decline since the late 19th century. In Wallachia and Moldavia, the two Danubian Principalities, the era of Ottoman suzerainty was not accompanied by a growth in the number of Muslims, whose presence there was always marginal. Also linked to the Ottoman Empire, groups of Islamic colonists in other parts of present-day Romania were relocated by the Habsburg expansion or by various other political changes.
context_section_description: Tatars in Tulcea County were driven out by Russian troops during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 (see Muhajir Balkan). Following the conflict and the Berlin Congress, the Romanian government of Ion Brătianu agreed to extend civil rights to non-Christians. In 1923 a monument in the shape of a small mosque was built in Bucharest's Carol Park, as sign of reconciliation after World War I. A small Muslim community resided on Ada Kaleh island in the Danube, south of the Banat, an Ottoman enclave and later part of Austria-Hungary, which was transferred to Romania in 1923.
  At the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913, the Kingdom of Romania came to include Southern Dobruja, whose population was over 50% Turkish (the region was ceded to Bulgaria in 1940). As recorded after World War I, Romania had a population of 200,000 Muslims from a total of 7 million, the majority of which were Turks who lived in the two areas of Dobruja (as many as 178,000). Since 1877, the community was led by four separate muftiyats. Their number was reduced during the interwar period, when the cities of Constanța and Tulcea each housed a muftiyat. In 1943, the two institutions were again unified around the mufi in Constanța. Outside Dobruja, the relatively small presence of Albanian Muslims also left a cultural imprint: in 1921, the first translation of the Qur'an into the Albanian language was completed by Ilo Mitke Qafëzezi in the Wallachian city of Ploiești.
  Until after World War II, the overall religiously conservative and apolitical Muslim population reportedly enjoyed a notable degree of religious tolerance. Nevertheless, after 1910, the community was subject to a steady decline, and many predominantly-Muslim villages were abandoned.
caption: Tatars (yellow) and Turks (dark purple) in Northern Dobruja (1903)
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