South-eastern Europe...played host to long-simmering tensions of state-making, community-building and religious resistance amid the ruins of empire. Emily Greble's important new book analyses many of these themes, using the history of Muslims in south-eastern Europe—and later Yugoslavia—from the 'long post-Ottoman transition' through the Second World War as her case study....Greble's book should spur Europeanists to pay much more attention to this regional history, which has had a large impact on the history of the continent in various ways.... Greble has certainly succeeded in her wider effort to reveal how Europe's Muslim communities helped define a 'modern political order' that existed 'within European history, not alongside, outside or on the peripheries of it', and which European historians specializing in other regions—including the readers of this journal—would do well to keep more firmly in view.
