A continuous presence of Islam in Belarus began in the 14th century. From this time it was primarily associated with the Lipka Tatars, many of whom settled in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth while continuing their traditions and religious beliefs. The Lipka Tatars themselves did not call themselves that. They preferred to be called Belarusian Muslims, as they considered themselves more educated and religious than the nomadic Tatars. That is why the Turkic languages spoken by other Tatars did not take root among the Belarusian Tatars. The Belarusian Muslims spoke Old Belarusian, which was the state language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. But they wrote in Arabic letters. This is how the Arabic script of the Belarusian language appeared. In the 16th century, Circassians came here, in the 19th century (after the Russo-Turkish War) there were many captured Turks here.
With the advent of the Soviet Union, many Muslims left Belarus for other countries, particularly Poland. Presently, the Belarusian Muslim community consists of remaining Lipka Tatars, as well as recent immigrants from the Middle East. As of 2019, there were 8,445 Muslims in Belarus.
History
Early period The first evidence of contacts between Belarus and the Muslim world are silver coins (dirhams). The oldest of them date back to the 8th century. Researchers believe that the penetration of Arabic coins began in the 70-80s of the 7th century. The first stage of dirham circulation in Belarus lasted until about 833. A characteristic feature of this stage is the predominance of coins of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties of North African coinage. Dirhams of Asian coinage were rare at this time, but in subsequent periods they took a dominant position. Thus, in 1962, a treasure was found in the Glubokoe district with dirhams of Caliph Harun ar-Rashid. and al-Mutasim Billahi (the city of Fariz, 834). In 1960, in the village of Porechye in the Glubokoe district, a treasure was found, the oldest coin of which was minted in the name of the Caliph al-Mansur in the city of Madinat as-Salam.Belarus Ve İslam Dunyasi, Vladimir Lichoedov
The Arab authors Al-Balkhi, Al-Istakhri, Al-Hawqal, and other Muslim authors mention the country of Arthania, whose king lives in Artha. Some researchers tend to associate Arta with the Belarusian city of Orsha, and Artania — with Krivia.С. Санько, Х. Кашкурэвіч, Загадкавая краіна Артанія
The Tale of Bygone Years (12th century) contains a story about Vladimir's the Great choice of faith, which goes as follows. In 986, ambassadors from the Volga Bulgars arrived to Vladimir, offering him the opportunity to convert to Islam. When they told the prince about the rituals that must be observed, including the ban on drinking wine, Vladimir responded with the famous phrase: "Drinking is the joy of Rus'," after which he rejected the Bulgars' offer.
In Belarus, the Vikings actively sold local slaves, known as Sakaliba, to the Arab Caliphate. Usually, these are prisoners as a result of internecine wars between local princes or leaders: conditionally they sold their own to foreigners. Or — the story of "slavery for debt". Imagine that a person from some Podvinnia did not return a loan to a neighbor on time, and as a result ended up on the slave market in Baghdad.
Finally, a large part of trade with the Eastern countries was the trade in slaves captured as a result of wars and robber attacks. Baltic, Slavic and Finnish slaves, united by the Arabs under the single name "Saqaliba", acted as warriors and guards of the emirs, served as eunuchs in harems, where girls from those very regions were gathered. The scale of this shameful trade amounted to tens of thousands of people.
Belarusian national patterns were found on the ornaments of the Egyptian Mamluks. Some of the embroideries of medieval Islamic textiles in museum catalogs were attributed to the ends of men's belts or as part of a turban. An eight-pointed star-rosette of four double ears of wheat in Belarus was considered a symbol of fertility, the spirit of the harvest. It was believed that the god of prosperity, harvest, wealth — Sporysh — lived in a double ear. Linear-geometric ornament in embroidery played a significant protective role in the Slavic costume. A rhombus or a slanted square, a rhombus with extended sides, a rhombus with rays, a rhombus with hooks, a motif of an oblique cross, an eight-pointed star are found on wedding ponevas, on embroidered sleeves of women's shirts, on girls' headdresses. Researcher of Belarusian ornament M.S. Katsar assumes that the image in the form of a rhombus with a dot in the center is a symbol of the god Yarilo — the god of the vital forces of nature and harvest.
Islam in Grand Duchy of Lithuania The history of Islam in Belarus began in the 14th century, as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania invited Tatars from the Golden Horde to assist with the protection of their borders.
The reign of Gediminas The appearance of the first Tatars in Belarus falls on the reign of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas. History has preserved information that, having conquered the lands of Kievan Rus, Duke Gediminas moved further with his army, in the direction of the southwest, but unexpectedly encountered the nomadic tribes of the Tatars and Kipchaks. The Grand Duke came up with the following idea: to use the warlike nomads as defenders of the borders of the Belarusian-Lithuanian state. After all, the Tatars were considered excellent warriors — horsemen, it was not for nothing that they were said to be born and grow up in the saddle. Duke Gediminas invited the Tatars to serve in his army.
The Grand Dukes Algirdas and Keistut were no longer limited to using the Tatars only as border defenders, but also invited them to participate in their campaigns against the same knights-crusaders. Returning from service, the Tatars received the right to settle within the borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, near cities and castles.
The reign of Vytautas
Vytautas the Great took a more active role in Tatar affairs. He expanded Tatar settlements across his realm, aiming to build a militarized social class. After his 1397 campaign against the Golden Horde, he brought thousands of prisoners to Lithuania. In 1398, returning from Crimea, he resettled several Karaite families — Jewish Khazars — in Trakai, who later spread to Vilnius and Panevėžys.
During the 1410 Battle of Grunwald, the sons of Khan Tokhtamysh—who once burned Moscow—fought alongside Vytautas against the Teutonic Knights. They were led by the famed Tatar commander Sultan Jalal ad-Din, whose cavalry dealt heavy losses to the crusaders. The last Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Ulrich von Jungingen, was slain by Khan Bogardyn.
The largest Muslim community in Belarus was in Ivye. According to legend, it was founded by «Noble Batald» (probably Vitovt the Great).
The Ivye Tatars, offering their prayers to Allah, still call him "noble Batald". For help in the Battle of Grunwald, he gave the Muslims the Muravshchizna tract, which was located a little more than a kilometer from the Ivye castle. This is how the community was born. But the local Tatars got their own temple, a mosque, much later. Muslims also called Vytautas the «white khan» because the color white in the symbolism of the Turkic nomads meant the western direction. The prayer for Vytautas, which was read during Friday church services in mosques until the 20th century, remained in the tradition of the Belarusian Muslims.
Vytautas also received nickname «Vattad», the mainstay of Islam in the West, and they pronounced his name together with the names of the caliphs — the rulers of Islam.
Commonwealth period Outwardly, the Tatars were not much different from the local population — fair-haired and light-eyed Europeans. They soon forgot their native language, but firmly preserved religious traditions. In fact, it was Islam with its clear regulation of all spheres of a believer's life that did not allow the Tatars to assimilate and preserved their ethnic identity. The Tatars were united by the laws of the Muslim community - the ummah, which was something like a "state within a state". There, the rules of mutual control and mutual assistance were strictly observed not only on religious, but also on everyday issues. The number of Tatars grew rapidly. In the 16th century, their number on Belarusian lands exceeded 20 thousand, 12 cathedral mosques were built. In the 17-18th centuries, the number of Muslims in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth reached 60 thousand, and there were more than four hundred mosques.Historical Experience of Islam ISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF ISLAM IN BELARUSIAN LANDS, Dovnar Lyudmila Aleksandrovna
Cultural herritage The Muslim population was the first of other confessional groups to create an original alphabet based on Arabic script, adapted for recording the sounds of the Belarusian language, which in certain moments surpasses the two other Belarusian alphabets – Cyrillic and Latin – in terms of the accuracy of sound transmission, even in their modern form. Scientists can recreate the Belarusian speech of past centuries more accurately using Muslim texts than any other. Muslims have written thousands of books, primarily of religious, but not only, content – the so-called kitabs.
The Muslim culture of Belarus in the period before the 20th century demonstrates the largest (and uninterrupted for centuries) tradition of Belarusian-language religious literature compared to all other confessions. Only in recent decades has Catholic and Protestant literature exceeded in volume what Muslims had been creating for centuries.
In 1686, the Minsk Tafsir was published in Minsk, a manuscript of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars from 1686, containing the text of the Quran with a translation into Polish. It is the first translation of the Quran into Polish and Slavic in general and the third into a European language. And the Belarusian language is one of the first living European languages into which the Quran was translated. At the same time, Christian Belarusians received the first full text of the Bible in its native language only in the second half of the 20th century.
The Muslim population, alone among the entire population of the region, continuously maintained the tradition of Belarusian-language book writing until the beginning of the 20th century. Only about Muslims can one say with certainty that they preserved, wrote and distributed books in the Belarusian language even in the darkest centuries for Belarusian culture.
The Tatars, however, soon settled in Lithuania, as well as in neighbouring Poland, and by the end of the 16th century, an estimated 100,000 Tatars lived in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, including the descendants of border guards, voluntary immigrants, and prisoners of war. From this group came the Lipka Tatars. In the early 19th century, several Tatars fled to the Ottoman Empire amidst rumours of forced baptisms of Muslims.
In Russian Empire By the time Belarus became part of the Russian Empire, local Muslim communities were independent, but in 1831 they submitted to the Tauride Muslim Spiritual Administration. On the eve of World War I, more than a dozen generals from Belarusian Tatars served in the Russian army, and colonels, majors and lower-ranking officers numbered in the hundreds. All of them were graduates of Russian military educational institutions and were therefore considered the most loyal to the authorities. The Tatar-Mongol invasion separated Iran and the Caucasus from the Belarusian lands for a long time. But Iranian merchants and goods arrived at our fairs, and the Persian belts became the model for the famous Slutsk belts. Then the borders of the Russian Empire moved close to Iran. In addition to active trade with Persia, there were also wars.