Cultural Hybridity in the Religious Literature of the Tatars of North-Eastern Europe

The Muslim Tatars of north-eastern Europe (Belarus, Lithuania and Poland) present an interesting example of cultural hybridity. Despite limited contact with the world of Islam, they preserved their Muslim identity for over eight centuries, combining the customs and norms of their adopted homeland, while maintaining their traditional practice of Islam. The religious literature they created (in Belarusian-Polish, written in the Arabic script) demonstrates an eclectic intermingling of these cultural and linguistic strands. The narratives examined in this paper, one from an Arabic source, the other from a semi-apocryphal Biblical text of Protestant sectarian derivation, exemplify the melding of these influences.