Source: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/26/AR2006122600797.html
SMOLYAN, Bulgaria (Reuters) - Like most Bulgarians, Salikh Kutsov hopes joining the European Union will bring prosperity to his town. But the Muslim carpenter wonders if his future wife would be happy wearing a headscarf in the EU.
The 27-year-old carpenter has been told accession will cement religious and democratic freedoms that have taken a tenuous hold here since the fall of communism.
But he is also taken aback at hardening attitudes toward his religion's traditions in the wealthy bloc and their effect in Bulgaria, where Christians and Muslims have lived in relative harmony for centuries.
"All my Christian friends here respect me, but as for Europe, I don't know," said Kutsov as he waited to attend Friday prayers in front of a newly painted mosque, one of the three in this gritty town in the south-east corner of Europe.
Bulgaria will be the only EU state where Muslims -- 12 percent of its 7.8 million people -- are not recent immigrants but a centuries-old local community. Mostly ethnic Turkish descendants of the Ottoman Empire's reach into Europe, they live beside Christians in a culture known as "komshuluk," or neighbourly relations.
Recently, however, two Muslim girls were prohibited from wearing headscarves to a state school in the town of Smolyan -- Bulgaria's first glimpse of an issue that has raised tensions between Christians and Muslims in western Europe.