Poland for the day

The New York Times has an article by Ryan Schuessler about the Tatars in Poland:

Though she is a Polish Muslim, Dzenneta Bogdanowicz (photo, left) had never felt threatened living in the small village of Kruszyniany, a few miles from the border with Belarus.
That is, until the attacks in Paris in November of 2015, when Europe was swept up in the migrant crisis and the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party had just won control of Poland’s government. As it happened, on the same day as the attacks, Kruszyniany was celebrating the opening of its first cultural center for Bogdanowicz’ community, the Lipka Tatars, a tiny Muslim minority with six-hundred-year-old roots in Poland.
Xenophobic and threatening comments poured in to Bogdanowicz’ email account and cropped up on the comment threads of news articles about the center. “Poland is for Poles,” not for Tatars, one comment said. “Usually,” Bogdanowicz said, “it’s normal and we feel safe,” but “that day, I did not feel safe.”
These are uncertain times for Poland’s Tatars, a largely overlooked group who now find themselves navigating between their religion and their nationality, as Poland’s new nationalist government resists the European Union’s refugee resettlement mandates and right-wing Christians take aim at Islam generally.
Yet, even as anti-Muslim sentiment builds in Poland and the Lipka Tatars occasionally find themselves the target of hatred, the Tatars themselves largely support the government’s harsh stance against the mainly Muslim migrants who are pouring into Europe.
About thirty thousand Muslims have entered Poland since the fall of Communism. Already outnumbered 10 to one, the three thousand or so Tatars worry that any further influx of Muslim migrants could threaten their six-century-deep monopoly on Polish Islam, and with it their identity and tradition of stability. “There is a huge group of Muslims that are not Tatars,” said Dzemil Gembicki, caretaker of the mosque in Kruszyniany. “We want to stick with our own traditions. We are afraid that the huge group of Muslims from other places may cause us to lose the traditions of Polish Tatars.”
Tomasz Miskiewicz, the mufti of Poland and a Lipka Tatar, said that “the situation of Tatar society here in Poland is on the edge. A lot has changed,” he said in an interview in the eastern city of Bialystok.
Lipka Tatars are descended from Turkic people from Central Asia, who migrated to the Baltic region in the fourteenth century. Those who live in what is now Poland have historically been centered in the Podlaskie region, a heavily forested area in the northeast where bison and wolves still roam, and where the countryside is peppered with Orthodox and Catholic churches, synagogues and mosques. The religious diversity is striking for a country that is otherwise over ninety percent Roman Catholic.
“I am Muslim, I am Tatar, I am Polish,” said Bogdanowicz, who runs a Tatar restaurant in Kruszyniany. “It cannot be divided.”
In the years after secular Communism collapsed in Poland, many of the country’s Tatar families sent their young men abroad to study Islam in Paris, Sarajevo, Medina, or other cities. The idea was that these men, Miskiewicz among them, would return to Poland to help rebuild the country’s Islamic institutions on Polish terms. Wealthy Muslim countries poured resources into reviving Islam in Eastern Europe, but Poland’s Tatars largely abstained from those efforts, and preferred to manage their country’s Islamic renaissance themselves. “We try to keep our tradition, our culture,” said Maciej Szczesnowicz, president of the Muslim community in the village of Bohoniki. “We have our own way of thinking and religious traditions.”
The Tatars revived cultural and religious festivals, and restarted the teaching of their language and of Arabic. The two remaining centuries-old, traditionally constructed mosques in Poland, which had survived World War Two and the Communist years, were renovated, and new ones were opened. An Islamic education center is scheduled to be built in the village of Sokolka this year, and another is planned for Bialystok in 2017.
“We want to awaken the precious traditions, before they are forgotten,” said Roza Chazbijewicz, chairwoman of the Tatar cultural foundation in Poland. “The identity must be kept.”
The Tatars’ traditional practice of Islam differs from that of many recent Muslim arrivals in Poland. At the historic mosque in Bohoniki, one seventy-year-old Tatar woman talked about the niqab, the veil worn by women from some conservative Muslim countries that covers the whole face except for the eyes. “What would I do in all of that, sit around and pray all day?” said the woman, Eugenia Radkiewicz. “Can you imagine that in Bohoniki?”
While they tend to stay clear of partisan politics, many Polish Tatars echo the nationalist and anti-migrant sentiments of the new Law and Justice government. The party’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has said that the flood of migrants would bring a host of ills to Europe, including infectious diseases.
“Poland is not ready for immigrants,” said Miskiewicz, the mufti.
On the other hand, the brewing Catholic nationalism that has grown alongside Poland’s anti-refugee stance has taken aim at Muslims, at times including the Tatars, whose uniquely Polish roots are not well known outside the Podlaskie region. When politicians paint Islam itself as a threat to Poland, the Tatars say they feel targeted. “We hear this,” said Bogdanowicz, the restaurateur. “We don’t know which way it’s going to go.”
There have been flashes of anti-Tatar violence in recent years, as the migrant crisis has mounted. The mosque in the port city of Gdansk, built by Tatars in 1991, was firebombed in 2013. In Kruszyniany, the following year, vandals painted anti-Muslim slogans, a pig, and a red X on the eighteenth-century mosque, and vandalized the adjacent cemetery, painting wartime resistance symbols and covering Islamic religious script on Tatar tombstones. “It’s hard to say if there are going to be more of these incidents, because of the situation with the immigrants,” Miskiewicz said. “On this huge wave of negative feelings about Islam, all are being thrown into one pot.”

Rico says it's gonna be hard on the poor Tatars...