The proceedings under review bring together twenty-seven contributions, in French and English, emerging from a conference conducted in 2001 at the Collège de France. As explained in the forward by Gilles Veinstein, the conference was inspired by the French historian Irène Mélikoff, who is credited for having recognized the bonds between Alevism-Bektashism and the dualist systems characteristic of Christian heresies widespread in the lands under Turkish-Islamic influence. The aim of the conference was to study possible influences of Christian sects on the Islam of Anatolia and the Balkans by bringing together specialists on the syncretistic traditions of Seljuk and Ottoman Islam with experts on Christian traditions in their vicinity (p. xiii).

In its ambition and scope, the work under review is related to the volumes edited by David Shankland (2004), which also aim at clarifying the syncretistic processes leading to the particular formations of Anatolian and Balkan Islam in the footsteps of Frederick W. Hasluck (1878–1920). As pointed out by Elizabeth Zachariadou, Hasluck set out the paradigm for exploring Islamic–Christian relations in Anatolia and the Balkans in terms of cohabitation, reciprocal influences, acculturation, syncretism, and continuity (p. 397).

The scope of the project is broad and exceedingly ambitious. It covers at least five centuries, a confusing number of different languages and people that interacted on a geography that experienced war, epidemics, and natural catastrophes in addition to social and economic pressures caused by waves of migration. The broadest, and hardly disputed, argument that this volume puts forth is that the forms of “heterodox” Islam, as identified with significant parts of the Anatolian and Balkan population following the Turkish intrusion and gradual Islamization, can be described as a syncretism; it amalgamated under a nominally Islamic surface pre-Islamic traditions of the mainly Turkmen, but also Kurdish and Iranian, immigrants, with traditions at the margins of orthodox Islam in the tradition of the ghulāt and law-defying Sufism, as well as local Christian traditions. Under dispute, however, is the extent of these influences, a question that is highly political because it has often been enmeshed in nationalist narratives obsessed with the quest of origin. It is unfortunate that the volume does not offer reflection on the nature and impact of modern political discourses on the historiography of the Ottoman period.

On a conceptual level, the volume under review circles around notions of syncretism and heresy as well as orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Although the first chapter, by Michele Tardieu, includes genealogical reflection on the concept of syncretism, the term “heresy” is unfortunately not subject to similar scrutiny, and neither are the terms “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” which are, across the contributions of the volume, used with varying degrees of critical reflection. Although Denis Gris, for example, shows in his study of the 15th-century theologian ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Bistami from Bursa how the notions of heterodoxy and heresy are relative to what happens to be accepted as orthodoxy (p. 184), thus employing these categories critically as analytic tools to highlight inequalities of power regarding the definition of religious belief and practice, others use them rather naively as descriptors of certain modes of religiosity without reflecting on their normative underpinnings. In general, what is missing in this volume, but not untypically for the study of the religious history of Anatolia and Balkans, is more theoretical ambition and critical reflection on the heuristic categories employed. An introduction outlining the theoretical and methodological challenges of an ambitious project such as the study of the complex relationships among the heterogeneous people under Seljuk and Ottoman reigns, including also a review of previous research in that direction, unfortunately remains a desideratum.

Many of the contributions seem to be synopses of previous work rather than original contributions, with some in the form of mere abstracts, or rather essayist in style, and with only minimal references, if any at all. Others are more elaborate and constitute indeed serious scholarly contributions. Among the most interesting chapters are those by Michel Balivet, Gilles Veinstein, Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, and David Shankland; further worth mentioning are the contributions by Toufic Fahd, Irène Mélikoff, and Yuri Stoyanov—all of which tackle from different angles the core problem of cross-influences among different religious traditions in Anatolia and the Balkans—as well as the chapters by Jean During, Françoise Arnaud-Demir, Hatice Aynur, Machiel Kiel, and Alexandre Popovic. An extensive and useful (although in its categorization somewhat confusing) index, separated into four categories (personal names, geographic and ethnic names, religious groups and doctrines, and “notions and works”), concludes the volume (pp. 405–28).

All in all, the originality and quality of the chapters vary considerably. Still, the volume should be in every library that includes works on the religious history of the Balkans and Anatolia or Christian–Islamic syncretism.