Imaginative encounters: Turkish neo-Ottomanist dreams in the Balkans and the Muslim minorities

Turkey’s political, financial, and cultural investments in Southeastern Europe are often analyzed through “soft power” frameworks that read its neo-Ottomanist ambitions unidirectional and cast Balkan Muslims as passive recipients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018–2022) with diverse Muslims in North Macedonia and Kosovo, this article challenges such accounts by showing how local actors actively engage with, reinterpret, and redirect Turkey’s imperial revival projects. Using takhayyul —a Non-Eurocentric formulation of imagination—as the theoretical framework, the analysis embraces the messiness of imaginative encounters across intersecting historical narratives and political aspirations. It traces how Balkan Muslim communities deploy sophisticated strategies of selective appropriation, maintain historical agency while navigating Turkey's diverse investments. Juxtaposing resurrection themes in Turkish Islamic revivalism with local pride narratives of Islamic primacy and resistance, the article demonstrates how imagination functions as political currency across post-Ottoman spaces, revealing the inadequacy of linear or hierarchical models of influence for understanding contemporary Islamist formations.