Torbeši
 |
The Macedonian Muslims are a minority religious group within the community of Macedonian Slavs who are Muslims. They have been culturally distinctive from the majority Orthodox Christian Slav community for centuries. They are descendants of Christian Slavs who converted to Islam during the centuries when the Ottoman Empire ruled the Balkans.
Like their Christian ethnic kin, Macedonian Muslims speak the Macedonian language as their first language. Despite their common religion, Macedonian Muslims rarely intermarry with the country's other Muslims. Macedonian ethnologists, especially Slavic ethnologists, do not considerate the Muslim Slavs a separate ethnic group from the Christian Macedonian Slavs, but instead a religious minority within the Slav ethnic community. They are officialy refered to as Macedonian Muslims, but they are sometimes informally and in some cases pejoratively called Torbesh, Gorani, Pomaks etc.
They should not be confused with the Macedonian Albanians, who are an entirely different ethnic group which is also divided into Muslim and Christian populations.