The purpose of the paper is to examine the process of political mobilization among the Muslims in Bulgaria in the period 1878-1908 with a particular focus on their initiatives for participation in parliamentary politics. In 1878 Bulgaria became an autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty. It had a significant Muslim community of about 600,000 who towards 1900 accounted for 15% of its population. The newly established Bulgarian state became a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system and its laws granted universal suffrage to all its male subjects including the Muslims. While certain Bulgarian political figures did not hide their perception of the Muslims as a foreign element who had no place in Bulgarian legislature, other more pragmatic politicians treated the large Muslim community as potential voters who could play a decisive role in winning an election. Such individuals actively sought to attract Muslim support for their political parties during election campaigns by promising to work for issues of interest to the community and even supporting Muslim parliamentary candidates. At the same time the Muslims did not remain passive and, seeking to make the most of such overtures, some of them entered the realm of Bulgarian party politics with considerable enthusiasm. The drive for political participation assumed new dimensions from the mid-1890s onwards as a result of the spread of the Young Turk opposition organization to Bulgaria and the emergence of a cultural and political reform movement among the local Muslims. One of the publicized aims of this movement was to make political participation a “national enterprise” for the community rather than the priority of a few individuals serving their own personal or party interests. In such a way the supporters of the movement began to challenge openly the established Muslim leadership who had traditionally served as the community’s representatives. The paper examines in some detail the ensuing debates and struggles between these two camps, as well as their relationship with the Bulgarians. At the same time it challenges the established view that the local Muslims were an inert mass with little interest in politics and instead casts them as an agent who actively sought to use all limited resources at its disposal in order take its respectable place in the new Bulgarian state. The paper is based on Bulgarian and Ottoman archival sources, Muslim journals published in Bulgaria and the proceedings of Bulgarian parliamentary meetings.