I received a used copy of Time of Parting as a gift from a friend. Based upon years of studying Islam’s history, conquests and the Shariah (Muslim law), I found the plot line to be historically accurate – and gruesome. The novel is based upon eye-witness accounts of the actual events. The book was made into a four and one-half hour movie, titled Time of Violence, which premiered at Cannes in 1988.
Set in 1688 during the Ottoman Turk Empire, author Anton Donchev takes us through a harrowing tale of unthinkable violence visited upon the Christian people of Elindenya in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria – to convert them from Christianity to Islam. A detachment of Janissaries, hardened soldiers of Allah, forcibly taken as small boys from their Christian families and raised with terrible cruelty as Muslims, is dispatched to accomplish the mission.
What follows their arrival is not for the faint of heart.
Based on this fictionalized account of real events and my understanding of Islam’s history, the takeaway is that atrocities like this will continue to happen throughout Western Civilization, unless there is some awakening on the part of our elected leaders to the realities of Islam. Jihad is doctrinally eternal. We have yet to come to terms and formulate a realistic plan to deal with it.
About John L. Work
John Lloyd Work has taken the detective thriller genre and woven an occasional political thread throughout his books, morphing what was once considered an arena reserved for pure fiction into believable, terrifying, futuristic, true-to-life “faction”.
He traveled the uniformed patrolman’s path, answering brutal domestic violence calls, high speed chases, homicides, suicides, armed robberies, breaking up bar fights, and the accompanying sporadic unpredictable moments of terror - which eventually come to all police officers, sometimes when least expected. He gradually absorbed the hard fact that the greatest danger a cop faces comes in the form of day-to-day encounters with emotionally disturbed, highly intoxicated people. Those experiences can wear a cop down, grinding on his own emotions and psyche. Prolonged exposure to the worst of people and people at their worst can soon make him believe that the world is a sewer. That police officer’s reality is a common thread throughout Work’s crime fiction books.
Following his graduation from high school, Work studied music and became a professional performer, conductor and teacher. Life made a sudden, unexpected turn when, one afternoon in 1976, his cousin, who eventually became the Chief of the Ontario, California, Police Department, talked him into riding along during a patrol shift. The musician was hooked into becoming a police officer.
After working for two years as a reserve officer in Southern California and in Boulder, Colorado, he joined the Longmont, Colorado Police Department. Work served there for seven years, investigating crimes as a patrolman, detective and patrol sergeant. In 1989 he joined the Adams County, Colorado Sheriff’s Office, where he soon learned that locking a criminal up inside a jail or prison does not put him out of business. As a sheriff’s detective he investigated hundreds of crimes, including eleven contract murder conspiracies which originated “inside the walls”.
While serving on the Adams County North Metro Gang Task Force and as a member of the Colorado Security Threat Intelligence Network Group (STING), Work designed a seminar on how a criminal’s mind formulates his victim selection strategy. Over a period of six years he taught that class in sheriff’s academies and colleges throughout Colorado. He saw the world of crime both inside the walls and out on the streets.
His final experiences in the criminal law field were with the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office, where for nearly two years he investigated felonies from the defense side of the Courtroom.
Twenty-two years of observing human nature at its worst, combined with watching some profound changes in America’s culture and political institutions, provided plenty of material for his first three books. A self-published author, he just finished writing his tenth thriller.
I received a used copy of Time of Parting as a gift from a friend. Based upon years of studying Islam’s history, conquests and the Shariah (Muslim law), I found the plot line to be historically accurate – and gruesome. The novel is based upon eye-witness accounts of the actual events. The book was made into a four and one-half hour movie, titled Time of Violence, which premiered at Cannes in 1988.
Here's The Right Side Of It 
I watched the movie
It was horrible
Poor Bulgarians were under ottoman yoke
Even in modern time such jihad can attack people as seen in Iraq
That film shocked me
Now I am trying to know more about Bulgaria and Bulgarians
This is a well written book. It was commissioned by the Communist Party in the early 1960s to justify the Communists’ brutal policies against Muslim minorities. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, but it is historically wrong. The Bulgarians were never converted to Islam by force. Aim of this book was to manipulate People against the turks and to create hatred. The book is still quite popular but in recent years its real character is more and more discussed in Bulgarian society.
Was anyone converted to Islam by force?