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The Muslim Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina (with Reference to the Sandžak of Novi Pazar): Islam as National Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Francine Friedman
Francine Friedman*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Ball State University, U.S.A.
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Extract

The Bosnian Muslims have only fairly recently become internationally identified as a national group. As a matter of fact, Bosnia and Herzegovina itself has had until lately a low recognition value to most people not living in southeastern Europe. Indeed, to many it has become a shock to discover that a fairly large group of Muslims resides in the middle of Europe, not to mention that they have become the object of ethnonationalistic violence at the end of the twentieth century. A further seeming incongruity in the international arena is the claim by many Bosnian Muslims that they should not be confused with Muslims of the Arab-speaking world, since Bosnian Muslims are indigenous Serbo-Croatian-speaking (now Bosnian-speaking) Slavic people, just like the Serbs or Croats who have committed the recent acts of violence against them in the name of ethnic purity. The Bosnian Muslim claim that the designation “Muslim” is more a national than a religious identification is confusing to the world at large. This article will trace the formation of the Bosnian Muslim national identification and set forth the issues faced by the Bosnian Muslims in their attempts to claim and defend it.

Type
The Muslim Minorities
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 165 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. One of the peculiar manifestations of the recent upsurge in the various South Slav nationalisms has been the attempt by the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims to claim that their common language, Serbo-Croatian, can be differentiated into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. To that end, the philologists and literary elites of each national group have attempted to purge their variant of Serbo-Croatian of those words that seem to evoke memories of the other two national groups. It appears that the Croats in particular are attempting to introduce many of the older words that modern Serbo-Croatian had forsaken, and the Bosnian Muslims may be relying on more “Turkishisms” than previously in the Bosnian variant. Conversation with Bogdan Rakić, Indiana University, 8 July 1998.Google Scholar

2. Acknowledging that Western scholarship has difficulty in differentiating, particularly in the Balkan context, between the concepts of nation and ethnic group, I have chosen to utilize in this article the Yugoslav versions of these terms. That is, a “nation” (narod) was considered a group that lived mostly within the former Yugoslavia and possessed a titular republic (e.g., Serbs in Serbia, Croats in Croatia, etc.). A “nationality” (narodnost) was a large population within Yugoslavia but with majority of its group living in countries bordering Yugoslavia (i.e., Hungarians and Albanians). Finally, “ethnic minority” (etnički manjine) designated all other groups living in Yugoslavia. The uniqueness of the position of the Bosnian Muslims in this scheme is detailed in the remainder of the article.Google Scholar

3. E. Pelidija, M. Maglajlić and R. Mahmutćehajić, “Bosnia and the Bosnian Muslims: Muslims in Sanjak” (Sarajevo: 1991), p. 5.Google Scholar

4. A number of Yugoslav historians have championed the Bogomil theory, such as V. Ćorović, Historija Bosne (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1940) and Sima Ćirković, Istorija srednjovekovne bosanske država (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1964).Google Scholar

5. For a brief statement of Fine's thesis, consult “The Medieval and Ottoman Roots of Modern Bosnian Society,” in Mark Pinson, ed., The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 1–21.Google Scholar

6. It would be well to remember that in the medieval era and even up through the nineteenth century, the terms “Serbs” and “Croats” had no intrinsic meaning. People were inclined to identify themselves according to their local or regional environs, such as Bosnia. Under the Ottoman Empire, only religious identification was relevant. Only in the nineteenth century with the rise of nationalism did people begin widely to identify themselves as Serbs or Croats.Google Scholar

7. See, for example, Colin Heywood, “Bosnia under Ottoman Rule, 1463–1800,” in Mark Pinson, ed., The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 22–53.Google Scholar

8. This is not to say that there were no disadvantaged Muslims under Ottoman rule. For example, the 1910 Austrian census numbers more than 9,500 Muslim landholders with peasants (kmets) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also lists 3,000 landholders without peasants, more than 77,000 free Muslim peasants, and more than 3,600 Muslim peasants. The census also records more than 900 Christian landholders with peasants. Robert J. Donia and John V. A. Fine, Jr, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 78.Google Scholar

9. See, for example, Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 54.Google Scholar

10. Salim Ceric, Muslimani srpskohrvatskog jezik (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1968), p. 41.Google Scholar

11. Avdo Suceska, “Istorijske osnove nacionalne posebnosti bosansko-hercegovačkih Muslimana,” Jugoslovenski istorijski časopis, Vol. 4, 1969, p. 50.Google Scholar

12. Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 46.Google Scholar

13. Mustafa Memić, “Bošnjaci Sandžaka i Bošnjačko nacionalno biće,” paper presented at the conference “Bosnian Paradigm,” Sarajevo, November 1998, p. 1.Google Scholar

14. Ibid.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 3.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 4.Google Scholar

17. Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims , p. 64.Google Scholar

18. Ibid.Google Scholar

19. Statement by publicist Sulejman el Syrre Abdagić, cited in Atif Purivatra, Jugoslavenska muslimanska organizacija u političkom životu Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1974), p. 74.Google Scholar

20. Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims , p. 100.Google Scholar

21. Ivo Banac suggested that of the more than one million people killed in Yugoslavia during World War II, the Serbs lost 6.9% of their population, Croats 5.4%, Bosnian Muslims 6.8%, and Jews 77.9%. “Yugoslavia,” in Joel Kruegler, ed., The Oxford Companion to World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 999.Google Scholar

22. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 105.Google Scholar

23. “Krv nije zatajila,” Ustaša, 9 November 1941, cited in Fikreta Jelić-Butić, “Bosna I Hercegovina u koncepciji stvaranja Nezavisne Država Hrvatske,” Pregled, Vol. 12, 1971, p. 670 (note).Google Scholar

24. See Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna država Hrvatska 1941–1945 (Zagreb: Liber, 1977), and the Summer 1982 (pp. 31–33) and Autumn 1983 (pp. 37–39) issues of South Slav Journal for more on the Muslim pronouncements against Ustaše anti-Serbian violence.Google Scholar

25. “The Sanjak Region,” Balkan Institute Background Brief , No. 4, 1996, http://www.balkaninstitute.org/reference/Bb4snjk.html Google Scholar

26. Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims , p. 159.Google Scholar

27. For more on the importance of the census as a reflection of Bosnian Muslim national identification, see Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims , pp. 149–168.Google Scholar

28. The remarks in quotes that follow are from Thomas’ “History, Religion, and National Identity,” in Raju G. C. Thomas and H. Richard Friman, eds, The South Slav Conflict: History, Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 16.Google Scholar

29. Ivo Banac, “Bosnian Muslims: From Religious Community to Socialist Nationhood and Postcommunist Statehood, 1918–1992,” in Mark Pinson, ed., The Muslims of Bosnia-Herze-govina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 133.Google Scholar

30. Lucian Kim, “Muslims Exit Serbia in ‘Soft’ Ethnic Cleansing,” Christian Science Monitor , 15 October 1997, p. 6.Google Scholar

31. “The Sanjak Region,” Balkan Institute Background Brief Google Scholar

32. Ibid.Google Scholar

33. Kim, “Muslims Exit Serbia in ‘Soft’ Ethnic Cleansing,” p. 6.Google Scholar

34. For example, Noel Malcolm has characterized the Bosnian Muslims as “among the most secularized Muslim population in the world … the absolute majority of whom did not think of themselves as religious believers and only followed some of the practices of Islam as a matter of culture and tradition.” Bosnia: A Short History , pp. 221–222.Google Scholar