The articles of this volume, masterfully collected and edited by Czech scholar František Šístek, shed much new light on how Bosnian Muslims were perceived and treated by writers, politicians, and intellectuals from different parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire over the past two centuries. The Bosnian Muslim community was one of the rare European Muslim communities to be brought fully under the aegis of a major European empire (in this case, Austria-Hungary) between 1878 and 1918. The ways Southeastern, Eastern, and Central European intellectuals and politicians perceived the impacts of this group from the late nineteenth century to the present provides the general focus for this diverse set of essays.
In general chronological order, scholars from a variety of disciplines with expertise on Central Europe and the Balkans treat various aspects of this understudied community in the Habsburg context and beyond. The first essay, by Czech scholars Ladislav Hladký and Petr Stehlík, puts the relatively lesser impact of the Turks and Ottomans in Bohemia in the context of the relatively greater sense of enmity felt there in the nineteenth century against the Habsburg rulers, with Czechs retaining a “pronounced ambivalence” about the Bosnians and other Muslims in the empire generally. This starkly contrasted with views on Muslims and Turks held by other constituent groups of the Habsburg Empire.
The next piece, by Božidar Jezernik of Slovenia, explores in some depth the evolution of the Bosnian Muslims away from their traditional Ottoman status as a millet (religious community) into being forced to choose to identify either with Serbs or Croats—a requirement that compromised their development as an autonomous national community within modern Yugoslavia, with enormous consequences after the Yugoslav breakup in the 1990s.
Martin Gabriel, an Austrian scholar, focuses in the next essay on how the Habsburgs used traditional anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish myths to consolidate their power over Bosnia after occupying it following the Russo-Turkish War of 1878. Gabriel depicts the tremendous uncertainty among the Bosnian Muslims about whether they should fight against or cooperate with their Christian occupiers. He also discusses how some Austrians actually perceived Bosnian Muslims as less problematical to rule than Bosnian Croat Catholics, since the former was more clearly an “other” than the latter: ironically, more manageable as a population clearly under occupation. His study parallels Jezernik's depiction of how Bosnian Muslims were increasingly caught between Serbian and Croatian communities in their loyalties—an ambivalence later resulting in great problems.
The next article, by Clemens Ruthner of Trinity College, Dublin, casts the four decades of Habsburg rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sort of experiment in “Austrian quasi-colonialism” which, in the context of other more famous colonial “civilizing missions” at that time around the globe, has been overlooked because of its location in Europe. Slovenian scholar Oliver Pejić then examines how, as part of this colonial project, the Habsburg government produced textbooks for Bosnian schools depicting Muslim history in a more positive light to help integrate this community more into Austro-Hungarian society. These two studies are then rounded out by Czech scholar Zora Hesová's very interesting piece on the emergence of an autonomous Muslim religious authority under the aegis of the Habsburgs in Bosnia and Herzegovina: shedding new light on the beginnings of the contemporary Muslim community there that has since come to occupy an important place in the modern global Muslim ecumenical movement. She explains how it pioneered ways in which a Muslim clerical hierarchy could coexist with the relatively secular governmental authority brought in by the Habsburgs.
These are followed by three essays exploring the impact of Bosnian Muslims in various Habsburg literary domains. First, František Šístek explores the myriad ways Bosnian Muslims have been depicted in Czech literature, revealing how Czech conceptions of Bosnians were shaped by the overall fate of Czechs in the Habsburg Empire as well as the experiences of many Czechs in Bosnia during the Habsburg occupation there. His work is well complemented by an intriguing discussion by Charles Sabatos, an American scholar now teaching in Turkey, of how Rebecca West used Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic account of Yugoslavia and its complex mix of peoples and religions, to parallel the complexities of her own experience growing up Anglo-Irish in a time of great change in the British Isles. The third piece in this group, by Slovenian scholar Bojan Baskar, unpacks the “Austronostalgia” of the anthropologist Vera Stein Erlich, who portrayed a Bosnia culturally on the edge between Oriental and European, ultimately casting it as a kind of revived Andalucia of the Moorish era with strong resemblances to Mexico of all places!
This group is followed by a final set of essays taking discussions in a more modern direction. They begin with an analysis of anti-Bosnian Serbian proverbs by the Serbian scholar Marija Mandić, who creates a bridge in her work between linguistic analysis and contemporary ethnic stereotyping and politicization of discourse. This is followed by an essay in a similar vein by Slovenian Alenka Bartulović discussing recent trends in Slovenia that have seen the simultaneous rejection and acceptance of Bosnians by Slovenians as “brothers and Other”: depicting an uncertainty only heightened by the political upheavals in former Yugoslavia at the end of the twentieth century. The final two essays, by graduate students working in Germany, Aldina Čemernica and Merima Šehagić, deal with the complexities of acceptance and rejection of Bosnian refugees from the recent conflict in other parts of Europe, particularly Germany.
On the whole, this volume provides an excellent collection of diverse studies on a wide variety of topics in and around questions of the status, perception, and reception of Bosnian Muslims in Eastern, Southeastern, and Central Europe over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. František Šístek is to be commended for assembling this informative group of studies that sheds new light on how this intersectional group interweaves European, Middle Eastern, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultural strands of history and cultural discourse in many surprising ways.
