The political affirmation of a"Muslim nation" in the land ofSouth Slavs has implications forthe wider questions of the rela-tionship of Islam to modernnationalism and of Islamic revivalin general.

YUGOSLAVIA’s MUSLIM NATION

by Dennison I. Rusinow

1982/No. 8Europe

[DIR-1-’82]

In the center of the coat of arms ofthe Socialist Federal Republic ofYugoslavia a cluster of flames risesfrom a single base. The flames sym-,boliz,enations,t,he (naroSdieparateorSUtshometimeSslaVnacije) that define Yugoslavia, aname meaning Land of the SouthSlavs, and that together account for85 percent of the country’s popula-tion; the common base symbolizesthe "brotherhood and unity"

theslebrOtstationisJdiOStaVndthe o)thetrha’t’nationb-indsalities" who live among them(narodnosti, now the official termfor those who used to be called"minorities") in a comrfion stateunder Communist rule. For the firsttwo decades after this new Yugo-slavia was forged out of the frag-ments of the old in the crucible ofWorld War II, there were five flameson this coat of arms, representingSerbs, Croats, Slovenes, Mace-donians, and Montenegrins, each

iii with a Republic of "its own" in thesix-republic federation. Since then,in a subtle change that has beengenerally unnoticed, there havebeen six flames. The sixth flamestands for a nation called "Muslim,"most of whose members live in thesixth federated republic, Bosnia andHerzegovina, which they share withtraditionally Orthodox Christian

ii:iil Serbs and traditionally Romanii:ili Catholic Croats.

..._...i! Thia SspectsR,epOc rtonseqWuillencesd,escriba implicaS_ome

tions of the development, definition,and political "affirmation" (by aCommunist and therefore in prin-ciple atheistic regime) of this "Mus-lim nation" in the land of the SouthSlavs. Their story has more thanlocal significance. In today’s worldthe relationship of Islam to commu-nalism and modern nationalism is ofsalient importance, part of the ques-tion of the mix of Islamic and nation-alist elements in the Iranian revolu-tion and the Afghan resistance

identitmyVemento’f pathkiesta nnaatnethaenpdlaceiMuslims in Indian society, pan-Arabism and separate state con-sciousness in the Arab world, andthe "Islamic revival" in general. Inthis context the development,"affirmation," and growing self-consciousness of a nation calledMuslim (or Muslims acquiring thestatus of a nation) in a multinational,multireligious and Communist-ruledEuropean state constitutes a casestudy that should also be of interestto those concerned with other areaswhere Muslims and modern nation-alism coexist and with current worldaffairs generally.

Islam in Bosnia-HerzegovinaIslam, as Bosnian Muslim nation-alists and Yugoslav Muslim clerical-ists are fond of noting, has beenpresent in the Balkans and on theterritory of present-day Yugoslaviasince as early as the ninth century,when it was brought to Dalmatianand other Balkan shores by Saracenraiders from. Sicily and made somescattered converts. In the fourteenthcentury and after, the gradual en-croachments of the Ottoman Turksendowed their presence with quanti-tative and cultural significance.Muslim Turkish fief-holders, soldiers,and peasants settled in conqueredterritories, particularly in the south

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and east of the Peninsula. Someof the native populations, eventu-ally including a majority of Alba-nians, were converted almost every-where, during the following cen-turies, with the Ottoman "bloodtax" playing a significant role in thisprocess in some territories, includingBosnia, where this form of recruit-ment to the corps of Janissaries wasparticularly intense or regular.(Mehmet Pasha Sokolovi,, orSokolli, who as Ottoman GrandVizier endowed his Bosnian home-land with bridges, mosques, hans,and other Ottoman and Islamicmonuments and institutions--whilealso restoring the Serbian OrthodoxPatriarchate with his own brother asPatriarch!--is the most famousexample and symbol of thisJanissary feedback.) Only in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the adjacentSanjak of Novi Pazar did conversionon a mass scale take place amongthe Slavs who were the Balkans’most numerous peoples.

When the Turks arrived in Bosnia in1453, four years after the fall of thelast independent Serbian despotatein the Morava valley and ten yearsafter the fall of Constantinople, itwas to conquer a highland kingdomthat was an ecclesiastical no-man’sland astride the frontier betweenEastern Orthodox and WesternCatholic Christendom. As far as isnow known from a misty period thathas left few written or even archeo-logical records, the nobles and sub-jects of this kingdom were partly orsometimes Orthodox, partly orsometimes Roman Catholic, andpartly adherents of a "nationalchurch" of their own, calledBogomil. This last has left few traces,apart from the remarkable monolithtombstones (steEacl] of their curiousnecropolises in the middle of no-where, but it is widely accepted thatBogomilism was a form of Mani-cheanism that had taken root in thisreligious borderland during the earlymedieval march of the ancientManichean heresy from Asia Minorthrough the Balkans and northernItaly to southwestern France.Whether or not this is true (it hasbeen suggested that the principalevidence is that the Pope, in seekingto launch a Crusade against them,said they were Manicheans), thepresence of this independent and atleast heterodox church astride thefrontier between Catholic andOrthodox Christianity--a sort of

medieval Titoism, defying the em-pires and ideologies of both Eastand West--was a challenge and anafront to both Rome and Constan-tinople. Rejected by the OrthodoxPatriarchs, at war with the CatholicPopes, with their Christianity deniedby both and with beliefs that madeboth standard Christian forms seemas alien as Islam, the Bogomils’adherence to Bogomilism hadbecome little more than a symbol ofloyalty to a state that now no longerexisted. Such at least is the tradi-tional view.

However valid this thesis may be--and it should be noted that contem-porary Yugoslav historiographybased on archival and cadastralmaterials tends to reject the impor-tance attributed to "the Bogomiltheory" in traditional explanations ofthe Islamization of Bosnia-Herze-govina2--the religious confusion,ambivalence, and marginality toboth Christian mainstreams thatcharacterized medieval Bosnia onthe eve of the Ottoman conquestapparently rendered the populationpeculiarly ripe for a conversion thatwas also opportune. First theBosnian nobility and by the sixteenthcentury many of their Orthodox,Catholic, and Bogomil subjectsdecided they had little to lose, andmuch to gain, by adopting the faithof their conquerors. They embracedIslam and thereby retained status,land, and rank under the new order.

The social situation created by thisconversion distinguished Bosniafrom the rest of the Ottoman Empire.In Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedoniathe Slav nobility generally remainedfaithful to Orthodoxy. They weretherefore dispossessed and reducedto equality with their own former andalso usually still Christian subjects,all raya, while the conquerorsreplaced the native aristocracy. Alien(but not always Turkish) Muslimsruled Christian Slav peasants, whosechurch became the rallying groundand haven of their sense of nation-ality until the day of liberation. InBosnia-Herzegovina, however, thenative aristocracy survived by meansof conversion to Islam and carriedmany of their subjects with them.Muslim Slavs ruled Christian andMuslim Slavs in the name of a distantSultan and Caliph. So great was thepower of these notables that theywere for a long period able to preventthe Sultan’s official representativefrom residing in the real capital of the

Pashalik, Sarajevo; he could comewithin its walls only one day a year,but otherwise must live at Travnik,60 miles away.

There are those who maintain thatthese Bosnian notables and pettygentry have always retained thepragmatism that once led them tochange their religion rather thansurrender their privileges. But nosuzerain since the Turk has everdemanded that particular sacrifice ofthem or their fellow Muslim under-lings again. Austro-Hungarian occu-pation after 1878 brought Bosnia andHerzegovina again under a Christianprince, a change that came about asthe result of a rising of Christianpeasants directed more againstoppression by fellow-Slavs of differ-ent religion than against the Sultan.Readers of Nobel laureate IvoAndri6’s Bridge on the Drina arefamiliar with the dismay and resent-ment with which the Muslim Slavs ofthe province greeted the new order.For reasons of their own, however,the Habsburg regime did not touchthe local social structure. The Mus-lims remained a favored people andIslam a privileged religion withautonomous institutions, even underthe Most Catholic Emperor.

There was, in fact, only one briefperiod between their conversion andthe advent of a Communist regime atthe end of World War II that theirreligion was a disability for Bosnia’sMuslims. The Yugoslavia of 1919-1941, in many ways a Greater (Ortho-dox) Serbia in which Macedonians,Montenegrins, and Slav Muslimswere all considered nationallyunconscious but redeemable Serbs,brought the abrogation of theirprivileges and most of their religiousautonomy. In Black Lamb and GreyFalcon Rebecca West recordsscenes from Sarajevo in 1938 thatdemonstrated their consequent nos-talgia for the vanished Ottoman Em-pire, which in turn led to pre- andpostwar waves of emigration toTurkey on such a scale that one in-formed Yugoslav estimate places thepresent size of the Bosnian colony inTurkey at more than 800,000.

These Slav Muslims, descendants ofthe original Serbo-Croatian-speak-ing Slav converts to Islam, comprisethe "Muslim nation" in Yugoslaviatoday--a national or ethnic identitynow written with a capital "M"(Muslimam to distinguish them fromthe far larger and partly different

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body of Yugoslavs who professIslam as a faith, and who are nowreferred to with a small "m"(muslimam3. In the Yugoslav censusof 1971 "Muslims in the sense ofnationality" (Muslimani u smislunarodnostl] was the category regis-tered for 1,729,932 Yugoslavs, 8.4percent of the then total populationof 20,522,972. This made them thethird most numerous (after 8.1million Serbs and 4.5 million Croats)among the 29 "’nations," "nation-alities," and other ethnic and non-ethnic categories (including "other,""Yugoslav," and "unknown") re-corded in that census.3 Of theseMuslims by nationality, 1,482,430lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina,where they were a plurality with 39.5percent of the population (cf. 37.2%Serbs, 20.6% Croats). Most of theremainder lived in the former Sanjakof Novi Pazar, now divided betweenSerbia and Montenegro. In the pre-liminary results of the next census,which was taken in April 1981, thereare 1,999,000 of them, representing8.92 percent of Yugoslavia’s popu-lation; 1,630,000 of these. Muslimsby nationality live in Bosnia-Herze-govina.

The Road to Nationhood:"Pragmatic" ReasonsThe gradual elevation of YugoslavMuslims with a capital "M" to thestatus of a full and equal South Slavnarod or nacija, and the stages inwhich it was accomplished, havehad both a pragmatic/political and aphilosophical/sociological ration-ale...and corresponding conse-quences.

The Muslims of Bosnia and Herze-govina are with almost no exceptionsSlavs, speaking local dialects orliterary variants (almost always theijekavski variant) of the languagethat is officially "Serbo-Cro-atian or Croato-Serbian" but morecommonly either Serbian or Croa-tion, depending on who and whereone is. The usual way of distinguish-ing a Serb from a Croat, althoughthere are a few exceptions, is byreligion: Serbs are Orthodox andCroats are Catholic Christians. What,then, is a Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian speaker whose religion orreligious background is Islam, whosepre-Ottoman Christian ancestorsinhabited a religious no man’s landastride the frontiers between Catholi-cism and Orthodoxy, and who mayhave been either or (as "Bogomils")neither of these?

For Croats the traditional answer isthat they are Islamicized Croats: forSerbs that they are IslamicizedSerbs. In an age of nationalism, withthe Serb-Croat question the mostsensitive and literally explosive of allof Yugoslavia’s national questions,and with their respective historicaland demographic "rights" to Bosniaand Herzegovina a major item in theirdispute, the answer matters: if theMuslims are Croats, Bosnia-Herze-govina has a Croat majority; if theyare Serbs, it is a Serb land with aCroatian minority. It mattered in 1878and 1908, when Croats in theHabsburg Monarchy rejoiced andSerbs in and outside Serbia plottedrevenge for the occupation and thenthe annexation of Bosnia-Herze-govina by Austria-Hungary.

It mattered again, and terribly, whenBosnia-Herzegovina became partof the "independent State ofCroatia" (NDH in the Croatian acro-nym) created in 1941 as a German-Italian puppet state and ruled by thefascist ustaEe, a band of Croatianchauvinist and militantly Catholicdesperadoes dedicated to an inde-pendent Greater Croatia and to theliquidation of Serbs and Orthodoxythroughout its territory. This lastthey promptly began to do, with astrategy that called for the expulsionof one-third, the conversion toCatholicism of one-third, and thekilling of the remaining third of theNDH’s then 1.5 million Serbs. On theother hand, and despite their militantCatholicism, the ustae--imitatingHabsburg policy in this as in someother areas--declared that theirMuslim subjects were brothers andallies who were Croats in origin anddecreed that Croatia was a nationwith two recognized religions,Catholic and Muslim.

Thus wooed and stimulated to see inHitler’s Germans (and Hitler’s Aus-trians, who staffed many key Ger-man offices in the NDH) a return ofthe Habsburg rule they now re-membered as benevolent and pro-Islamic, unlike Serbian rule betweenthe wars, more members of the Mus-lim community initially contributedtheir sympathies and arms to theustae and German cause than tothat of the Communist-led Partisanresistance movement. The latter inany case possessed two other dis-qualifying features for most Muslims:the occasionally militant atheism ofits Communist leadership and inBosnia an initial preponderance in its

ranks of Serbs fleeing ustae perse-cution and murder. Conversely, thefew Muslims who joined thePartisans in early months wereregarded with suspicion and somehostility by the Serb Partisans. (Onesuch Muslim, a prewar Communistand postwar senior Party and Stateofficial, has told me that for thisreason he found it expedient toadopt a Serb nora de guerre, so thathe would not be recognized as aMuslim, when assigned as politicalcommissar to a Partisan unit in theRomanija mountains).

The Germans held this Muslimloyalty longer than the ustae insome circles, with consequencesthat also affected their postwar"image." In 1942 a group of promi-nent Sarajevo Muslim clergy andbusinessmen sent a letter to Hitlerbegging him to separate Bosnia-Herzegovina from the NDH andestablish it as an IndependentMuslim State. Hitler denied therequest but did authorize the crea-tion of a Bosnian Muslim armedforce, a German-commanded andgrimly famous SS HandscharDivision, which had the honor to beinspected by the pro-German GrandMufti of Jerusalem in the name ofa Pan-Islamic struggle againstWestern colonialism and (local)Communist atheism. In Bosnian"establishment" usage even todaythe term "Pan-Islam" carries nega-tive connotations derived in partfrom that episode and coloringattitudes toward the contemporary"worldwide Islamic revival" and itsprotagonists.

Only during 1943 did Muslims beginto flock to the Partisan standard insignificant numbers. By then theGermans and the ustae, whoseslaughter of Serbs had broughtbrutal reprisals by Serbian royalistChetniks down on the heads ofMuslim as well as Croat villagers,looked increasingly like losers.

Partisan slogans of brotherhood andunity and pledges of nationalequality and religious tolerance werealso having an effect. A furtherboost was provided by the secondcongress of the Partisans’ all-Yugo-slav political arm, the AntifascistCouncil for the National Liberationof Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), which metin the medieval Bosnian capital ofJajce in November 1943 to lay thefoundations for a new Yugoslavstate. The Jajce Congress formally

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committed the Partisan movementto a postwar federation of six re-publics in which the names and theautonomy of five of them wouldrecognize the national aspirations ofthe Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Mace-donians, and Montenegrins. Thesixth Republic--Bosnia and Herze-govina-would be the commonhomeland of "the Serbs, Croats,and Muslims" of that historicalrather than national unit. In retro-spect, Yugoslav Communists regardthe Jajce declaration as the Party’sfirst if still only implicit formalrecognition of the separate "nation-ality" of the Muslims.

These wartime developments arerecounted in some detail becausethey established a contradictoryframework for the subsequentevolution of the status, the self-image, and the other Yugoslavs’view of the Slav Muslim community.On the one hand, this communityemerged from the war tarred withthe brush of having been collabo-rators of the "Nazi-fascist" occu-piers, enemies of the Communistswho now ruled the country (animage enhanced by a surge ofanticommunist feeling and activityamong the Muslim clergy andbourgeoisie in 1946-47), and paro-chial chauvinists in their own right.On the other hand, the pledgesmade to them were genuinely andsincerely rooted in the YugoslavCommunist Party’s ideological andstrategic view of the nationalquestion and were not merely awartime and revolutionary tacticalploy. In addition, wartime develop-ments had again dramaticallydemonstrated the multiple dangersfor the state, society, and civil peaceinherent in the Serb-Croat disputeover their respective national rightsto Bosnia-Herzegovina and the vitalcorollary of that dispute, the nation-ality--Serb or Croat--of the SlavMuslims.

It is often said, and is Certainly animportant part of the truth, that"Tito created a ’Muslim nation’" toput an end to Serb-Croat conflictover Bosnia-Herzegovina by sanc-tioning the separate political exis-tence, as a Federal Republic, of anhistoric unit reconstituted as a tri-national state. If the Slav Muslimsare neither Serbs nor Croats, thenBosnia-Herzegovina does not "be-long" to either Serbia or Croatia butrather, as proclaimed at Jajce, to its

Serbs, Croats, and Muslims...ofwhom the last are now the mostnumerous. As the Macedoniannation was "created" (again a pieceof the truth, but an even smallerpiece) to put an end to the equallydangerous dispute between Serbsand Bulgars over the geographicregion called Macedonia, so it iswith the Muslim nation. Surely anadmirable pragmatic/politicalreason.

The achievement of formal and full"national" status for the Muslimsdid not, however, happen at onceand forever as it did with the Mace-donians. The Communist Party ofYugoslavia (CPY), renamed theLeague of Communists of Yugo-slavia in 1952, was itself of dividedcounsel on the question, as Partyleaders involved over the years nowadmit, although they are still re-luctant to discuss the politicaldetails of these divisions and hesi-tations. The one exception is will-ingness, indeed eagerness, to de-scribe the concerted resistanceoffered until 1966 by some federalorgans, including the powerfulsecurity service (UDBa), which werecontrolled by Serb Party leaderswho were purged that year on Tito’sinitiative and on charges of "cen-tralism," misuse of power, andSerbian nationalism. Those ofwhom asked this question did,however, list three additional factorsthat also delayed the "full affirma-tion" of a "Muslim nation" andmade it controversial: the negative"image" of the Muslims in manyParty and Partisan circles andamong members of other nation-alities after the war, as describedabove; the need for further develop-ment of "national consciousness"among the Muslims themselves andits recognition outside their ranks;and the risk that "others," furtherdefined as Muslim "clericalists" and"bourgois nationalists," might suc-ceed in exploiting or appropriatingto themselves, and for their ownpurposes, the "national conscious-ness" fanned into flame by theCommunist regime.

Some aspects of the second andthird of these factors are particularlyrelevant to the more general ques-tion of the relationship of Islam tocommunalism and nationalism, andare therefore considered in moredetail below. Before doing so, how-ever, it may be useful to trace the

evolution of the formal status of theSlav Muslim community as itemerges, clearly and suggestively, inthe nomenclature employed and thenumbers recorded in successivepostwar censuses under the rubric"population according to nation-ality."

"Muslim" and Nationality inYugoslav CensusesIn the 1948 census the Slav Muslimscould declare themselves in any oneof three ways: as Serbs, as Croats,or as "Muslims nationally undesig-nated" (muslimane nacionalno neo-predeljene). According to figuresprovided to me in Sarajevo inJanuary 1981, 71,911 Muslims wereregistered as Serbs in that census,25,295 as Croats, and 778,403 as"Muslims nationally undetermined,"for a total of 875,609.4

In the 1953 census there was no"Muslim" category of any kind, buta new category, "Yugoslavs undes-ignated" (Jugoslovene neopredel-jene), had been introduced as partof a short-lived campaign, initiallysupported by Tito but later identifiedwith "Greater Serbian" conceptsand aspirations, for a "Yugoslavidentity" (Jugoslavenstvo a"higher" level of patriotism andcultural community superimposedon or even replacing separatenational identities. The number re-corded in this category was 998,698.It is generally assumed, and boththeir concentration in Bosnia-Herzegovina and data from subse-quent censuses would appear toconfirm, that most of these wereMuslims who had chosen in thisway to express their sense that theywere neither Serbs nor Croats. Theremaining "Yugoslavs undesig-nated," it is also generally andreasonably assumed, representedproducts of mixed marriages whodid not know what else to call them-selves, and a few others, particularlyCommunists, who for ideologicalreasons wished to consider them-selves "Yugoslavs."In the 1961 census, taken after the"Jugoslavenstvo" campaign wasdropped because all except theSerbs perceived it as a new attemptat Serbianization, as had proved tobe the case with King Alexander’sproclamation of a "Yugoslav na-tion" in 1929, another new categorywas introduced: "Muslims (ethnicadherence)" (Muslimani [etnikapripadnost] ). When 972,954 were

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recorded in this category, thenumber of "Yugoslavs undesig-nated" fell drastically, from nearly amillion to 317,125. Most of theseremaining "Yugoslavs" (87%) werestill recorded in Bosnia-Herzegovina,indicating that a considerablenumber of Communist and othernonreligious members of the SlavMuslim community continued toregard "Muslim" as a religious andnot an "ethnic" category andtherefore rejected it.

In January 1968, before the nextcensus, the Muslims were finallyand officially declared a full"nation."5 The changes in the polit-ical climate that made this step pos-sible, and that were both cause andconsequence of the purges of 1966,had ushered in an era of "liberalism"(a positive term at the time, laterofficially a negative one) on all ques-tions including the national one,where it led to a resurgence ofnationalisms, and national disputes,throughout the land. These develop-ments eventually led to Tito’s inter-vention, at the end of 1971, and thepurge of "nationalists" and"liberals" in several republics.Meanwhile, the 1971 census re-corded the latest change in theformal status of Bosnia-Herze-govina’s most numerous commu-nity in another change of nomen-clature that was also clearly still acompromise: "Muslims in the senseof nationality" (Muslimani u smislunarodnosti) replaced "Muslims(ethnic adherence)." More signifi-cant was the prodigious jump intheir numbers: to 1,729,932, an in-crease of 78 percent which madethem--as noted above--the thirdmost numerous national group inYugoslavia. The category "Yugo-slavs undesignated" also underwentfurther suggestive changes. Nowsimply denominated "’Yugoslavs’"(n.b., quotation marks as though tosignify doubt that this is a legitimatecategory), it was demoted to the tailend of the list, whereas it hadpreviously come just after the fiveand later six South Slav "nations"and ahead of all the non-SouthSlav "nationalities." The number of"Yugoslavs" declined further to273,077, a loss of an additional100,000 since 1961.6In the 1981 census, the last relics ofdiscriminatory treatment vanishedfrom the nomenclature. "Muslim"appeared without any qualifiers andwas listed in the instructions for

recording the census in alphabeticalorder (in the Serbo-Croatian lan-guage) among the "nations" asfollows: "Question 9. Adherence tonation, nationality, or ethnicgroup.., on this question thecensus-taker is obligated to recordfaithfully how the enumerated per-son declares himself as to adherenceto one of the nations of Yugoslavia(Montenegrin, Croat, Macedonian,Muslim, Slovene, Serb)or one ofthe nationalities of Yugoslavia, e.g.:Albanian, Hungarian, Gypsy, Italian,Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian, Ukrain-ian, Turk, or other nationality." 7 Asthis Report goes to press the resultsof this census are still being pub-lished. The preliminary breakdownby nations, nationalities, and ethnicgroups records 1,999,000 Muslims,of whom 1,630,000 were registeredin Bosnia-Herzegovina-- an increasesince 1971 of 270,000 in the countryas a whole and 148,000 in "their"Republic. The surprise of the censuswas a jump in the number of "Yugo-slavs" to 1,215,000, with most ofthis increase in Croatia and Serbiaand a drop in the total number ofSerbs and Croats by 154,000. Thecorresponding proportionate rein-forcement of the Muslims’ positionas the third largest Yugoslav nationwill have political repercussions in acountry in which each national unitcounts its share in political powerand jobs to see whether these areproportionate to its numbers. Thelegitimacy of Muslim nationhood isbecoming more important, not less.

The Road to Nationhood:From Cultural Distinctiveness to"National Consciousness"The "Party line" and contemporaryBosnian historiography, while notdenying the "pragmatic" usefulnessof recognition of the Muslim (andMacedonian and Montenegrin)nations described above, vehe-mently insist that the regime hasmerely"affirmed" but not"created"these nations. According to thisview, the "national consciousness"of the Slav Muslims that has devel-oped in pace with the upgrading oftheir legal and terminological statussince the war--a fact apparent toanyone with more than a superficialacquaintance with today’s Bosniaand the variously militant, defensive,and proud sense of separate culturaland national identity displayed bymost Bosnian Muslim contacts--ismerely the natural culmination of aprocess of "nation-building" with

numerous analogues in contem-porary Third World and moreremote European history.

Translated into this outside ob-server’s non-Marxist terminologyand concepts, their argument isroughly as follows: The YugoslavMuslim nation is a modern and inessence secular nation only partlysynonymous with the YugoslavMuslims by religious faith, a cate-gory that includes many Muslims ofother nationalities and excludesnonreligious Muslims-by-nationality.The Yugoslav Muslim nation derivesits specificity and consciousnessfrom a combination of factors. Theimpact of Islam as culture and ethosas well as religion is undeniably oneof the most important of these, butso is the fact that the impactedculture was a distinct (Bosnian) onewhen Islam struck. It was thereforeas capable of further evolution fromthe premodern welter of South Slavtribal and clan cultures and identitiesinto a full-fledged separate nationalculture and identity, had separatestatehood continued, as those ofthe Serbs, Croats, and Bulgars.Islam added new dimensions to andaccelerated the process of differen-tiation and individualization. Theproduct of this dynamic synthesis ofIslamic and Bosnian Slav culturalelements is a society distinct fromother Slav and other Muslimnations--a society sui generis,which is one-way of defining anation.

The emergence of a modern"national consciousness" appro-priate to this particularity was de-layed, however, for several reasons,some of them specific to Bosnianhistory. Several Yugoslav scholarshave talked to agree with the thesisthat commitment to the concept ofa universal Islamic Community(umma islamiyya) and Islam as bothstate and religion (Islam din wadawla) reinforced in the politicalculture by the Ottoman milletsystem, constituted powerful com-peting and inhibiting principles.Equally or more important, theysuggest, were the consequences ofBosnia-Herzegovina’s proximity tothe European West and geographicmarginality to the rest of the Muslimworld, and the way European con-cepts of nation and nation-statecame to the Balkans and Bosnia.Drastically oversimplified: by stan-dard and classic Central Europeandefinitions of a "nation" (as a

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specific kind of linguistic, ethnic orracial, and territorial community)these Slav Muslims, speaking thesame language and having the samebasic origins as their Serb and Croatneighbors, must be either Serbs orCroats. And that, of course, waswhat they were hearing from bothSerb and Croat apostles of nation-alism since the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries. By andlarge, and insofar as they weredrawn into the argument at all inBosnian conditions of isolation,illiteracy, and a simple struggle forsurvival and freedom from oppres-sion (this last by their own kinsmenand fellow-Muslims, remember),they went along.

But not all, and not entirely: BosnianMuslim historians, behaving like thehistorians of all "new" or "emerg-ing" nations, are now busy delvinginto the past for evidence of earlyawareness of separate cultural iden-tity if not quite separate nationhood.The results, although often exag-gerated (like the results of all suchnational historiography), are im-pressive. This is particularly true forthe period after 1878, when Bosnia-Herzegovina moved from a marginalposition in the Muslim world to anequally marginal one in theEuropean world of modern nation-alism-and did so at a time whenthe "national question" was enter-ing its acute phase precisely in theHabsburg Monarchy to whichBosnia-Herzegovina was nowattached. Especially revealing aredescriptions of the new HabsburgProvince’s first generation of"Westernized" Muslim intellectualsliving in fin de siecle Vienna andseeking to develop a secular but dis-tinctive Bosnian-Muslim literaturewritten in the Serbo-Croatian lan-guage with Arabic script, and thenswitching to Latin script as theybroke with the clerical factionamong them. So are the wider im-plications of the creation andmobilizing role of a Bosno-Herzego-vinian Muslim political party, theUnited Muslim Organization, in oldYugoslavia (1919-1941), establishedalong the same lines and in com-petition with the nationalist partiesof the Serbs, Croats, et al.

As the studies pour from the pressthe examples multiply, and onlysome do not prove the point theyclaim to: the progressive develop-ment and secularization of aBosnian Muslim identity, and then

its translation into what looks verymuch like a national identity.

Who Speaks for the Muslim Nation?This Bosnian Muslim historiographyand accompanying sociology is not,however, as monolithic as the aboveoutline has so far made it appear.There are, in fact, three distinctschools, and they in turn reflect thedivergent interests of three rivalclaimants to leadership and repre-sentation of the "Muslim nation."These are the Party and its fellow-travelers, the clergy and its laysupporters, and those whom theParty calls "traditional bourgeois-nationalist intellectuals"-- although,as a further and typical Yugoslavcomplication, representatives ofeach group can also be found in theranks of the others.

The "Party line" no longer attempts,as it once did, to reduce the role ofIslam in the shaping and essence ofMuslim nationhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina to a minor factor. The"clericalists," however, insist thatIslam is the determining andconstitutive element. Islam andnation are identical, and the nationis Islam. This thesis, in one sense aconsistent modern ideological deriv-ative of traditional Islamic conceptsof the relationship of Islam tosociety and the state tainted byEuropean concepts of nationhood,is also a political claim with seriousimplications. If it is true, who has abetter right to speak for this people,and to represent them in dealingswith other social and political agen-cies, especially the (Communist)state, than their clergy? And doessuch a nation not naturally havecloser and more meaningful linkswith other Muslim societies andwith Pan-Islamic ideals than withthe other and secular nations withwhich it is joined in the Yugoslav"socialist commonwealth"?

Convinced that this is what theclergy and other clericalists are upto, the regime has lately becomehypersensitive to straws-in-the-windlike articles in the Yugoslav Muslimreligious press that seem to beextolling the exclusive and superiorvirtues of Islam; or to a statement bya Muslim priest, at a quasi-publicmeeting in Bosnian Bugojno in 1980,that "those who eat pig come toresemble the animal they eat." Thisis clearly one reason why the largenumber of young Bosnian Muslimsstudying at AI Azhar in Cairo and

other Muslim universities in theMiddle East, heretofore proudlytouted as an example of YugoslavCommunism’s liberal attitude toreligion and Islam in particular, wasbeing subjected to critical re-exami-nation-which is in turn one reasonwhy the regime supported therecent establishment of a Muslimtheological faculty connected to theancient medresa in Sarajevo. This isalso why the wartime collaborationof many of the Muslim clergy withthe occupiers and the ustae isbeing dredged up again after beingstrictly banned from public discus-sion for many years--leading topolemics between the Party-con-trolled press and Preporod, the fort-nightly journal of the Association ofthe Islamic Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1979...and so toabrupt changes in Preporod’s editor-ship.8 As one Party official told meduring a discussion of this affair,"They are not going to get awaywith the myth that they, and not theprincipled position of the Party onthe national question, saved theMuslim community at that time."

This, and perhaps a lurking fear ofinfection from the implicitly anti-communist ferment sweeping theMuslim world, is why the Party andParty-minded scholars and writersrespond so vehemently to anotherargument that has occasionallyappeared in the Bosnian Muslimpress and scholarly writing. Thisargument claims that the way theYugoslav Muslim nation has beenconstrued and inculcated by theParty line (and also by the"bourgeois-nationalist" Muslims)betrays a "Europo-centric" and anti-Islamic philosophical and politicalbias on the part of those whoinvented it. Bosnian Muslims woulddo better to look east rather than toEurope for the philosophical basisand content of their identity. Such aclaim also has other dimensions,however: as part of an on-goingBosnian Muslim concern with thespecific nature, mission, and pur-portedly special purity of "frontierIslam" in places like Bosnia andIndonesia, and as a Bosniananalogue to disputes between"modernizers" (or "Westernizers")and "neo-traditionalists" in many"Third World" societies.

The third or "bourgeois-nationalist"line, which actually seems to haveas many adherents in the Party asoutside it, poses a different sort of

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challenge to the establishment’sview and purposes. It is calledBosnjaEtvo (Bosnianism). If theBosnian Muslims are a nation, equalto all the other South Slav nations,is it not logical that they, too, shouldhave a Republic in the Federation asa nation-state of their own? TheSerbs have Serbia, the Croats haveCroatia, and so on, although othernationalities live in Croatia (includingSerbs as 15% of Croatia’s popula-tion), Serbia, and the rest. TheMuslims are a plurality, if not amajority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina,and in any case the other twonations represented there--theSerbs and Croats--have Serbia andCroatia to look to as their protectivemotherlands. Let Bosnia-Herze-govina therefore become the stateof the Slav Muslim nation (bettercalled the Bosnian nation), a state in

which the rights of the Serbs andCroats to participate in political andcultural life will be as respected asare those of the Serbs in CroatiaThe explosive potential of thisthesis, in terms of both Serb andCroat reactions to its widespreadacceptance, hardly needs elabora-tion.

Caught between these two fires,those who "affirmed" the Muslimnation in Yugoslavia are attemptingto control the national and nation-alist sentiments that they encour-aged, if they did not invent them, tosolve old problems and not createnew ones. Their current slogan is"differentiation and togetherness"diferencijacija i zajedni#tvo whichmay be like trying to square thecircle. The "clericalist" faction isright about at least one thing: all are

trapped by "Europo-centric" defini-tions of nation and nation-state.

One other thing is also hard todispute. By most current definitionsof a nation--particularly "subjec-tive" definitions that emphasize theneed for a critical mass or quality ofpersons who regard their commu-nity as a nation (who possess"national consciousness")--theSlavic community in Yugoslavia thatis called "Muslim" has indeed be-come a nation. The implications ofof that proposition for the widerquestion of the relationship of Islamto modern nationalism, and forthose who maintain that Islam andnation are incompatible concepts,are less clear.

(January 1982)

NOTES

1. For this reason a discussion draft ofthis Report was commissioned for aconference on "Islam, Communalism,and Modern Nationalism," organized forthe American Universities Field Staff(now the Universities Field Staff Inter-national) by Charles F. Gallagher, theAUFS Director of Studies, at the Rocke-feller Foundations’s Villa Serbelloni inBellagio (Italy) in April 1981. Also par-ticipating, with a parallel paper on Yugo-slavia, was Professor Sulejman Groz-dani, Director of the Oriental Instituteof the University of Sarajevo (Yugo-slavia), to whom the present writer isparticularly indebted for comments andcriticism to his conference draft.

2. A point particularly emphasized byProf. Grozdani(! at the Bellagio confer-ence cited in the previous footnote.

3. The number of Muslims as a re-ligious category (muslimam] is harder todetermine since postwar Yugoslavcensuses do not ask about religion. Esti-mates, however, have been produced bythe Islamic Religious Community ofYugoslavia, the official organization ofthe faithful, for the four administrativedistricts into which it is divided. Theseclaim about 1,850,000 Muslims-by-religion in the district comprised ofBosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slo-venia, almost all of whom are in Bosnia-Herzegovina; about 1,350,000 in Serbia,including the Autonomous Province of

Kosovo and the Vojvodina (primarilyAlbanians in Kosovo; also Slav Muslimsin the Serbian part of the Sanjak); about450,000 in Macedonia (mostly Albaniansand Turks); and about 150,000 in Mon-tenegro (again primarily Albanians in thesouth and Muslim Slavs in the Sanjak): agrand total of about 3,850,000 Mus-lims, more than 17 percent of Yugo-slavia’s present population of 22,350,000.Their total also represents 90 percent ofthe 1971 census total of the fournationality categories to which virtuallyall religious Muslims are likely to belong:Muslims-as-nationality, Albanians,Turks, and Gypsies.

4. This does not correspond to the un-differentiated total of 808,921 ’Muslims"cited for that census in more recentYugoslav Statistical Yearbooks andEnglish-language sources based onthem, but do not have access to thedetailed original 1948 reports fromwhich the data provided me in Sarajevowere presumably taken. Nor did my in-formants explain the source of theircuriously precise figures for the numbersof Muslims who registered as Serbs orCroats.

5. The proposal to this end wasofficially tabled and justified by NisimAlbahari, a distinguished Bosnianprewar Communist, holder of thehighest medals for Partisan heroism,and postwar senior Party and state

official, who happens to be a relic of theonce glorious Sarajevo community ofSephardic Jews rather than a memberof any of the three "interested party"nations.

6. Some had presumably beensiphoned off by another new categoryand sign of the times that attracted32,774 registrations in 1971: "Did notdeclare themselves nationally, in accord-ance with Article 421 of the [1963] Con-stitution of the SFRY."

7. was told, when was providedwith a copy in Sarajevo in January 1981,that this is the first time such specificinstructions and lists have been issued.They also contained some other items ofsignificance for those interested in theYugoslav national question in general."Did not declare" or "did not desig-nate" are still permissible answers,guaranteed by the Constitution of 1974.As for "Yugoslav," the instructionswould appear to discourage this answereven more firmly than in 1971: "If acitizen wishes to record Yugoslav as ananswer to this question, the census-taker is obligated to record even thatanswer, although the citizen does notthereby declare himself concerningadherence to a nation or nationality."Finally "ethnic groups" as an addition to"nations" and "nationalities" as censuscategories makes its first appearancehere, but on the basis of Republican

8/DIR-1-’82

rather than the Federal Constitution,and is therefore not admissible in thetwo federal units-- Bosnia-Herzegovinaand Montenegro--whose constitutionswritten in the 1970s do not provide for it.The others are themselves to specifywhat they mean by "ethnic group."

8. The focus of this polemic was abook by Dervis Sui6, a Muslim writerand ex-Partisan, which strongly criti-cized the behavior of the Muslim clergyand politicians before and during WorldWar II, and which was serialized in thequasi-official Sarajevo daily Oslobod-jenje.