Islam and Nationhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Originally published in French in 2013, Bougarel’s book presents a clear and concise political history of Bosnia-Herzegovina since the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the relation between Islam and national identity in the discourse of Bosnian Muslim elites. In particular, the book analyses the history of the country’s Islamic institution—the Islamic Community headed by a Mufti, the reis-ul-ulema—and the positions of its major Islamic thinkers. While the Bosnian Croats and Serbs developed strong national ideologies linked to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, respectively, and enjoyed backing from what became Croatia and Serbia, the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) had difficulties in formulating a national identity that could serve for building a nation state; traditional religious or local/regional identities prevailed. To make up for this deficiency, so Bougarel argues, the Muslim elites used to seek protection for their communities from the subsequent ‘empires’ that ruled over the area—the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Croatian Ustaša regime and the Third Reich, and eventually Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the late 1960s, secular Yugoslavia gave up the implicit expectation that at one point the Bosnian Muslims would decide to identify as either Croats or Serbs (or ‘Yugoslavs’), and recognized the existence of a ‘Muslim’ nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it however tried to detach from the religion of Islam and from other Muslim nationalities in Yugoslavia. In the absence of strong national institutions, the Islamic Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina became a proxy institution for the emergent Muslim nation. When Yugoslavia fell apart, a group of former ‘pan-Islamic’ dissident intellectuals established the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) that organized the defence of the Muslim-populated parts of BiH against Croat and Serb attacks and ethnic cleansing, and dominated politics in the Muslim parts of BiH. The SDA employed the Islamic Community to present Islam as the major cornerstone of what they now called ‘Bosniak’ identity (as opposed to ‘Bosnian’, which would also encompass the other two major nationalities in BiH), to build a Muslim national entity while at the same time calling for the preservation of a multinational Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the face of war and genocidal violence, the outside forces that they now put their hopes on were partly the Muslim world (for fundraising and circumventing the arms embargo), and, more consistently, the UN, the United States, and the European Community/EU. The Dayton Agreement of 1995 established peace at the cost of cementing the national delimitation between the entities of BiH, of protecting the respective political, military and economic networks that came to power in the war, and of making the return of refugees almost impossible. Since the late 1990s political pluralism eliminated the monopoly of the SDA in the Muslim part of BiH, and religious pluralism—including the intrusion of ‘Neo-Salafism’ and ‘Neo-Sufism’—challenged the dominance of the Islamic Community in religious matters

Ancient history · Bosnian · Ideology · Islam · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · History · Law