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YUGOSLAVIA's MUSLIM NATION YUGOSLAVIA's MUSLIM NATION by Dennison I. Rusinow 1982/No. 8 Europe [DIR-1-'82] The political affirmation of a tions of the development, definition, "Muslim nation" in the land of and political "affirmation" (by a South Slavs has implications for Communist and therefore in prin- the wider questions of the rela- ciple atheistic regime) of this "Mus- tionship of Islam to modern lim nation" in the land of the South of Islamic revival Slavs. Their story has more than nationalism and local significance. In today's world in general. the relationship of Islam to commu- nalism and modern nationalism is of In the center of the coat of arms of salient importance, part of the ques- the Socialist Federal Republic of tion of the mix of Islamic and nation- Yugoslavia a cluster of flames rises alist elements in the Iranian revolu- from a single base. The flames sym- tion and the Afghan resistance ,boliz, he enations,t, (naroSdieparateorSUtshometimeSslaV identitmyVemento'f pathkiesta nn aatnethae npdlacei nacije) that define Yugoslavia, a Muslims in Indian society, pan- name meaning Land of the South Arabism and separate state con- Slavs, and that together account for sciousness in the Arab world, and 85 percent of the country's popula- the "Islamic revival" in general. In tion; the common base symbolizes this context the development, the "brotherhood and unity" "affirmation," and growing self- b consciousness of a nation called theslebrOtstationisJdiOStaVndthe o)thetrha't'nation-inds Muslim (or Muslims acquiring the alities" who live among them status of a nation) in a multinational, (narodnosti, now the official term multireligious and Communist-ruled for those who used to be called European state constitutes a case "minorities") in a comrfion state study that should also be of interest under Communist rule. For the first to those concerned with other areas two decades after this new Yugo- where Muslims and modern nation- slavia was forged out of the frag- alism coexist and with current world ments of the old in the crucible of affairs generally. World War II, there were five flames Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina on this coat of arms, representing Islam, as Bosnian Muslim nation- Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Mace- alists and Yugoslav Muslim clerical- donians, and Montenegrins, each ists are fond of noting, has been iii with a Republic of "its own" in the present in the Balkans and on the six-republic federation. Since then, territory of present-day Yugoslavia in a subtle change that has been since as early as the ninth century, generally unnoticed, there have when it was brought to Dalmatian been six flames. The sixth flame and other Balkan shores by Saracen stands for a nation called "Muslim," raiders from. Sicily and made some most of whose members live in the scattered converts. In the fourteenth sixth federated republic, Bosnia and century and after, the gradual en- Herzegovina, which they share with croachments of the Ottoman Turks traditionally Orthodox Christian endowed their presence with quanti- ii:iil Serbs and traditionally Roman tative and cultural significance. ii:ili Catholic Croats. Muslim Turkish fief-holders, soldiers, and peasants settled in conquered SspectsR,epOc rtonseqWuillencesd,escriba implicaS_ome particularly in the south ..._...i! Thia territories, 2/DIR-1-82 and east of the Peninsula. Some medieval Titoism, defying the em- Pashalik, Sarajevo; he could come of the native populations, eventu- pires and ideologies of both East within its walls only one day a year, ally including a majority of Alba- and West--was a challenge and an but otherwise must live at Travnik, nians, were converted almost every- afront to both Rome and Constan- 60 miles away. where, during the following cen- tinople. Rejected by the Orthodox turies, with the Ottoman "blood Patriarchs, at war with the Catholic There are those who maintain that tax" playing a significant role in this Popes, with their Christianity denied these Bosnian notables and petty process in some territories, including by both and with beliefs that made gentry have always retained the Bosnia, where this form of recruit- both standard Christian forms seem pragmatism that once led them to ment to the corps of Janissaries was as alien as Islam, the Bogomils' change their religion rather than particularly intense or regular. adherence to Bogomilism had surrender their privileges. But no (Mehmet Pasha Sokolovi,, or become little more than a symbol of suzerain since the Turk has ever Sokolli, who as Ottoman Grand loyalty to a state that now no longer demanded that particular sacrifice of Vizier endowed his Bosnian home- existed. Such at least is the tradi- them or their fellow Muslim under- land with bridges, mosques, hans, tional view. lings again. Austro-Hungarian occu- pation after 1878 brought Bosnia and and other Ottoman and Islamic However valid this thesis may be-- monuments and institutions--while Herzegovina again under a Christian and it should be noted that contem- prince, a change that came about as also restoring the Serbian Orthodox porary Yugoslav historiography Patriarchate with his own brother as the result of a rising of Christian based on archival and cadastral peasants directed more against Patriarch!--is the most famous materials tends to reject the impor- example and symbol of this oppression by fellow-Slavs of differ- tance attributed to "the Bogomil ent religion than against the Sultan. Janissary feedback.) Only in Bosnia- theory" in traditional explanations of Herzegovina and the adjacent Readers of Nobel laureate Ivo the Islamization of Bosnia-Herze- Andri6's Bridge on the Drina are Sanjak of Novi Pazar did conversion govina2--the religious confusion, on a mass scale take place among familiar with the dismay and resent- ambivalence, and marginality to ment with which the Muslim Slavs of the Slavs who were the Balkans' both Christian mainstreams that most numerous peoples. the province greeted the new order. characterized medieval Bosnia on For reasons of their own, however, When the Turks arrived in Bosnia in the eve of the Ottoman conquest the Habsburg regime did not touch 1453, four years after the fall of the apparently rendered the population the local social structure. The Mus- last independent Serbian despotate peculiarly ripe for a conversion that lims remained a favored people and in the Morava valley and ten years was also opportune. First the Islam a privileged religion with after the fall of Constantinople, it Bosnian nobility and by the sixteenth autonomous institutions, even under was to conquer a highland kingdom century many of their Orthodox, the Most Catholic Emperor. that was an ecclesiastical no-man's Catholic, and Bogomil subjects decided they had little to lose, and There was, in fact, only one brief land astride the frontier between period between their conversion and Eastern Orthodox and Western much to gain, by adopting the faith of their conquerors. They embraced the advent of a Communist regime at Catholic Christendom. As far as is the end of World War II that their now known from a misty period that Islam and thereby retained status, land, and rank under the new order. religion was a disability for Bosnia's has left few written or even archeo- Muslims. The Yugoslavia of 1919- logical records, the nobles and sub- The social situation created by this 1941, in many ways a Greater (Ortho- jects of this kingdom were partly or conversion distinguished Bosnia dox) Serbia in which Macedonians, sometimes Orthodox, partly or from the rest of the Ottoman Empire. Montenegrins, and Slav Muslims sometimes Roman Catholic, and In Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia were all considered nationally partly adherents of a "national the Slav nobility generally remained unconscious but redeemable Serbs, church" of their own, called faithful to Orthodoxy. They were brought the abrogation of their Bogomil. This last has left few traces, therefore dispossessed and reduced privileges and most of their religious apart from the remarkable monolith to equality with their own former and autonomy. In Black Lamb and Grey tombstones (steEacl] of their curious also usually still Christian subjects, Falcon Rebecca West records necropolises in the middle of no- all raya, while the conquerors scenes from Sarajevo in 1938 that where, but it is widely accepted that replaced the native aristocracy. Alien demonstrated their consequent nos- Bogomilism was a form of Mani- (but not always Turkish) Muslims talgia for the vanished Ottoman Em- cheanism that had taken root in this ruled Christian Slav peasants, whose pire, which in turn led to pre- and religious borderland during the early church became the rallying ground postwar waves of emigration to medieval march of the ancient and haven of their sense of nation- Turkey on such a scale that one in- Manichean heresy from Asia Minor ality until the day of liberation. In formed Yugoslav estimate places the through the Balkans and northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, the present size of the Bosnian colony in Italy to southwestern France. native aristocracy survived by means Turkey at more than 800,000. Whether or not this is true (it has of conversion to Islam and carried been suggested that the principal many of their subjects with them. These Slav Muslims, descendants of evidence is that the Pope, in seeking Muslim Slavs ruled Christian and the original Serbo-Croatian-speak- to launch a Crusade against them, Muslim Slavs in the name of a distant ing Slav converts to Islam, comprise said they were Manicheans), the Sultan and Caliph. So great was the the "Muslim nation" in Yugoslavia presence of this independent and at power of these notables that they today--a national or ethnic identity least heterodox church astride the were for a long period able to prevent now written with a capital "M" frontier between Catholic and the Sultan's official representative (Muslimam to distinguish them from Orthodox Christianity--a sort of from residing in the real capital of the the far larger and partly different DIR-1-'82/3 body of Yugoslavs who profess For Croats the traditional answer is ranks of Serbs fleeing ustae perse- Islam as a faith, and who are now that they are Islamicized Croats: for cution and murder.
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