book reviewS 331
Xavier Bougarel. Islam and Nationhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Surviving Empires (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) isbn 978-1-3500-0359-0.
Should you be insulted to be called a “watermelon”? Understanding the slur “watermelon”, that is, being green on the outside and red on the inside, pro- vides a unique insight into the place of Bosnian Muslims/Bosniaks in the on- going nation-building in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Xavier Bougarel documents the use of watermelon (lubenica) with reference to elites who were formerly advo- cates of Yugoslav Communism (i.e. red), but who, post-1992, publicly displayed their Islamic piety (i.e. green), to help their rehabilitation into newly forming Bosniak/Muslim nationalism (p. 166). What is striking about the watermelon slur is its ideological dimension; it is an insult which denies one their place in the Bosniak nation, but not within Bosnian society. Islam’s central place in the creation/recreation of Bosniak nationalism makes it necessary to identify as Muslim to be part of that nation, while it is of course possible to be Bosnian while identifying as Catholic, Orthodox, or eschewing religious- or linguistic- based nationalism all together. In this excellent book, Bougarel frequently returns to the paradoxes, continuities and divergences between Islam, nation- hood and statehood in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Aiming to provide a broad overview and reconsideration of transition nar- ratives that claim a linear progression from the imperial to the nation-state order, the book will find an audience among researchers of historiography of the region as well as political scientists. A second aim of the book, to provide an account of the actual forms and practices which constituted the creation of Muslim/Bosniak national identity from the ninetieth to the twenty-first century, will hold particular relevance for researchers of political Islam or the politics of the Muslim world. Bougarel achieves both of these aims with thor- ough and scrupulous reference to primary source materials, combining exter- nal factors, such as the great-power politics of the region, with an exploration of institutional design and various sociological and domestic factors to make his argument. Beginning with the transition from Ottoman rule to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina reveal their “national indetermination” (pp. 7–28) by going against the Ottoman ulema (religious scholars) who had decreed that emigration was obligatory for the Muslims of the region (p. 12). As the Muslim population of the region did not identify as Serb, Croat or Turkish, the Austro-Hungarian authorities designated them simply as “Muslims” (p. 23). This legacy of explicitly religious identification, in contrast to the national identification of their neighbors—which combine religion, language, culture and history—would have lasting consequences.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/18763332-04303009
More broadly, it is intriguing how the Muslim community rejected the call of the ulema to migrate. As is often the case when Islam begins to make explicit claims on the conduct of communities, states and governments, such claims are made in opposition to the religious establishment (recognizing Iran as a prime counter-case of this dynamic). Ulema, dismissed as overly conservative and out of touch, are sidestepped as a “political Islam” takes hold under the stewardship of laymen such as teachers and political elites, not religious actors. While Bougarel does reflect on the establishment of a new religious institu- tion, the Reis-u-ulema, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the book does not place these dynamics in the context of political Islam writ large. Clearly this is not Bougarel’s aim, but the raw materials are here for an insightful analysis of political Islam which would be well received as contemporary Europe con- tinues to express varied anxieties over the governance of Muslim minorities. Back to the narrative of the book, from the interwar years through to the Second World War (wwii), Communist Yugoslavia, the wars of the 1990s and beyond, Bougarel sketches the contours of Bosnian Muslim politics which oscillated between seeking communal protection from great powers and pur- suing their own nationalist project. Bosnian Muslims were somewhat late to embrace nationalism, still seeking the protection of an “empire” during the height of nationalism in wwii. The Muslim community, Bougarel argues, was unable or unwilling to recognize that loyalty to a central power (the Ustasha) did not provide communal rights (Muslim Roma were still executed, and Jew- ish families were still persecuted after conversion to Islam). Continuing to fail to see that such behavior was part of the “logic” of a totalitarian, racist state, parts of the Muslim community went “straight to the top” and complained to the Third Reich about the Ustasha’s excesses. In shocking attempts to tie Islam and National-Socialism together, which met partial success in the formation of a Muslim SS Division, the Muslim community hoped that Germany would pro- tect them from Chetnik, Partisan and Ustasha violence (p. 62). Ultimately the appeal to Germany failed as the Muslim community met with greater Chetnik violence. “A logical consequence was that many Muslims began to join the Par- tisans” (p. 68). As the wwii raged on, it was the Partisans who now represented “the Muslim community’s new protectors” (p. 69). As Tito’s Yugoslavia came to power after wwii, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (kpj) regarded Muslims as a community, but not a nation. Here a contradiction emerges as Yugoslavia was the entity providing the Muslim com- munity protection from the nationalism of its Serb and Croat neighbors, but at the same time Yugoslavia nationalized the community, removing the au- tonomy it had enjoyed under empire, making it jealous of the other Yugoslav
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