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Between Ethnic Bosniak and Civic Croatian Identity

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Between Ethnic Bosniak and Civic Croatian Identity Südosteuropa 62 (2014), no. 3, 275-304 DINo MujaDžEvIć The Islamic Community in Croatia: Between Ethnic Bosniak and Civic Croatian Identity Abstract. The Islamic Community in Croatia (ICC) is generally seen as an internally stable religious organization that enjoys very good relations with the state . However, its complex ethnic background and the historical context of its formation during the twentieth century have resulted in the emergence of different visions of the ICC, and since 2012 have led to internal tensions that are generally unknown to the public . The author points out two contemporary views of this organization: one seeing the ICC as part of an international Bosniak Islamic network led by the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ICBH), the other stress- ing that the ICC’s principal goal should be identification with the broader Croatian society. To explain the genesis of this division, the author analyzes the makeup of the ethnic identity of Croatian Muslims, the organizational development of Islamic life in modern Croatia, and, in particular, the historical and demographic relations of Croatian Muslims with Bosnia and other parts of former Yugoslavia . The division has emerged as a product of several additional sociopolitical factors, such as the specific historical connections between Croatian Muslims and modern Croatian nationalism, the appearance of a Muslim and later a Bosniak ethnic category, the disintegration of the formerly unified Islamic Community of Yugoslavia (ICY), and the 1991–1995 wars in former Yugoslavia. Dino Mujadžević earned his PhD in History from the university of Zagreb in 2010 and is presently a Humboldt Fellow at the Chair for the History of the ottoman Empire and Turkey at the Ruhr University Bochum . Introduction In april 2012, the traditional annual international symposium “Islam in Eu- rope: Situation and Perspectives”, held in the Islamic Center in Zagreb, attracted numerous European scholars of Islam and Muslim activists .1 Several speakers noted that Croatian Muslims, who represent only 60,000 out of a nation of 4 .5 million, have certain advantages over Muslim communities in other European 1 The abstracts of the conference papers were published online, see Knjiga sažetaka sa simpozija “Islam u Europi – stanje i perspektive”, available at <http://www.ibn-sina.net/bs/ tekstovi-i-predavanja/1499-knjiga-saetaka-sa-simpozija-qislam-u-europi-stanje-i-perspektiveq. html>. all internet sources were accessed on 23 September 2014. 276 Dino Mujadžević countries .2 according to these speakers, the first and most notable advantage is the existence of excellent relations between the State of Croatia and the ICC, including the special agreement with the Croatian government that was signed in 2002. It requires constant and significant financial state support of the ICC, official recognition of Islamic marriage, freedom of Islamic religious instruction in public schools, and Islamic chaplaincy in public institutions and the armed forces 3. Some of the speakers recognized the lack of Muslim organizational frag- mentation in Croatia as the main reason for the excellent settlement with the Croatian state, despite the relatively small number of Muslims and the 1993–1994 Croato-Muslim (Bosniak) military confrontation. Specifically, in Croatia, besides the ICC, there is no other registered or existing Islamic religious congregation . This unique position gave rise to extremely fruitful negotiations with the state. In most of the other European countries with immigration-based Muslim com- munities, there is no single organizational entity entitled to negotiate with the state on behalf of all Muslims 4. This fact is the reason, or at least the pretext, for the absence of a settlement with the state on the issue of official recognition of Islam in many of these countries . Ethnic, linguistic, sectarian, or dogmatic differences between Muslim populations are a hindrance to the formation of a sole organizational structure in almost all traditionally non-Muslim European countries . The Muslim population in these countries, with some exceptions, is not indigenous and consists of various immigrant communities, hence their or- ganizational diversity . The immigrant Muslim community in Croatia represents one of the few exceptional cases in traditionally non-Muslim parts of Europe where Muslims have been able to establish a unified organizational structure and to achieve recognition by the state and its society .5 2 This view was notably advanced in the paper by Jørgen S. Nielsen . 3 For the position of Croatian Muslims, see Dino Mujadžević, Croatia, in: Jørgen S . Nielsen / ahmet alibašić / Edgunas Račius (eds .), Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, Vol . 4 . Leiden, Boston/Ma 2012, 127–134. For more on the ICC agreement with the Croatian state, see the section below, “Between Successful arrangements with Croatian State and Traditional Adherence to Bosnian Islam” . 4 Predominantly Christian European countries with indigenous and in some cases quite large Muslim populations, like Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, and Montenegro, have generally settled the relations with their respective Muslim organizations (Serbia, where there is more than one such organization, being a good example) and officially recognized Islam, but these settlements vary in detail from state to state. For more on the issue, see Thomas Schmidinger, Islam, Migration, and the Muslim Communities in Europe: History, Legal Framework, and Organizations, in: Vedran Džihić / idem (eds .), Looming Shadows . Migration and Integration at a Time of upheaval. Washington/DC 2011, 99–122. 5 For a general overview of the position of Muslims and their organizations in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century, see jørgen S. Nielsen, Muslims in Western Europe. Edinburgh 1995. The Islamic Community in Croatia 277 International participants in the april 2012 conference at the Islamic Center in Zagreb were most likely not aware that, at that very moment, the ICC was actually not the unified supra-ethnic Islamic organization that it appeared to be on the surface . Rather, it was severely divided by internal tensions that were either invisible to outside onlookers or even kept secret . This paper, based on sources such as ICC internal legal documents, Croatian national census data, interviews with participants, and personal observation of events, provides the historical and contemporary international and Croatian contexts for the emergence of two distinct currents within the contemporary ICC, as well as related power dynamics . My research suggests that there are basically two fac- tions inside the ICC: One consists almost exclusively of Bosniaks who consider the ICC part of the loose transnational Bosniak or Bosniak-dominated Islamic national organization network, led by the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ICBH) and based primarily on Bosnian Islamic tradition . The other is an essentially multiethnic group that stresses the importance of build- ing its own Croatian Islamic tradition and demands that the principal ICC goal be identification with the broader Croatian society, rather than the relationship with Bosnia and Bosniak ethnicity . The most obvious parallel, and for some, a cautionary one, for the ICC divi- sion is the rivalry between two major Muslim organizations currently existing in Serbia: the Islamic Community in Serbia (ICiS) and the Islamic Community of Serbia (ICoS). according to Bosnian political scientist Šaćir Filandra, the ICoS emphasizes the “heterogenous ethnic structure of Muslims in Serbia and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia”, that is, a supra-ethnic Islamic community based on civic loyalty to the Republic of Serbia . In contrast, the ICiS supports a Bosniak-dominated organization with institutional connections to the Sarajevo-based ICBH . The two organizations were previously one . Tensions erupted in 2007, when the drive to form an Islamic organization with its own reis and with Belgrade as its center, that is, an Islamic organization completely independent of Bosnian Islamic institutions, encountered strong resistance, es- pecially from Novi Pazar mufti Muamer Zukrolić, in Serbia’s historical Sandžak region . In March 2007, the ICiS was formed in Novi Pazar precisely to main- tain ties with Bosnian institutions. Later that year, the first ICoSreis, Adem Zilkić, was appointed. The pro-Bosnian/Bosniak side quickly claimed that the ICoS was supported by official Belgrade to stir “institutional discord among Bosniaks” 6. This intercommunal schism, which also had political repercussions within the ethnic Bosniak minority in Sandžak, has not been fully overcome, 6 Šaćir Filandra, Bošnjaci nakon socijalizma. o bošnjačkom identitetu u postjugoslovenskom dobu. Sarajevo 2012, 92f. 278 Dino Mujadžević although a reconciliation process was initiated in 2011 by Turkish diplomacy.7 As I demonstrate in the following pages, the division inside the ICC displays internal dynamics very similar to the Serbian situation . In both cases, internal divisions and tensions center around an issue in the post-Yugoslav minority context: whether the Islamic community, after the dissolution of the unified -Is lamic Community in Yugoslavia (ICY), should be based on the dominant ethnic Islamic tradition (the Bosniak one, in both the Serbian and the Croatian cases), or the Islamic minorities should focus upon the civic identity of the country in which they live. Despite the strong similarities, the internal
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