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
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 conflicts within the ICC have become neither intensive nor politically important, owing to the differences between the Croatian and Serbian contexts, the most prominent being the much greater number of Muslims in Serbia and the greater political stakes related to it .
Methodological and Conceptual Considerations
Research on contemporary divisions within the ICC raises a methodological challenge of sorts because of the complexity, lack of transparency, and evolving nature of the subject. It requires, indeed demands, that one ignores the boundar - ies of scholarly fields. Therefore, I decided to apply an interdisciplinary approach combining several qualitative research methods, each one typical of a particular field of the humanities/social sciences: history, Islamic studies, and political an - thropology . The contemporary power dynamics within the ICC cannot be fully understood without taking into account cultural factors such as the history of the Croatian Muslims’ ethnic and civic identity structure, as well as the ICC’s contemporary position within the Croatian state and the wider network of the post-Yugoslav Islamic area . ICC identity politics cannot be discussed without taking into consideration Muslim migrations to Croatia from Bosnia and other Balkan countries, as well as the attitude of Croatian culture and politics toward Islam and Bosnia. The ICC’s relationship to the Croatian government and the ICBH is embedded in the general historical context of state–religion relations in Croatia and the broader political systems of which this country was or is still part, since the beginning of the twentieth century: Austro-Hungary, the interwar South Slavic kingdom, German-dominated Europe during the Second World War, socialist Yugoslavia, the Republic of Croatia, and the European
7 ankara Settles the Dispute between Religious Institutions of Sandžak, Today’s Zaman, 17 october 2011, available at
Union . There are several research perspectives that I consider essential and methodologically consistent for this paper: – the historical research perspective, with a focus on the historical sociocultural context of the development of the ICC, based on literature, written sources, and data collections; – the research perspective of the field of Islamology, which explores the contem- porary legal and social status of the ICC vis-à-vis the position of other Muslim communities in Europe, predominantly on the basis of the interpretation of contemporary legal documents; – the anthropological research perspective, which deals with the internal dy- namics of the elite of the contemporary ICC, based on interviews and my own observations . The choice of these methods has depended not only on the nature of the research issues, but also on the availability or scarcity of relevant literature, sources, and data for different segments of the subject. although historiography and Islamic studies shed light on earlier times, the contemporary period is characterized by a nearly total lack of research . For more recent times, therefore, I apply almost exclusively methods such as textual analysis of primary sources, interviews, and observation . For the political and organizational history of Croatian Mus- lims up to the 1990s, I chiefly used history-related literature, as well as a certain number of published legal and other primary sources . As for the history of the demographic development and ethnic self-identification of Croatian Muslims from the Second World War to 2011, I analyzed official Yugoslav and Croatian national census data. The question of the peculiar institutional position of the ICC toward the ICBH, as well as its relations with the Croatian state, I interpret through primary textual sources, mostly legal documents, owing to the paucity of relevant literature . Finally, the struggle for power within the ICC, largely undocumented in the media or even kept secret, has been examined by applying qualitative methods more typical of political anthropology, such as unstructured interviews, personal observation, and participation in various events . The English terminology that I used to describe South Slavic Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina (alternatively defined as BCS, i. e. Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian- speaking Muslims) with respect to their ethnicity, citizenship, and religion, as well as South Slavic Muslims of Serbia and Montenegro in the historical Sandžak region and smaller neighboring communities, may be confusing to nonspecial- ists. The adjective “Bosnian” ( bosanski) in this paper refers to the geographical and/or civic identity of a person (Bosanac) or thing originating in the territory of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina within its current, officially recognized borders . This adjective also describes Bosnian Muslims (bosanski muslimani) as adherents of Islam. I use the adjective “Muslim” (musliman, with a lowercase initial letter) to refer to two different aspects of “being Bosnian”. one concerns 280 Dino Mujadžević adherents of Islam from Bosnia and Herzegovina; the other points to a historical ethnonym of a group of people of Bosnian Muslim heritage (Musliman, with an uppercase initial letter). This ethnonym was officially in use between 1968 and 1993. Since 1993, the most common ethnonym associated with the population of Bosnian Muslim background has been “Bosniak” ( Bošnjak) . Circumstantial evidence shows that this self-identification category has not been as widely -ac cepted as the (ethnic) Muslim one, especially in Croatia and Montenegro .8 The adjective “Croatian” refers to the geographical and/or civic identity of a person or thing originating in the territory of contemporary Croatia . On the other hand, the adjective “Croat” is used to describe a member of an ethnic group or a thing related to it (in BCS, the same term is used for both adjectives: hrvatski) .
Islam and Muslims in the Modern Croatian Political Framework
Probably the most striking feature of Islam in Croatia, in comparison with other predominantly Christian countries in Europe, is the strong tradition of a positive relationship between Islam and the state, as well as between Islam and domestic nationalism, notwithstanding existing opposing tendencies . This tradition of a mainly positive disposition has furthered the development of a strong Croatian civic identity among Croatian Muslims and a relatively high number of Muslims who, despite their non-Croat origin, identify ethnically as Croats. The first modern Muslim immigrants to Croatia in the late nineteenth century found themselves in an emerging modern society in which cultural attitudes toward Muslims and Islam, especially with respect to the ottoman legacy, varied in the upper strata according to political orientation . During the period from 1860 to 1918, the Croatian national movement was divided into two distinct traditions . Yugoslav Croat nationalism and the pravaši/frankovci
8 For more on the ethnic identity of Bosnian Muslims, see Tone R. Bringa, Nationality Categories, National Identification and Identity Formation in “Multinational Bosnia”, Anthropology of East Europe Review 11 (1993), nos. 1–2, 80–89; Sabrina P. Ramet, Primordial Ethnicity or Modern Nationalism: The Case of Yugoslavia’s Muslims, Reconsidered, in: Andreas Kappeler / Gerhard Simon / Georg Brunner (eds .), Muslim Communities Reemerge . Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Durham/NC 1994, 112–138; Florian Bieber, Muslim Identity in the Balkans before the Establishment of Nation States, Nationalities Papers 28 (2000), no. 1, 13–25; Filandra , Bošnjaci nakon socijalizma, 131–198. a 2007 survey of 500 randomly chosen 500 Bosnian Muslim persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina shows that 55.7% nationally identified as Muslim, 22.7% as Bosniak, and 16.8% as Bosniak Muslim. as the national census of 2012 was not published, this survey could possibly indicate that even in Bosnia, the Bosniak ethnonym is not universally accepted by Bosnian Muslims . See Dinoabazović, Bosanskohercegovački muslimani na početku novog milenija: sociološki pogledi, in: Kamberović (ed .), Rasprave o nacionalnom identitetu Bošnjaka, 219–239, 232. The Islamic Community in Croatia 281 current reflected opposing attitudes toward the ottoman presence and its legacy in the Balkans . The dominant Yugoslav faction was Slavophile and pro-Serbian. It aimed at cultural unification of South Slavs and ipsowas facto anti-ottoman. Its press, literature, and scholarship glorified the struggle of the Christian nations in the Balkans, the Serb nation in particular, and demonized the ottomans. The minority view in the Croatian political and cultural life of the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century was the Islamophilia of the nationalist group known initially as pravaši and since the end of 19th c . also as frankovci, which sought to gain sympathy of Bosnian Muslims for Croat national identity and saw Serbian – exclusively Islamophobic – nationalism as the real threat to Croats and Croatia . although negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims continued to influence a considerable part of the educated elite and academia, it is important to em- phasize that the Croatian political elite, in the years preceding the First World War, considerably reduced the anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourses . All major political movements during the period, while laying claim to Bosnia as part of Croat national territory, accepted Islam as part of their national legacy and Bosnian Muslims as fellow Croats. From 1900 to 1920, the very small, but steadily growing Croatian Muslim community increasingly came to be seen as a potential bridge to Bosnia, so that it was welcomed by the majority of the Croatian press, local authorities, and political parties 9. This change in the attitudes of the Croatian elite coincided with political changes in the region and the beginning of Muslim settlement in Croatia in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Muslims started to return to Croatia two centuries after the Habsburg and Venetian reconquistas .10 The (re-) emergence of Muslims in Croatia at that time and later in the twentieth century was closely related to the situation in Bosnia, the country of origin of most of them. a new era had begun in 1878, when the austro-Hungarian Monarchy, of which Croatia was an integral part, occupied the area of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina . With this development, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina were able to travel, study, and settle in other parts of the monarchy. after the austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 and the ottoman acceptance of it, the position of Bosnian Muslims and their attitude toward the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy changed dramatically . On the one hand, the
9 For more detailed information on Croatian elite attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and Bosnia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Dino Mujadžević, The Consolidation of the Islamic Community in Croatia. a unique Path to the acceptance of Islam in a Traditionally Catholic European Country, Journal of Muslims in Europe 3 (2014), no. 1, 66–93. 10 For the general history of the Muslim community in modern Croatia, see Zlatko Hasanbegović, Muslimani u Zagrebu, 1878–1945. Doba utemeljenja. Zagreb 2007; ankica Marinović Bobinac / Dinka Marinović jerolimov, Vjerske zajednice u Hrvatskoj . Zagreb 2008, 285f .; Ševkoomerbašić, Islam i muslimani. Zagreb 2010. 282 Dino Mujadžević
Bosnian Muslim elite realized that ottoman rule was gone forever and that the new environment had to be accepted . On the other hand, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy undertook efforts to integrate Islam more fully, both in Bosnia and elsewhere . These developments eventually led to the public acceptance of Islam in Croatia, opening it to a greater influx of Muslim immigrants and an estab - lishment of Islamic communities and leadership structure during the years that followed . Acts adopted by the autonomous legislative bodies in the monarchy granted Islam the status of an official religion, enabling it to be legally professed alongside the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish faiths . These acts rep- resented the most significant means employed to integrate Islam. The Council of the Empire (Reichsrat), the austrian parliament, was first to recognize Islam as an official religion by promulgating the Law on Recognition of Islam accord- ing to the Hanafi Rite in 1912. The military alliance of austro-Hungary and the ottoman Empire at the start of the First World War in 1914 helped to promote the official recognition of the Islamic religion in other parts of the monarchy in subsequent years. The Parliament of the Kingdom of Hungary passed the Law on Recognition of the Islamic Confession in january 1916. Finally, on 7 March 1916, the Croatian-Slavonian Parliament (Sabor), being autonomous with respect to religious affairs, unanimously adopted the Law on Recognition of Islam in the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia. This March 1916 law, which provided full legal recognition to a numerically small and organizationally nonexistent Muslim community in Croatia, was probably the most important point in the process of co-opting Islam and Muslims into Croat/Croatian culture and politics . The law incorporated almost identical provisions as acts of recogni- tion in the austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy. Its first paragraph officially introduced the terms “adherents of Islam” and “Muslims” instead of “Mahometans”, which was prevalent in Croatian public discourse at the time. This section also allowed Muslims to practice their religion publicly “within the boundaries of the law” and to “independently operate affairs of religion, education, and pious foundations”, provided that they recognize “the right of supreme oversight of the state” .11 During the period of the first Yugoslav state (1918–1941), the good relationship between the Croatian political elite of almost all persuasions and the Muslims continued . Prominent members of the growing Muslim community became quite active in the struggle for an autonomous and/or independent Croatia. The majority of them publicly accepted and promoted Croatian ethnic identity, as
11 Cf. Reichsgesetzblatt für die im Reichsrat vertretenen Königreiche und Länder. Wien 1912, 875f.; Törvények gyüjteménye. Budapest 1916, 83f. For the 1916 recognition by the Croatian Sabor, see Sbornik zakona i naredaba valjanih za kraljevine Hrvatsku i Slavoniju . God. 1916. Zagreb 1917, 150–159; Hasanbegović, Muslimani u Zagrebu, 50f .;omerbašić , Islam i muslimani, 384f . The Islamic Community in Croatia 283 a result of which Muslims, mostly in Zagreb at the time, were rapidly assimilated into Croatian society .12 During this period, the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka, HSS), under the leadership of Stjepan Radić and vlatko Maček, almost completely dominated the Croatian political landscape. Its attitudes toward the “Bosnian questions” and Bosnian Muslims profoundly influenced Croatian culture and politics, not only during the interwar period but later as well, to a limited extent, almost until the very end of the twentieth century . In contrast to the Croatian frankovci nationalists, the HSS did not consider the Bos- nian question central to Croatian politics. But there was general agreement that Bosnia belonged to the Croatian national territory and that Bosnian Muslims, at least in theory, thus belonged to the Croat nation . The HSS encouraged a tolerant and inclusive policy toward the Muslims through its “Muslim organization“ established in the 1930s. In 1939, the HSS leadership reached an agreement with Belgrade aimed at solving the question of Croatian autonomy in Yugoslavia, known as the Cvetković-Maček agreement. It effectively divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two parts, one Serbian and the other Croatian . This result, among other things, signified a final relinquishing of the demands of Croatian mainstream nationalist politics to incorporate Bosnia and Herzegovina com- pletely into Croatia and to include the Bosnian Muslims in the Croatian ethnic category .13 In the 1930s, the future Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, although a committed Communist in his early years, was heavily influenced by the poli - cies of the HSS toward Bosnia and Bosnian Muslims. In the 1990s, he sought to revive exactly this part of HSS policy .14 During the brief existence of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC, 1941–1945), Bosnian Muslims came to play a relatively important role in the schemes of the regime, controlled by the Ustaše, an extreme Croat nationalist and fascist-like movement that was under German and Italian control and was sustained by their military assistance . The ISC, in collaboration with Nazi Germany, imple- mented racial laws and attempted to exterminate the local jewish population. It also started a campaign of large-scale ethnic persecution of Serbs . With roots in the frankovci Croat nationalist tradition, the Ustaše put strong emphasis on the adherence of Bosnian Muslims to the Croat nation and seemed, from the very start of its regime, eager to attract the Bosnian Muslim elite, especially theulama , whose support was considered crucial for the stabilization of the new regime
12 For the history of Muslims in Croatia until 1949, see Hasanbegović, Muslimani u Za- grebu, 56–339 . 13 For the politics of the HSS in the interwar period, see Mark Biondich, Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party, and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–1928. Toronto 2000. 14 Tuđman’s writings and public appearances in Bosnia in the early 1990s largely supported partition . Cf . IvoBanac et al ., Otvoreno pismo predsjedniku Republike Hrvatske dr . Franji Tuđmanu, Erazmus (1992), no. 3, 2f. See also Predrag Lučić (ed .), Stenogrami o podjeli Bosne . Sarajevo, Split 2005 . 284 Dino Mujadžević in Bosnia, where it faced serious resistance from communist-led partizani and chetnik guerrillas .15 From the very beginning of its regime, the Ustaše established a very good cooperative relationship with Ismet Muftić, imam of Zagreb, using him as a propaganda tool (for example, sending him on quasi-diplomatic mis - sions to Turkey in 1942 and 1943) and as a bridge to the much more important Bosnian ulama . Nonetheless, some of the most prominent Bosnian ulama were signers of the series of resolutions by Muslim notables in 1941, which protested against the violent treatment and persecution of Jews and Serbs . It is important to note the uniqueness of this protest against the crimes of the Ustaše at that time and on ISC territory . The leaders of the former Islamic Religious Community in Yugoslavia, which was concentrated in Bosnia, fluctuated between cooperating with the ISC regime and keeping it at a distance .16 Some ulama even preferred cooperating more closely with the Germans in order to achieve some sort of Bosnian autonomy vis-à-vis the Ustaše regime .17 ISC government and influential Bosnian Muslim leaders’ propaganda, aimed at Bosnian Muslims and Ismet Muftić’s collaboration with the regime, culminated in the opening of the mosque in Zagreb in 1944. To create the mosque, ISC authorities provided a building in the city center, previously used for other purposes, and erected three large minarets around it. The mosque was opened in august 1944 amid the severe military and political conditions confronting the ISC regime . The leadership of the Bosnian ulama, realizing that the ISC was about to dissolve, boycotted the opening ceremony. The building became officially known as the Poglavnik mosque, and in December that year the ISC government formed the Pious Foundation of Poglavnik Mosque, endowing it with a huge sum of money.18 after the war’s end in 1945, the new communist regime operated with brutal repression, summary executions, and long imprisonments for real or falsely accused collaborators with the former occupying powers .Although building a mosque in Zagreb had been a legitimate goal of the Muslim leadership since the 1920s, the new regime regarded its opening and the establishment of work- ing relations with the ISC as an Islamic community act of cooperation with the
15 For an overview of the Second World War situation in Croatia and Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945, see jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945. Stanford/ Ca 2001; Ivo Goldstein, Hrvatska 1918–2008. Zagreb 2008, 208–327. For the situation of Bosnian Muslims during the Second World War, see Marko attil a Hoare, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War. a History. London 2012. For a general overview of Ustaša policies towards Muslims, see Nada Kisić-Kolanović, Muslimani i hrvatski nacionalizam . Zagreb 2009 . 16 Hasanbegović, Muslimani u Zagrebu, 182f., 187, 337–346. 17 Rasim Hurem, Pokušaj nekih građanskih muslimanskih političara da Bosnu i Hercegovinu izdvoje iz okvira Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, Godišnjak društva istoričara Bosne i Hercegovine 16 (1965), 191–221; idem, Koncepcije nekih muslimanskih građanskih političara o položaju Bosne i Hercegovine u vremenu od sredine 1943. do kraja 1944. godine, Prilozi instituta za historiju radničkog pokreta 4 (1968), 533–548. 18 Hasanbegović, Muslimani u Zagrebu, 246–329; omerbašić, Islam i muslimani, 407–414. The Islamic Community in Croatia 285 enemy . The mosque was closed in 1949. In Croatia, as well as in Bosnia, many imams and other religious leaders were executed or imprisoned . Most notably, the imam of the džemat in Zagreb, Ismet Muftić, was summarily tried in Zagreb and executed for collaboration 19. The organized Muslim community in Croa- tia continued to operate in socialist Croatia as part of the IRCY, known since 1970 as the Islamic Community in Yugoslavia, or ICY, but like other religious groups, it was marginalized by the authorities . It must be emphasized that the population of Bosnian Muslim background as a whole was not persecuted by the Croatian communist authorities, as such action ran contrary to the policy of “Brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo), which aimed to ease the ethnic and confessional tensions between the South Slavic groups . Under the socialist regime (1945–1990), some anti-Islamic attitudes, associated with the negative perception of ottoman rule over parts of Croatia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nevertheless continued to be reproduced in the Croatian historiography and school system, partly as a result of Marxist influences and the anti-ottoman discourses of other Yugoslav historiographies. 20 The end of the ISC regime in 1945 confirmed separation of Croatian main - stream politics from the policy promoting the inclusion of Bosnian Muslims in the Croat nation and Bosnia in Croatia . Croatian communists, in keeping with the official Yugoslav ideology, accepted the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina and strictly refrained from any attempt to appropriate Bosnian Muslims ethni - cally. The recognition of a Muslim self-identification ethnic category by official socialist Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and its wide acceptance by the Bosnian Muslims living in Croatia, especially those who had immigrated to Croatia since the 1950s, have isolated them from the mainstream of the Croatian politi- cal culture ever since . Even during the socialist period, but particularly since 1990, the Croatian political culture has functioned mainly in the framework of Croat ethnic politics . As later events and censuses have shown, despite the dominance of ethnic Muslim self-identification (the Bosniak ethnonym has been in use since 1993), a smaller number of people of Bosnian Muslim origin in Croatia continued to embrace Croat ethnicity . Moreover, during and after the fall of socialism and the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1990–1991/92, newly awakened Croatian nationalism revived the pro-Islamic tradition for a certain period of time, in hopes of winning the Bosnian Muslims’ sympathy and collaboration, despite the conflict of these ideas with those of Franjo Tuđman. In 1991, the Croatian
19 omerbašić, Islam i muslimani, 421f. 20 For more on the topic of the perception of ottomans in Croatia during state socialism, see Dino Mujadžević, The Image of ottomans in Croatian Historiography: Changing Narratives in Elementary School Textbooks in Croatia — 1980s to 2000s, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 34 (2014), no. 3, 293–303. 286 Dino Mujadžević president publicly disparaged the importance of the Bosnian tradition of state- hood and sought to attain a direct agreement with Serbian President Slobodan Milošević to end the crisis in Yugoslavia, a move that can be interpreted as analogous to the deal made by the Croatian Peasants’ Party with Belgrade in 1939. During the initial periods of the Serbia-sponsored war against Bosnia and Croatia (1991–1993), the Islamic establishment in Croatia enjoyed a very good relationship with the state, and supported its bid for independence and its alli- ance with the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs . Nevertheless, the end of the ICC’s good relations with Franjo Tuđman’s regime, as well as the final blow to Croatian nationalist Islamophilia, embodied in the pro-Ustaše discourse of the Croatian Party of Rights and its paramilitary units in Croatia and Bosnia, took place during the 1993–1994 Bosniak-Croat war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This military conflict amounted to attempts by official Croatia to annex parts of Bosnia with the help of the Bosnian Croats, and to distance itself from its former allies, the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) 21. The war of 1993–1994 has burdened the relations between both Bosnian Croats political and Bosniaks with Croatia, even after the Bosniak-Croat military rap- prochement in 1994. It also briefly calmed the relations between the Croatian state and its majority population, as well as the Bosniak-dominated ICC .22 Still, the legacy of acceptance of Islam in modern Croatia proved stronger: during the 1993–1994 conflict, the Croatian state did not embark on an ethnically or reli - giously based persecution of Muslims in Croatia, as did take place in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the same period . After the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) lost the elections in 2000, relations between the state and the ICC began to improve again. During the subsequent process of rebuilding ties, both the Croatian state and the ICC looked to modern Croatian history for an adequate reference point. This turned out to be the 1916 Law on Recognition of Islam . The law was proclaimed a historical precedent in article 1 of the ICC’s Statute adopted in 2006. Fittingly enough, the most inten - sive and controversial historical period of state–Islam cooperation in Croatia, the Second World War period, and the events of 1993–1994 were not mentioned.
21 For the circumstances of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially the Bosniak-Croat war, see Xavier Bougarel, Bosnie: anatomie d’un conflict. Paris 1996; Steven L. Burg / Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention. armonk/NY, London 1999; Branka Magaš / Ivo žanić (eds .), The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1991–1995. London 2001; Marko attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed: The Birth and Rise of the Bosnian Army . London 2004 . 22 Zagreb’s main imam, in his September 1993 interview with Dejan jović, described the situation of the Croatian Muslims: “The number of incidents are increasing. I would say that a nightmare situation is being established. It doesn’t surprise me, if we look at the quantity of disinformation about the situation in Bosnia . Propaganda against Muslims, and especially against Islam, must be stopped […] .” Cf . Ševko Omerbašić, Ne vidim kraja ratu, Feral Tribune (Purgatorij), no. 424, 21 September 1993, 2f. The Islamic Community in Croatia 287 Changing the Ethnic Makeup of Croatian Muslims
Notwithstanding the building of strong ties with the newly established Re- public of Croatia, Croatian Muslims continued to be heavily influenced by the different ethnic affiliations to which they had adhered during the twentieth -cen tury, and the ethnic factor came to play a major role in the internal structure and discourse of the ICC . Although it is supposedly ethnically neutral, the ICC, ever since its origin as an independent organization in the 1990s, has been practically dominated by persons of Bosnian Muslim background who opted for Bosniak ethnicity. Moreover, during the 1990s and 2000s, the Bosniak ethnic identity discourse and activism were openly central features of the ICBH, to which the ICC continues to be organizationally and culturally linked .23 Since the very be- ginning of organized Islam in modern Croatia, Bosnian Muslim dominance has been evident among Muslims in Croatia, including both the members and the leaders of the community, and strong organizational, educational, and personal ties with Bosnian Islam have existed. For the times before the Yugoslav 1948 census, no official data is available from which we could precisely identify the ethnic makeup of the Muslim population in Croatia, but other sources make clear that since the establishment of a modern Muslim community in Croatia, its population has predominantly been of Bosnian Muslim origin, although it includes a smaller number of people of non-Bosnian, mostly Albanian, origin . Obviously, the relationship between Muslims in Croatia and those in Bosnia and Herzegovina was not merely demographic, but also cultural, spiritual, and administrative . Further, until the 2000s, the Muslims in Croatia, mostly living in Zagreb and with personal or family roots in Bosnia and Her zegovina or Sandžak, were seen and treated exclusively as an extension of Bosnian Islam . This con- nection in fact even predates the establishment of regular Islamic religious life in modern Croatia by the 1916 Law on Recognition of Islam in the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia, at a time when there was no organized Islamic com- munal organization in the country and the number of Muslims ranged between 1,000 and 2,000. The law acknowledged the ties between Bosnian and Croatian Muslims by envisioning some sort of dependence on the Bosnian hierarchy by the future Islamic community in Croatia: Paragraph 4 of the statute proclaimed that the future Islamic community in Croatia was allowed to establish itself “in relation to the Muslim confessional structure in Bosnia”, and Paragraph 5 allowed religious dignitaries from Bosnia to be employed in Croatia 24. Thus, paradoxically, the relations between the state and organized Islam in Croatia,
23 For more on the role of Bosniak ethnicity in the ICBH and the nationalization of Bosnian Islam in the 1990s, see Xavier Bougarel, od “Muslimana” do “Bošnjaka”. Pitanje nacionalnog imena Bosanskih muslimana, in: Kamberović (ed .), Rasprave o nacionalnom identitetu Bošnjaka, 117–135, 128–132. 24 Sbornik zakona i naredaba valjanih za kraljevine Hrvatsku i Slavoniju god. 1916, 150–159; 288 Dino Mujadžević as well as those between Muslims in Croatia and Bosnian Islam, were laid out even before the Muslim community started to operate . In a way, the Croatian state in 1916 allowed, even encouraged, the dual loyalty of Croatian Muslims to Bosnian Islam and Islam in Croatia . In the spirit of the Croat(ian) nationalist discourse of the time, Croatian lawmakers undoubtedly implied that some day, in one way or another, Croatia and Bosnia would be united and that promot- ing the connection between Muslims in Zagreb and Sarajevo was only natural . The first permanent Croatian Muslim camaat (džemat) started operating in Zagreb in 1919, immediately after the First World War. Its personnel, including imam Ismet Muftić and others, were exclusively Bosnian Muslim and trained in Bosnia . Both the organization and Islamic practice in the Zagreb community were modeled on the Bosnian Sunni Hanafi Islamic tradition. although initially independent, Muftić was in practice from the very beginning issues under the oversight of the Bosnian reis-ul-ulema in Sarajevo and the mufti of Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1930, Croatian Muslims became part of the state-sponsored Islamic Religious Community in Yugoslavia (IRCY), which was dominated by a Bosnian Muslim ulama . As Croatia was part of the South Slavic state, known since 1929 as Yugoslavia, it was natural that the Croatian Muslims were part of the IRCY . They belonged to its lower organizational units, with their center in Bosnia and Herzegovina (odbor/starješinstvo/mešihat) . The Bosnian Islamic religious authorities continued in the same fashion to exert direct control over the religious affairs of Croatian Muslims under the pro-axis ISC regime (1941–1945) and in socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1990), when the IRCY (later ICY) was re-established .25 The national censuses from the interwar period collected data about religious affiliation but not ethnicity. 26 During the first period of organized Islamic re - ligious activity in Croatia (1920s–1930s), the number of Muslims (in terms of religion) in Croatia remained small but relatively stable. In 1931, there were 4,750 Muslims in Croatia, of whom 3,000 were in Zagreb . After the Second World War, the national censuses did not collect data on religious affiliation but focused instead on data concerning ethnic self-identification ( narodnost) . The census of 1948 was the first in Yugoslav history to allow ethnic self-identification. South Slavic Muslims, while nominally a religious group, were regarded in socialist Yugoslavia from early on as a de facto ethnic group .27 In the 1948 national cen -
25 Hasanbegović, Muslimani u Zagrebu, 56–339 . 26 For the issue of ethnicity in general in the Yugoslav censuses, see Snježana Mrđen, Narodnost u popisima . Promjenjiva i nestalna kategorija, Stanovništvo (2002), nos. 1-4, 77–103. 27 For the recognition of ethnic Muslim identity in socialist Yugoslavia, see Wolfgang Höpken, Die jugoslawischen Kommunisten und die bosnischen Muslime, in: Andreas Kappeler / Gerhard Simon / Georg Brunner (eds .), Die Muslime in der Sowjetunion und in jugoslawien. Identität, Politik, Widerstand. Köln 1989, 181–210; Fikret adanir, The Formation of a “Muslim” Nation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. a Historiographic Discussion, in: idem / Suraiya The Islamic Community in Croatia 289 sus, they were not given a separate ethnic category, but could choose among the following: Serb Muslim, Croat Muslim, and ethnically nonaffiliated Muslim of Yugoslav descent (neopredijeljen musliman jugoslovenskog porijekla ) . Ethnically nonaffiliated Muslims, even though they were not an officially recognized ethnic category, were nevertheless listed among other Yugoslav ethnic groups in the census 28. according to the 1948 census, the number of nonaffiliated Muslims in Croatia was only 321, and the number of albanians was 107. The number of Croat Muslims in Croatia, 3,212, was strikingly higher.29 While Muslims in Bosnia generally opted to declare themselves ethnically unaffiliated, those in Croatia, although coming from the same background, had been very much af- fected by the pro-Muslim attitudes during the interwar and ISC periods, and by the general cultural assimilation process . They readily accepted Croat ethnic self-identification, even after the complete destruction of the Croatian bourgeois and/or nationalist political scene in Croatia in 1945. The subsequent census of 1953 removed the nonaffiliated-Muslim catego - ry and introduced instead the category of nonaffiliated Yugoslav ( Jugosloven neopredijeljen) .30 Since then, no data on Croat Muslim or Serb Muslim ethnic subcategories was available in Yugoslav censuses .31 In 1961, the ethnic Muslim category (Musliman/etnička pripadnost) was officially introduced to the Yugoslav census,32 but ethnic Muslims were officially recognized only in 1968 as one of the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia. It was the 1971 Yugoslav national cen - sus that officially acknowledged “Muslims in the national sense”, Musliman u smislu narodnosti, in a Yugoslav national census 33. That year, as many as 3,113 ethnic Muslims and 2,126 albanians lived in Croatia,34 reflecting not only the beginning of a new immigration wave to Croatia from other parts of Yugoslavia during the 1950s, but also the fact that this immigration, unlike the immigra - tion to Croatia prior to 1945, was taking place in quite a different political and cultural setting. Muslims from Bosnia who arrived in Croatia after the Second World War were much less likely to identify ethnically with Croatia, for the socialist regime in Croatia did not aspire to incorporate Bosnian Muslims into the Croat nation or Bosnia into Croatia . Although the Titoist socialist system
Faroqhi (eds.), The ottomans and the Balkans. a Discussion of Historiography. Leiden 2002, 267–304; Bougarel, od “Muslimana” do “Bošnjaka”, 122f. 28 Konačni rezultati popisa stanovništva od 15. marta 1948, vol 9: Stanovništvo po narod- nosti. Belgrade 1954, XvII, XXXIII–XXXIv. 29 Ibid., 105–107. 30 Popis stanovništva 1953, vol. 1: vitalna i etnička obilježja. Belgrade 1959. 31 Filandra, Bošnjaci i nakon socijalizma, 203 . 32 Ibid ., 203 . 33 Popis stanovništva i stanova. Stanovništvo, vitalna, etnička i migraciona obilježja. Belgrade 1974. 34 Nacionalni sastav stanovništva FNR jugoslavije po naseljima i opštinama, vol. 3. Belgrade 1994. 290 Dino Mujadžević emphasized the ethnic equality of all Yugoslav citizens on the basis of the ideology of “Brotherhood and unity”, the Muslim ethnic group had its actual “national home” in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, sharing it with Bosnian Serbs and Croats, rather than in the Socialist Republic of Croatia, which was constitutionally specifically defined at the time as the national state of Croats, and from 1971, as the state of the Serbs in Croatia. The number of ethnic Muslims kept rising as a result of immigration in later decades. In 1971, there were as many as 18,487 ethnic Muslims in Croatia, and 23,740 in 1981. The increased immigration of ethnic Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sandžak in the 1960s and 1970s was part of the larger social transformations in socialist Yugoslavia, brought about by faster industrial development in the northern parts of Yugoslavia (Croatia and Slovenia) and persisting economic underdevelopment in the still mostly agricultural southern parts of the country 35. It is also to be assumed that a small but not inconsider- able number of Muslims (in terms of religion) continued to identify themselves as Croats in the official census after the introduction of the ethnic Muslim cat - egory, but there are no exact data regarding this point . In comparison with the 1961 census, which recorded 3,113 ethnic Muslims in Croatia, the number of individuals identifying as such in the 1971 and 1981 censuses is rel atively large. That fact is probably quite a reliable indication of the growth in the number of religious Muslim inhabitants in Croatia, although there is no definite evi - dence . Probably the most important circumstantial evidence of the increase in the number of religious Muslims in the ICY branch in Croatia during the late socialist period was their religious and cultural activity, most conspicuously represented by the successful effort to build a mosque in Zagreb in the late 1970s and early 1980s, presumably the most important event in the history of organized Islam in Croatia 36. In spite of the Bosnian Muslim/Bosniak dominance, the Muslim population in Croatia in the twentieth century has been multiethnic, and its ethnic makeup has not been historically stable, but has become increasingly heterogeneous over time . First of all, the population of Bosnian Muslim background in Croatia was not ethnopolitically monolithic. according to census data, since at leas t the 1940s it has been divided into two or more ethnicities: Muslim (ethnic Muslim), Croat (of the Muslim religion), and later Bosniak . In addition, by all accounts, before 2011, albanians were the second-largest Muslim ethnic group in Croatia. But one must take into consideration the fact that many of these Albanians were Ro- man Catholic. The first available data on the religious affiliation of albanians in
35 On the issue of internal migrations in socialist Yugoslavija, see Silva Mežnarić, Otkrivanje prostora – prekrivanje vremena: migracije umjesto razvoja. Zagreb 1991. 36 The construction of the Zagreb mosque (Islamic Center) lasted from 1981 to 1987. For more, see omerbašić, Islam i muslimani, 473–491. The Islamic Community in Croatia 291
Croatia, from 2011, puts the share of Muslim albanians at 51%.37 In 1931, when there were 4,725 Muslims in Croatia, only 818 albanians lived in the country. If we cautiously accept today’s ratio of Muslims and Catholics in the Croatian al- banian population, we might say that approximately 10% of Muslims in Croatia could have been of Albanian origin at that time . It seems that this percentage did not change much until the 1990s, although the total number of albanians rose drastically. Sixty years later, in 1991, under far different circumstances, the last Yugoslav national census, which recorded the religious affiliation of the population, confirmed this ratio, although the absolute number of albanians as well as that of religious and ethnic Muslims nearly doubled. In 1991, there were 54,814 religious Muslims in Croatia; the number of ethnic Muslims stood at 43,469, and that of albanians at 12,032. If we accept the Muslim–Catholic ratio from 2011, we could estimate that albanians represented around 10% of Muslims in Croatia in 1991.38 As a result of the demographic dominance of Bosnian Muslims over Croatian Muslims, and their cultural, spiritual, and administrative dependence on the Bosnian ICY branch until the 1990s, practically all imams and a considerable majority of other personnel and activists of the Croatian ICY branch were of Bosnian Muslim origin . The Bosnian version of the BCS language has been de facto the official language of Islamic religious instruction, hutbas (sermons), correspondence, documents, and official inscriptions of the ICY in Croatia since the interwar period . The Albanian language has been used very rarely in the materials printed by the community (e .g . the Ramadan time schedule) . The closeness between the Croatian and the Bosnian ICY was strengthened by the fact that their leaders were first-generation immigrants from Bosnia. almost all of them, like the longest-serving chief imams of the Zagreb mosque in the 1980s and 1990s, Mustafa Cerić and Ševko omerbašić, were born and grew up in Bosnia . The Bosnian Muslim ulama from Zagreb also played an important role in the ICBH leadership in Sarajevo: in 1993, Mustafa Cerić became the ICBH reis-ul-ulema residing in Sarajevo . The dominance of persons of Bosnian Muslim origin, although predominantly born in Croatia, has continued to be one of the main features of the ICC, which started operating independently in 1994.39 During the 1990s, the dominance of ulama of Bosnian origin weakened
37 Državni zavod za statistiku Republike Hrvatske, Stanovništvo prema narodnosti i vjeri. Popis 2011, available at
40 assimilationist pressures and “ethnomimicry” during approximately the same period as in Croatia were studied in the case of the Serb minority in Zagreb, see Drago župarić- Iljić, od očuvanja identiteta do asimilacije: aktualni položaj i integriranost srpske nacionalne manjine u Zagrebu, in: Darko Gavrilović, Srpsko-hrvatski odnosi: Rješavanje otvorenih pitanja. Novi Sad 2012, 189–207. 41 on the influence of the place of birth on ethnic self-identification, see alija ,Hodžić Bošnjaci u Zagrebu (kratki prikaz socio-kulturnog stanja). Zagreb 2011, 8f., 19f., available at
The ICC in the 2000s: Between a Successful Arrangement with the Croatian State and Traditional Adherence to Bosnian Islam
The 2000s turned out to be a very successful period for the ICC, currently the only Islamic religious organization in Croatia . The Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Croatia with the Islamic Community in Croatia on Issues of Common Interest (Ugovor između Vlade Republike Hrvatske i Islamske zajednice u Hrvatskoj o pitanjima od zajedničkog interesa ), signed in 2002, gave the ICC practically the same rights formerly granted to the Catholic Church by an agreement between the Republic of Croatia and the Holy See . It also stipulated the rights of the ICC in terms of independence from state intervention, freedom of mosque construction, freedom of speech and publishing, state-supported religious education in public schools, and chaplaincy in prisons, the armed forces, and the police by means of Croatian state funding . It gave the ICC the right to register marriages having the same legal effect as civil marriages. ac- cording to this agreement, salaries, health care, and pension charges for imams of džemats are to be fully paid by the government . Included also were privileges that are currently not available to Islamic institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and most other European countries, such as those concerning the recording of marriages .44 The very good contractual agreement with the Croatian state not only promoted the functioning and financial stability of the ICC, but also em- powered the ICC elite to build a close relationship with the Croatian political elite, a relationship useful to both the ICC and private interests .45 The ICC’s successful arrangement with the state was possible only in the sociopolitical environment of the 2000s and 2010s, which was generally more supportive for Croatian Muslims, as opposed to the less receptive and volatile 1990s. In addition to a less nationalistic atmosphere in the country and the region
44 For the text of the Agreement, see Narodne novine (2003), no. 196. For a general overview of the legal status of religious communities in Croatia, see Ivan Padjen, The Status of Minor Communities in Croatia: A Revival of Legal Pluralism, in: Silvo Devetak / Liana Kalčina / Miroslav F. Polzer (eds .), Legal Position of Churches and Religious Communities in South-Eastern Europe. Maribor, Ljubljana, vienna 2004, 93–106. 45 For example, the closeness of the ICC leaders, especially the former mufti Ševko omerbašić, to the present mayor of Zagreb Milan Bandić and the tacit lobbying to vote for him or his associates were well known to political analysts and also to my contacts inside the ICC . The Islamic Community in Croatia 295 after 2000–2001, there were other factors that contributed to this environment. Owing to the linguistic and cultural proximity between the Croatian Catholic majority and Croatian Muslims, as well as a relatively low overall number of Muslims, there were no significant social tensions, and Muslims were largely integrated into Croatian society. During the 2000s and 2010s, the very positive attitude of the Croatian political elite, even some individuals from conserva- tive Croatian political circles, toward the ICC and Islam in general, and the relatively more welcoming social climate also led to generally positive attitudes of Croatian Muslims toward Croatia, regardless of their willingness to identify with Croat ethnicity 46. My observations, together with conversations with nu- merous members of the ICC, suggest that there is a strong civic identification with Croatia among most Muslims in Croatia today, although it is commonly understood that anti-Islamic, anti-Bosniak, and anti-Bosnian prejudices continue to exist in significant part of the Croatian population. The 1991–1995 Croatian Homeland War has remained distinctly popular among the numerous Mus- lims I talked to during my research 47. The positive attitude toward Croatia is also perceivable in the increasing acceptance of Croat ethnicity by Muslims after 2000 (12% in 2001; 15% in 2011).48 It seems that social factors, such as the diminished migration from other countries since the establishment of Croatian independence in 1991 and the growing number of Muslims born and raised in Croatia, contribute to the ever-growing identification of the Muslim population with Croatia, while the ties to their parents’ countries of origin, primarily Bosnia and Herzegovina, tend to weaken . According to a sociological survey of 9,943 Bosniaks and ethnic Muslims from Zagreb conducted between 2006 and 2008, 47% of Bosniaks and ethnic Muslims living in Zagreb were born in Croatia, and 46% in Bosnia and Herzegovina . The survey also showed that those born
46 Probably the most illustrative example of a positive attitude of the post-Tuđman Croatian political elite with respect to the ICC and Islam is the opening of the Rijeka mosque (Islamic Center) on 3 May 2013, which was financed mainly by Qatar. The event was represented as one of national importance, as a symbol of cosmopolitism, and the mosque hailed as “the most beautiful mosque in Europe”. It was attended by many Croatian dignitaries, prominent acting and former presidents and prime ministers, and Catholic Church dignitaries . See Ivo Balen / Mirjana Grce, Otvoren islamski centar u Rijeci: iz Hrvatske i Rijeke svijetu poslana pozitivna poruka, Novi list, 4 May 2013, available at
49 Alija Hodžić, Bošnjaci u Zagrebu, 8f., 19f. The survey was organized by the Council of the Bosniak Minority of the City of Zagreb with the aim, among other things, to popularize the Bosniak ethnonym among the persons polled . The addresses of persons contacted during the survey were taken from the official voters’ register, which also contains information on the ethnic affiliation of voters. 50 Dušanka Kosanović, Nacionalni identiteti i socijalna distanca studenata hrvatske, bošnjačke i srpske nacionalnosti, diplomski rad. Zagreb 2003, 32, available at
Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Slovenia, as well as in the Western diaspora, thereby becoming a major vehicle for promoting and strengthening Bosniak identity in Bosnia and abroad 53. The ICC’s Bosniak-dominated leadership, despite the rising ethnic heterogeneity of its membership, accepted this new Bosniak framework for its activities by maintaining loose ties with the ICBH, but at the same time chose in reality to remain completely autonomous . During the 2000s, it positioned itself somewhere between loyalty to Bosnian Muslim/ Bosniak culture and the reality of living in independent Croatia, which was of- fering state protection and funds in exchange for social services and civic loyalty . In spite of the ICC’s nominal organizational and cultural dependence on the ICBH, the ICC leaders decided to run their organization in ways that would ensure good relations with the Croatian state and protect their own power and influence. This “middle position” provided probably the best solution for the predominantly ethnic Bosniak ICC elite (ulama and “lay” activists): autonomy shielded it from the day-to-day influence of Sarajevo, but maintaining the largely nominal connection with the ICBH organizational network helped to ensure the Bosniak character of the ICC and thus to prevent possible internal challenges from competitors supported by other ethnic networks . Internal documents of both the ICC and the ICBH from this period reflect the development of the ICC’s legal position vis-à-vis the ICBH and its discourse on ethnic, primarily Bosniak, issues . During the 1990s, the Bosnian Islamic leadership was the first to acknowledge close ties with ethnic Muslims and to include them in its newly emerging orga- nizational framework . The ICY dissolved with the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991–1992. In 1993, in a session in besieged Sarajevo, the Bosnian ICY assembly representatives adopted the groundbreaking Constitutional Decision of the Is- lamic Community of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which accepted the fact of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and proclaimed a new organizational independence . The ICC issue was not mentioned in this document . However, the document declared that “all Bosnian Muslims temporarily or permanently residing in foreign countries” belonged to the ICBH . In practice, Croatia never ceased to be part of a common organizational structure, as clearly shown by the ICBH internal documents from that period . For example, theRijaset of the ICBH, in its session in january 1994, named the ICC in Croatia and the ICC in Slovenia as parts of the ICBH 54.
53 For the relationship of Bosniak ethnic identity and the ICBH in Bosnia and abroad, see Armina omerika, Islam und Bosniakentum in Deutschland . Eine Bestandsaufnahme des Diskursfeldes, in: Rauf Ceylan (ed .), Islam und Diaspora . Analysen zum muslimischen Leben in Deutschland aus historischer, rechtlicher sowie migrations- und religionssoziologischer Perspektive. Frankfurt/M. et al. 2012, 317–333. 54 Filandra, Bošnjaci nakon socijalizma, 95 . 298 Dino Mujadžević
In November 1997, finally, the ICBHSabor in Sarajevo passed the Constitution of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina .55 Several paragraphs of the document clearly define the connection between the two Islamic organiza - tions in neighboring states, including the nominal superiority of the ICBH over the ICC. For example, Paragraph 1 proclaims the ICBH “the one and only community of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniaks abroad, and other Muslims who accept it as being theirs . The Mešihat of the Islamic Community in Sandžak, the Mešihat of the ICC, and the Mešihat of the Islamic Com- munity in Slovenia are constitutive parts of the ICBH .” The ICBH leadership thereby defined its role as the Islamic organization in Bosnia and Herzegovina . In other countries, it would play this roleonly for Bosniaks. Since the mid-1990s, the ICBH leadership has been very enthusiastic about accepting the Bosniak ethnonym as the ethnopolitical identity of Bosniak Muslims . Since that time, most of its functionaries have been modeling them- selves as Bosniak national activists, some even as Bosniak political leaders, the most prominent examples being reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Cerić and Novi Pazar mufti Muamer Zukorlić. The Constitution puts very clear emphasis on the fact that the Islamic organization abroad is expected to follow the leadership in Sarajevo, which is thus suggested to be the spiritual center of Bosniaks . As a matter of course,all Bosniaks are assumed to be Muslims in terms of religion . Paragraphs 63-64 of the Constitution deal with the number of Croatian and other non-Bosnian representatives in the ICBH Sabor . Paragraph 80 says that Islamic communities in Sandžak, Croatia, and Slovenia are to regulate “the organization of religious life themselves”, but “in concordance with the ICBH Constitution”. 56 For its part, the ICC leadership decided in the 2000s to acknowledge the ties with Bosnia already proclaimed in the ICBH Constitution . ICC documents show that the leaders chose a path that would enable the ICC to remain formally united with the ICBH and to accept the nominal seniority of the ICBH leadership in Sarajevo, but to remain in fact an independent organization. The first paragraph of the ICC Statute contains a brief but significant reference to the 1916 Law of Recognition, showing that the ICC bases its identity on a relatively obscure but existing modern Croatian Islamic tradition and respects the Croatian legal framework in that regard . Although the 2002 Croatian Law on the Legal Status of Religious Communities allows religious communities to keep very close ties with foreign countries, including unification with religious organizations in them,57 this was not the case with the ICC, which opted for complete operational
55 For the ICBH documents from the 1990s, see Muhamed Salkić, Ustavi Islamske zajednice . Sarajevo 2001, 313–367 (with texts from the Constitutional Decisions and the Constitution). 56 The text of the Constitution is available at
Escalation: Mufti Elections in May 2012
As previously indicated, the Bosniak dominance in the leadership of the Croatian Islamic Community during the 2000s, as expressed in the 2005 Statute and the distribution of leadership positions, did not reflect the reality of ethnic self-identification among Muslims in Croatia. The ICC leadership, in its official documents, persistently refused to recognize any ethnonym other than Bosniak for people of Bosnian Muslim heritage . In addition, the ICC made reference to Muslims of Albanian, Turkish, Arab, and Roma origin . The Croatian Islamic leadership (mufti and mešihat) was largely Bosniak, including a certain number of Albanians . Nevertheless, on the local level and particularly in Zagreb, the medžlis and persons of other ethnic persuasions, including “dissident” ethnic self-identifications of Bosnian Muslims, have remained influential. For example, Professor osman Muftić, for decades a member of the executive board of the Zagreb medžlis, and historian Zlatko Hasanbegović, who succeeded Professor Muftić after his death in 2010, declared themselves publicly to be ethnic Croat
58 “[…] Islamska zajednica nadnacionalna je zajednica, ali nije anacionalna, a to znači da u svom radu uvažava činjenicu da njenu većinu čine muslimani-Bošnjaci. Stoga se rad Islamske zajednice odvija u izravnoj suradnji s Islamskom zajednicom u Bosni i Hercegovini […] .” Statut Islamske zajednice u Hrvatskoj . Unpublished material . The copy of the text is in my private possession . 300 Dino Mujadžević
Muslims 59. The disproportion between Bosniak dominance and demographic and political reality was too blatant, thus eliminating any chance to avoid severe consequences for the internal power dynamics of the ICC and even for relation - ships among Muslim ethnic groups in Croatia . The turning point for internal relations in the visibly unified, peaceful, and successful ICC arrived in the second half of 2012. as Ševko omerbašić, the first ICC mufti and previously the leading imam in Zagreb, was about to leave office for mandatory retirement, the fight over his successor, who ouldw enjoy control over the distribution of resources as well as great public esteem, shook the very foundations of the organization. Hafiz aziz alili, the mai n Zagreb imam, a man of albanian ethnic origin, and the Bosniak aziz Hasanović became candidates for the position, for which one is elected by a select body of representatives of camaats, dignitaries, clerics, and Community personnel . The main issue divid- ing supporters during the 2012 unofficial campaign for the election of the ICC mufti was the vision of the future ICC: whether it should remain part of the international Bosniak Islamic organizational network or restructure itself to become a multiethnic organization focused on the reality of living in Croatia .60 From the very beginning, the group around aziz Hasanović was regarded by both supporters and opponents as representative of forces willing to maintain the Bosniak grip on the ICC and to insist on retaining the largely symbolic ties with the Bosniak Islamic transnational network. although Hasanović’s public statements do not give the impression that he shared such views concerning the ICC and his candidacy, other facts suggest that he did support and possibly even initiate the discourse. at the time, Hasanović himself was widely regarded as a close ally of two prominent ICBH clerics who were active Bosniak nationalist leaders and main actors supporting the discourse of a transnational Bosniak Islam in the ex-Yugoslav space, reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Cerić and Novi Pazar mufti Muamer Zukorlić. It was in Novi Pazar at Zukorlić’s private university, strongly supported by Cerić, that Hasanović successfully defended his PhD thesis in Islamic theology and acquired the title of full university professor ( redovni profe- sor). as noted above, Zukorlić, supported by Cerić in Sarajevo, has been highly influential as de facto ICiS leader since 2007. The issue of maintaining ties with Bosnia and ethnic Bosniak primacy over the Islamic structure in Serbia, in order to ensure the dominance of the Sandžak Bosniak ulama and Zukorlić himself over Islam in Serbia, was one of the most important topics in the discourse of Zukorlić and his supporters in Serbia and Bosnia. all of Hasanović’s supporters, with one important exception, were of Bosniak ethnicity and were predominantly from the Zagreb Islamic High School and the Bosniak conservative cultural or-
59 Conversation with Zlatko Hasanbegović in june and September 2013. 60 The descriptions of the inner divisions and groups in the ICC are based on my personal observations and interviews with several representatives of both points of view . The Islamic Community in Croatia 301 ganization Preporod . Preporod itself is not part of the Islamic Community, but its magazines, Preporodov Journal and Behar, do influence conservative Bosniaks in Croatia, and through their internet editions similar readership in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western diaspora . The Preporod leadership, including leading writers for its magazines, gave strong preference to contents concerning the discourse on Islamic conservatism and Bosniak ethnic nationalism 61. The most prominent mufti supporter was Mirza Šabić, an enterpreneur and the son of one of the most influential Bosniak leaders in Croatia in the 1990s, the late Salim Šabić. In 2012 Mirza Šabić, as the only invited representative of Bosniaks from Croatia, joined Mustafa Cerić and Muamer Zukorlić at the founding congress for their new project, the Bosniak World Congress (Bošnjački svjetski kongres) . ultimately, my interviews with several supporters and opponents of Hasanović indicated that during the spring of 2012, some of Hasanović’s supporters used anti-Albanian chauvinistic arguments to gain support for his candidacy, in private settings only, of course. The possibility of a mufti of albanian origin was represented as a possible danger of an Albanian takeover of the allegedly Bosniak ICC 62. Still, there have been no reports that Hasanović himself used such extreme arguments; he was known for denouncing ethnic hatred before and after these events. My perception of Hasanović’s supporters was that they were genuinely motivated, in most cases, by their view of the importance of ethnic loyalty and the need to preserve the prevailing Bosniak character of the ICC. Personal loyalty and private interests were less significant. In spite of their focus on ethnicity, Hasanović’s supporters, like Hasanović himself, were gen- erally not hostile toward the Croatian state and society, but were rather eager to join in their activities, some of them already being involved in that sense . Hasanović and his followers were unofficially sponsored by Ivo josipović, the left-leaning president of Croatia .63 The other candidate, alili, managed to attract supporters of various ethnic backgrounds . His group, gathered around the Zagreb medžlis, consisted of prominent Bosniaks, Albanians, Croats, and people of other ethnicities . The
61 among the most frequent commentators in Behar and Preporodov Journal during 2012 were Filip Mursel Begović, Senad Nanić, and Faris Nanić, who more or less openly supported aziz Hasanović in their writings. More recently, discourses concerning religious and ethnic issues have become significantly more moderate in these magazines. 62 according to a Bosniak supporter of Hasanović whom I interviewedn i june 2012, albanians already held “too many” ICC functions, most notably among imams, but what Hasanović’s supporters actually resented was the fact that the albanian and his family ran the popular restaurant in the Islamic Center in Zagreb. This was seen as a vivid “example” of the supposed rise of albanian influence. anti-albanian prejudices concerning their supposed networking, ethnic solidarity, and family loyalty, in contrast to the supposed Bosniak individualism and anarchism, played a significant role in deciding whom to support. 63 I communicated with Hasanović’s supporters mainly during May–june 2012; all wished to remain anonymous . 302 Dino Mujadžević narrative of this group was centered around rebuilding the ICC as a truly mul- tiethnic Islamic organization with no dominant ethnic group . The main line of thought was that the ICC should focus on Croatia, the very environment in which Croatian Muslims live, rather than on Bosnia or Bosniak ethnic communities worldwide. The primary ICC task should be the creation of a better position for Croatian Muslims in the Croatian society and state . Civic loyalty of Muslims living in Croatia was considered to be at least as important for the Muslim community as their loyalty to their respective communities . An ICC without the supremacy of any one group was seen as being more in line with Islamic ideals, which encourage paying closer attention to personal moral characteristics than to a person’s origin, and, as alili supporters put it, discourage “national- ism”, meaning ethnic chauvinism .64 Alili supporters, the most prominent being Gzim Rexhepi, the albanian community leader, and Mirsad Srebreniković, the president of the Bosniak Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije ), had good contacts with the largest conservative Croatian party, the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica), led by Tomislav Karamarko, but also with the populist Zagreb mayor, Milan Bandić. My observations and interviews with several participants led me to conclude that the multiethnic group of alili’s supporters had good connections in conservative Croatian circles because most of them identified primarily with the Croatian context rather than with their own ethnic communities, an attitude that permitted the forming of alliances beyond the non-nationalist Croatian left . Despite rejecting ethnic supremacy, the majority of the alili supporters were quite active in their own ethnic communities . For example, most of the Bosniak support for Alili came from activists of the moderate and secular Bosniak organization Bosniak National Community of Croatia (Bošnjačka nacionalna zajednica Hrvatske) . I also noticed that alili’s Bosniak supporters were primarily realists who knew that the situation inside the ICC required multiethnic models of functioning. alili’s sup - porters preferred him to Hasanović, who represented the international Bosniak networks . Hence they chose a candidate who they thought could represent the interests of Muslims in Croatia, regardless of his ethnic background . According to them, the interests of Muslims in Croatia can no longer be identified with Bosniak interests in Croatia. Such identification, they reckoned, would expose the ICC to more tensions along ethnic lines . They fully supported keeping the ICBH at a distance, although not completely breaking with it. one of the “realist” Bosniak supporters of Alili, the president of the Bosniak National Community, Professor Sead Berberović, gave a lecture at the Islamic Center in Zagreb in june 2013, almost a year after the election of the new mufti. While making comments
64 This overview of Alili supporters was based, to a great extent, on conversations with Dževad jogunčić, Sead Berberović, Mirsad Srebreniković, Zlatko Hasanbegović, and Gzim Rexhepi, leading supporters of aziz alili, in Zagreb during june and july 2012. The Islamic Community in Croatia 303 about the publication of 2011 census data, Berberović noted that, according to the census, the ICC was a fully multiethnic organization, not a mainly Bosniak one, and expressed his view that this fact should be respected .65 This comment can be understood only as criticism of the ICC Bosniak position, which is, as so obviously implied by Berberović, divisive and even dangerous to the unity of the ICC . The Albanian support of Alili stemmed from a mixture of ethnic loyalty to a fellow Albanian and the desire to loosen the decade-long Bosnian grip on the ICC . Still, the Albanian Alili supporters with whom I communicated were well aware that, owing to mere numbers, there was no possibility of Albanian supremacy and that more balanced ethnic relations inside the ICC would require cooperation and partnership with Bosniaks and Muslims of other ethnicities . In May 2012, Hasanović managed to win by a narrow majority, to organize the ICC mešihat exclusively with supporters, and slowly to purge some of alili’s supporters who were employed as Croatian Islamic Community personnel 66. The fight, although bitter, seriously damaging for interpersonal relations, and marginally debilitating for the functioning of the ICC, never became public . As a result, no media made any report about internal divisions within the ICC . Nevertheless, these internal divisions continue to rock the organization: the most recent battlefield has been the Zagrebmedžlis, under the control of Alili supporters. In the elections for this body in fall 2014, however, alili has been confirmed in his role as first imam.
Conclusion
I argue that the main line of division lies in the confrontation of two different discourses among the ICC ranks: one sees Islam in Croatia primarily as part of the transnational Bosniak Islamic network with its center in Sarajevo, and stresses the centrality of traditionally Muslim Bosniak ethnicity for Islam in Croatia. The other finds its identity in the notion of Islam in Croatia and stresses its multiethnic nature . In other words, the line of division in the ICC resembles the one in Serbia, where a Bosniak ethnocentric Islam opposes a multiethnic Islam centered on belonging to the Serbian state . Yet, the level of confrontation in the Croatian case remains quite different. In contrast to the formal schism between formally established Islamic communities in Serbia, the parties that use these opposing discourses within the ICC are informal networks, almost invisible to non-insiders, but having firmly established narratives, positions, territories, memberships, leaderships, international networks of support, and important allies in Croatian political life . Owing to its informal nature, the
65 Ismet Isaković, ohrabrujući popisni rezultati, Preporodov Journal (2012), no. 152, 5–7. 66 For example, in September 2013, Mirsad Srebreniković, a leading alili supporter, had to leave his post as legal assistant . 304 Dino Mujadžević fight between the two camps remains mainly discreet, hidden from the eyes of the broader public, and mostly focused on the election process inside the ICC and administrative measures by the functionaries who belong to the one side or the other . For the time being, the controversial issues surrounding the divi- sions among Croatian Muslims on the basis of ethnic self-identification and civic loyalty to the country of Croatia do not appear in the public discourse of the ICC dignitaries and activists. In fact, since the early 1990s, the public state- ments by the ICC leadership, including sermons, have continuously avoided direct emphasis on the centrality of Bosniak ethnicity for the community, in sharp contrast to the use of Bosniak ethnic issues and the ethnonym in the discourse of the ICBH leadership during approximately the same period . The ICC leadership’s discourse, while almost exclusively in the Bosnian version of the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language, has emphasized very general Islamic themes such as Islamic solidarity, piety, and supraethnicity, or commonplaces such as the multireligious nature of Croatian society and cooperation with other religious communities and the state . Still, the future functioning of the ICC and its position in the Croatian society will depend less on the continuation of largely ethnically neutral rhetorics and more on concrete solutions for the current internal conflict. If the ICC succeeds in adapting to the increasingly changing identities of its membership and transforms itself into a genuinely multiethnic organization, it will avoid future polarization. a continuation of the conflict, which is primarily rooted in the persistence of Bosniak supremacy in the ICC, could eventually lead to disfunctionality and institutional fragmentation .