Empire, Nation, and the Islamic World: Bosnian Muslim Reformists between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 1901-1914 Harun Buljina Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Harun Buljina All rights reserved ABSTRACT Empire, Nation, and the Islamic World: Bosnian Muslim Reformists between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 1901-1914 Harun Buljina This dissertation is a study of the early 20th-century Pan-Islamist reform movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, tracing its origins and trans-imperial development with a focus on the years 1901-1914. Its central figure is the theologian and print entrepreneur Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević (1870-1938), who returned to his Austro-Hungarian-occupied home province from extended studies in the Ottoman lands at the start of this period with an ambitious agenda of communal reform. Čaušević’s project centered on tying his native land and its Muslim inhabitants to the wider “Islamic World”—a novel geo-cultural construct he portrayed as a viable model for communal modernization. Over the subsequent decade, he and his followers founded a printing press, standardized the writing of Bosnian in a modified Arabic script, organized the country’s Ulema, and linked these initiatives together in a string of successful Arabic-script, Ulema-led, and theologically modernist print publications. By 1914, Čaušević’s supporters even brought him to a position of institutional power as Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Reis-ul-Ulema (A: raʾīs al-ʿulamāʾ), the country’s highest Islamic religious authority and a figure of regional influence between two empires. Methodologically, the project functions on two primary levels. The first is a close reading of the reform movement’s multilingual and multi-scriptural periodical press and publishing scene, situating this fin-de-siècle Muslim print culture in its late imperial and trans-regional context. The second is a prosopographical approach to the polyglot generation of writers and theologians who stood behind it, emphasizing networks of collaboration, education, and kinship that tied them both to the wider world and previous generations of Bosnian scholars. The dissertation ultimately argues that Čaušević and his movement emerged from and represented a locally grounded tradition of Muslim cosmopolitan reform, which insisted on religious instruction in the Bosnian vernacular not at the expense of the classical languages of higher Islamic learning or the Ottoman (and later Habsburg) imperial order, but rather as a foundation that would enable Muslims to pursue the former and buttress the latter as well. In making this case, the project contributes to the wider historiography on empires and nationalism in Eastern and Southeast Europe, reconsidering the role of multilingualism in imperial demise and moving beyond the prevailing top-down focus on Muslims and other ethno-religious minorities as beleaguered subjects of nationalizing states. At the same time, it serves as a Bosnian case study for outstanding concerns in global Islamic intellectual history, arguing that the late and post-Ottoman Balkans played an active and underappreciated role in the formation of transnational Pan-Islamist thought during the late imperial period. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................................... iv DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................................ ix Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1 Survey of Existing Literature ..................................................................................................................... 6 Čaušević and Bosnian Pan-Islamism within Southeastern European History ........................................... 13 Čaušević and Bosnian Pan-Islamism within the “Islamic World” ............................................................. 19 Dissertation Structure and Chapter Summaries ....................................................................................... 27 Chapter 1: Vernacular Cosmopolitans in the Muslim West: Bosnian Pedagogical Vernacularization and the Genealogies of Islamic Reform in the 19th Century Balkans ......................................................................... 32 1.1. Revolutionary Vernaculars ............................................................................................................... 36 1.2. Tanzimat from Below ...................................................................................................................... 53 1.3. 1878: Rupture and Continuity ......................................................................................................... 66 Chapter 2: Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević: Bosnian Pan-Islamism and the Discovery of the Islamic World, 1901-1908 .................................................................................................................................................. 88 2.1. Background and Intellectual Roots through 1903 ............................................................................. 92 2.2. Return, Reception, and Collaboration with Progressives, 1903-1907 .............................................. 110 2.3. Script, Print, and Ulema Organizing through 1908 ........................................................................ 134 Chapter 3: Bosnia’s Constitutional Revolution: Pan-Islamist Students between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 1908-1914 ................................................................................................................................. 154 3.1. Educational Entanglement on the Eve of Revolution ...................................................................... 157 3.2. The 1908 Revolution and its Consequences ................................................................................... 162 3.3. The Way and the Righteous Path ................................................................................................... 176 3.4. Reciprocal Promotion .................................................................................................................... 188 3.5. Pan-Islamist Constitutionalism ...................................................................................................... 208 Chapter 4: The Lay Literati: Islamic Reform and Print Cosmopolitanism in the Journal Biser, 1912-1914 223 4.1. State Studies Between Istanbul and Vienna .................................................................................... 226 4.2. The Biser Authors: Bosnia’s Last Ottoman Generation? ................................................................. 233 4.3. The Influence of Čaušević’s Pan-Islamist Reform Movement ......................................................... 247 4.4. Fin-de-siècle Pan-Islamists: Biser’s Editorial Line ............................................................................ 258 4.5. Ideological Fault Lines: the National and Woman Questions in Biser ............................................. 266 4.6. Circulations and Translations: Biser Between “Europe” and the “Islamic World” ........................... 274 i Epilogue ................................................................................................................................................... 284 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 296 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Intellectual Network of Bosnian reformist Ulema, 1863-1934 ....................................................... 74 Figure 2: Portrait of Čaušević, c. 1914. ......................................................................................................... 90 Figure 3: Intellectual network chart of Bosnia’s 19th century reformist Ulema from chapter one, modified to highlight Čaušević's place therein as well as potential link to Ahmed Cevdet Pasha. ..................................... 98 Figure 4: The Islamic Shareholders’ Printing Press in Sarajevo c. 1907. ...................................................... 125 Figure 5: Header for the inaugural Turkish secftion of Behar, May 1st, 1906. ............................................. 127 Figure 6: Čaušević's network of collaborators in pre-1914 Arebica print ventures ....................................... 141 Figure 7: Front page of Tarik's first issue, June 1st, 1908. ........................................................................... 147 Figure 8: Major Bosnian Muslim political and ideological factions in 1908 on the eve of the Revolution ... 164 Figure 9: Founders of the Muallim and Imam Society for Bosnia-Herzegovina c. 1909 .............................. 183 Figure 10: Portraits of three of Čaušević’s young collaborators gathered around his Arebica periodicals ...... 185 Figure 11: Timeline of the major Bosnian-language Muslim periodicals active from January 1st, 1908 to July 1st, 1914 ...................................................................................................................................................