Nationalist ideologies like to anchor themselves in the distant past. In the area inhabited by South Slavs—which we will call the “Yugoslav space” for the sake of convenience—such ideologies frequently refer to the medieval kingdoms of Croatia, Serbia, or Bosnia. However, these kingdoms were less important than empires in shaping the human realities of the Yugoslav space: first the Byzantine Empire and the Venetian Empire, later the Ottoman and the Austrian empires, which became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867 (see Map I). These empires all made use of the existing confessional divisions in the Yugoslav space, while modifying them on a lasting basis. The rivalry between Constantinople and Venice mirrored the rivalry between Eastern Christianity (Orthodoxy) and Western Christianity (Catholicism). Ottoman expansion led sizable autochthonous populations to convert to Islam. And the Austrian Empire, a Catholic entity, encouraged Orthodox peasant soldiers to settle at its borders. Thus, centuries of migrations and religious conversions explain the religious diversity of the Yugoslav space. This is especially obvious in Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to large Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic communities, as well as a smaller Jewish community.
The confessional lines of demarcation in the Yugoslav space were more or less stabilized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, their persistent importance is attributable to the ties that developed between religious belonging and national belonging. Indeed, nationalist ideologies began to appear in the Yugoslav space in the early nineteenth century. In the Ottoman Empire, the Serb insurrections of 1803 and 1815, followed by the formation of the autonomous principality of Serbia in 1830 (see Map I), established the material conditions for the development of a Serb national project. In the Austrian Empire, the Illyrian Movement led by Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s was a forerunner of the Yugoslav idea: the project of uniting all South Slavic people (“Yugo-Slavs”). Yet in the first half of the nineteenth century, the nascent nationalist ideologies held sway only in limited circles of the cultural and political elites. National identification was a foreign idea to the general population, which defined itself mainly in confessional, provincial, and local terms.
Faced with the emergence of modern nation-states in Western Europe and growing social and political tensions internally, the Ottoman and Austrian Empires attempted to reform their military and administrative systems, while reorganizing their linguistic and religious diversity. In the Ottoman Empire, these modernizing reforms were symbolized by the Edict (Hatt-ı Şerif) of Gülhane of 1839 and the Imperial Reform Edict (Hatt-ı Hümayun) of 1856, which granted legal equality for Muslims and non-Muslims in the Empire, and strengthened the organization of non-Muslim populations into millets, i.e. non-sovereign religious communities that enjoyed broad autonomy in legal and educational matters. In 1867, the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after a compromise (Ausgleich) divided it into two entities with equal rights: the Austrian Empire and the kingdom of Hungary. A year later, an agreement (nagodba) gave Croatia-Slavonia limited autonomy within the kingdom of Hungary. The rivalries between South Slavic nationalisms are partly attributable to the fact that they arose from two different imperial frameworks. Over the nineteenth century, Serbia asserted its autonomy and extended its territory to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire, while also showing strong interest in the South Slavic provinces of the Austrian Empire. Alongside the principality of Serbia under Ottoman tutelage, the Vojvodina under Hungarian domination was another important hotbed of the Serb national idea. Vuk Karadžić, the main intellectual figure of Serb nationalism, considered all speakers of the Štokavian dialects to be Serbs,1 whether they were Orthodox Christian, Catholic, or Muslim. In the Austrian Empire, Bishop Josip Strossmayer and his People’s Party (Narodna stranka, founded in 1860) defended the idea of a union of South Slavic peoples, whereas Ante Starčević and his Party of Rights (Stranka prava, founded in 1861) called for the restoration of Croatia with its historical rights and were in favor of pan-Croat nationalism, claiming that the Muslims of Ottoman Bosnia were also Croats.
Map I The Yugoslav space, circa 1870.
The main nationalist ideologies of the Yugoslav space—Serb, Croat, and Yugoslav—thus developed in an area spanning two empires, and crystallized on the basis of linguistic and confessional criteria. On a linguistic level, the main nationalist actors worked for a convergence between the various Štokavian dialects. Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić both chose the Herzegovinan dialect as the reference, and the Vienna Literary Agreement signed by Serb and Croat writers in 1850 laid the foundations for a common language. However, the former called the language “Serbian,” whereas the latter called it “Croatian” or “Illyrian.”
On a confessional level, Vuk Karadžić’s pan-Serb views and Ante Starčević’s pan-Croat ideas denied that confessional belonging held any national relevance. In reality, though, Karadžić and Starčević had to recognize the strength of religion in the national identification processes. In the nineteenth century, in the regions where nationalist ideologies spread beyond the small circles they were initially confined to, Orthodoxy and the Serb national identity largely overlapped, as did Catholicism and the Croat national identity. Moreover, certain currents of Serb nationalism were characterized by strong hostility to Islam; they instrumentalized the legend of the Battle of Kosovo waged against the Ottomans in 1389, regarding local Muslims as apostates who should leave their homeland for Asia Minor as the Ottoman Empire receded. Already in this era, the linguistic criterion thus proved to be a potential unifying factor, while the religious criterion was a factor of division; this made the forming of national identities in the Yugoslav space a particularly complex, conflictual process.
Located in the heart of the Yugoslav space (see Map I), the Ottoman vilayet of Bosnia held an important place in the nascent nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth century, with Serb and Croat authors both aspiring to incorporate this province into the state that they hoped would be formed. In their eyes, Bosnian Muslims were Serbs or Croats who had converted to Islam. As Bosnian Muslims represented 42.5 percent of the Bosnian population in 1870, and Orthodox and Catholic Christians 41.7 percent, and 14.5 percent respectively, Bosnia could be presented as a majority Serb or majority Croat province, depending on whether its Muslim population was considered to be Islamicized Serbs or Croats. However, although Bosnia was the target of conflicting nationalist aspirations as early as the mid-nineteenth century, Bosnian society of the time ignored national categories. Religious intellectuals or urban notables claiming a Serb or Croat national identity were few and far between, whereas the Bosnian population continued to identify in ethno-confessional terms: “Turks” (Turci) for Muslims, “Christians” (Hrišćani), or “Greeks” (Grci) for the Orthodox, “Christians” (Kršćani) or “Latins” (Latinci) for Catholics. Furthermore, as a peripheral province of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia was resistant to Ottoman reforms. The modernization of the army faced strong resistance from the ayans (local notables), as illustrated by the revolt led by Husein-kapetan Gradaščević in 1831, and the Ottoman reforms did not begin to take effect until Ömer-paşa Latas harshly took control of the province in 1850. Among other effects, these reforms resulted in a loss of influence for the ‘ulama’ (religious scholars): Shari‘a (Islamic law) no longer applied outside family law matters, and state-managed schools were created alongside Muslim religious schools, the mektebs (elementary schools) and madrasas (advanced schools). At the same time, the first newspapers began to appear in the province, and the first modern political institutions were established, with the creation of a provincial assembly in 1865, including Muslim and non-Muslim notables.
The revolt of Bosnian ayans in the 1830s and the first attempts at formulating a provincial identity in the 1860s are often presented as early signs of a Bosnian national identity. Yet forms of affirmation of a Bosnian identity that surpassed confessional boundaries were rare, and the strong Bosnian feeling among Muslim ayans or certain Franciscan priests hardly expressed more than a feeling of regional belonging, while retaining an obvious confessional aspect. For Christians, this feeling was compatible with a Serb or Croat national identification. For Muslims, it was connected with the defense of local privileges, but did not put into question their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Against this backdrop, their use of the term “Bosniak” (Bošnjak) to describe their regional origin had no national meaning, and when the Ottoman period in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended in 1878, any national identification was still foreign to Bosnian Muslims.
In 1875, a revolt by Orthodox peasants in western Herzegovina triggered one of the most important geopolitical shifts in the Balkans. Indeed, in 1876, Serbia and Montenegro used this revolt as a pretense for declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire followed their lead a year later. The Ottoman defeat led to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when the map of the region was redrawn. Serbia and Montenegro officially became independent and enlarged their territories, while Bulgaria gained de facto independence, marking an essential step in the emergence of Balkan nation-states. Bosnia, for its part, moved from one imperial order to another: apart from the sanjak of Novi Pazar, the Bosnian vilayet was placed under Austro-Hungarian military occupation, while formally remaining under Ottoman sovereignty (see Map II). In April 1879, the Novi Pazar Agreement signed by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires reaffirmed the latter’s formal sovereignty, specifying the framework for the Austro-Hungarian occupation to occur. In particular, this agreement granted the Muslims of the Bosnian vilayet—renamed the Province of Bosnia-Herzegovina—free exercise of their religion and, more concretely, the right to maintain ties with Ottoman religious authorities, to fly Ottoman flags at mosques during religious holidays, and to hold khutbas (Friday sermons) in the Sultan’s name.
Map II The Yugoslav space from the Congress of Berlin (1878) to the Balkan Wars (1912–13).
Austro-Hungarian troops in the province initially came against armed resistance from a portion of the Muslim population. Austro-Hungarians took Sarajevo in just a few days, but they needed three months to take control of the entire province. This armed resistance reflected Muslim hostility to the idea of being subjects of a non-Muslim power. Generally speaking, however, the secular and religious Muslim elites saw the Austro-Hungarian occupation as a lesser evil, and sought to protect their own material interests. They were therefore opposed to any armed resistance, and quickly gave allegiance to the new imperial power. This did not prevent them from harboring a deep nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, or even secretly hoping to return to it.
More than armed revolt, emigration expressed the refusal of some Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina to submit to a non-Muslim power. This Muslim emigration continued throughout the Austro-Hungarian period, with peaks during moments of political tension, such as when Bosnia-Herzegovina was annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1908), ending the fictitious Ottoman sovereignty over this province. Austro-Hungarian records indicate around 65,000 departures for the Ottoman Empire between 1878 and 1914, and the estimates of 100,000 or 150,000 emigrants are therefore probably too high. This question of emigration was at the heart of the first doctrinal debate of the post-Ottoman period. Indeed, some of the ‘ulama’ presented emigration as hijra (religious emigration), and therefore a religious obligation. The Şeyh-ül-islam of Istanbul—the highest religious authority in the Ottoman Empire—even issued a fatwa (religious decree) stating this in 1887. However, several Bosnian ‘ulama’ were opposed to this interpretation, believing that it was permitted to submit to a non-Muslim power. In 1884, in particular, the mufti of Tuzla Teufik Azapagić affirmed that Bosnia-Herzegovina had not become part of dar al-kufr (the realm of the infidel), but continued to belong to dar al-islam (the realm of Islam), since Muslims could freely carry out their religious obligations. For Azapagić, Muslims therefore did not have an obligation to emigrate to Ottoman territory.2
As a result, a large majority of Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and their secular and religious elites stayed where they were, and the emigration of a minority did not threaten the Muslim community’s continued existence. However, Muslim emigration helped the Orthodox community achieve a relative majority. In 1879, according to the official census, Bosnia-Herzegovina had 1,158,164 inhabitants, of which 496,485 Eastern Orthodox (42.9 percent of the population), 448,613 Muslims (38.7 percent), 209,391 Roman Catholics (18.1 percent), and 3,426 Jews (0.3 percent). Thirty-one years later, in 1910, Bosnia-Herzegovina had 1,898,044 inhabitants, of which 825,418 were Serbo-Orthodox (43.5 percent), 612,137 Muslim (32.3 percent), 434,061 Roman Catholic (22.9 percent), 11,868 Jewish (0.6 percent), and 14,560 belonged to other confessions (0.7 percent). Thus, the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina were the first sizable Muslim community to survive the Ottoman Empire’s decline in the Balkans, as the Austro-Hungarian imperial order offered them protection that their fellow Muslims did not enjoy in the rising Balkan nation-states. As the newspaper Vatan (“Fatherland,” close to the Austro-Hungarian authorities) wrote in 1884:
If we look at the destiny of Mahometans in the various new states created in the Balkan peninsula, we must be grateful to Providence for having entrusted us to the just and wise administration of his Majesty the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, and that we can keep our faith, our customs and our goods, and at the same time gain access to everything that the creativity of these new times offers to our social life.3
Yet it was still up to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and their elites—both secular and religious—to define their place in the Province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, now separate from the Ottoman Empire.
Before addressing the political aspects of this new challenge, we must take a closer look at the social and cultural transformations triggered by the Austro-Hungarian occupation. Beginning in the 1850s, the Ottoman reforms had started to open Bosnia up to Western-inspired modernization. The Austro-Hungarian period magnified and accelerated this trend. In the span of four decades, Bosnia-Herzegovina saw major changes. Economically, the Austro-Hungarian authorities encouraged the growth of industry and banking, developed the road and railway networks, set up a modern postal service, and other public services. The civil service also experienced spectacular growth, with the number of civil servants rising from around 1,000 at the end of the Ottoman period to 14,330 in 1914. This increased state presence was also visible in the school system. Alongside religious schools that dated back to the Ottoman period, the Austro-Hungarian administration opened elementary schools (the total number of such schools rose from thirty-eight in 1880 to 401 in 1914), secondary schools for vocational training, and six high schools (gimnazije), two of which were in Sarajevo. Lastly, on a broader scale, the Austro-Hungarian period was marked by the introduction of new cultural norms from the West, ranging from town planning rules to forms of civility, and including architectural styles and dress codes.
However, this Austro-Hungarian modernization had its limitations. In many respects, the Austro-Hungarian Empire administered Bosnia-Herzegovina in a way that some have described as “quasi-colonial.”4 Thus, the proportion of civil servants native to Bosnia-Herzegovina was only 27.6 percent in 1905 and 42.2 percent in 1914. Given this composition of the civil service, until the early 1910s, German and Hungarian had official language status, alongside the vernacular. In many fields, the Austro-Hungarian administration simply standardized norms that had been established under the Ottoman Empire. This policy had important implications for land ownership. In 1910 around 87 percent of the Bosnian population earned their living from farming. However, this population was still divided into begs and agas (landowners) on the one hand, free peasants and kmets (sharecroppers) on the other. These social divisions largely corresponded to and reinforced the confessional divides in Bosnian society, as shown in Table 1. By preserving structures of landownership from the Ottoman period, the Austro-Hungarian authorities sought mainly to avoid losing support from the Muslim landowning elites. However, this approach weighed on the relations between communities and created divergences between urban centers that saw rapid modernization and rural areas that held onto old social structures.
This urban/rural divide was also visible on a cultural level. Despite the opening of elementary schools in rural areas, 87.8 percent of the Bosnian population was still illiterate in 1910, including 94.6 percent of Muslims. While the Austro-Hungarian period was undoubtedly one of modernization, this process was skewed by the way in which the Austro-Hungarian authorities based their own domination on social structures inherited from the Ottoman system. These specificities of the modernization of Bosnia-Herzegovina partially explain the behavior of the traditional Muslim elites. On the one hand, these elites sought to defend their landowning privileges, and avoided the new sectors of economic activity. In the civil services, Muslims were substantially underrepresented: in 1914, only 1,644 civil servants were Muslim, out of a total of 14,330. On the other hand, the Muslim elites were still attached to the former Ottoman imperial order, and most of them were reluctant to send their children to the new Austro-Hungarian schools. This reluctance was even greater with regard to girls, and when primary school became compulsory in 1911, the representatives of the Muslim community were granted an exemption so that this rule would not apply to Muslim girls. Hence the Muslim community showed allegiance to the new central power, while at the same time turning inward—a trend that influenced how the Muslim elites would respond to political and religious challenges during the Austro-Hungarian period.
Table 1 Confessional belonging of landowners, free peasants and kmets in Bosnia-Herzegovina according to the 1910 census.
| Orthodox | Muslim | Catholic | Total | |
| Landowners with kmet | 633 (6.0%) |
9,537 (91.1%) |
267 (2.6%) |
10,463 |
| Landowners without kmet | 760 (17.8%) |
3,023 (70.6%) |
458 (10.7%) |
4,281 |
| Free peasants (mainly) | 35,414 (25.9%) |
77,518 (56.6%) |
22,916 (16.7%) |
136,854 |
| Kmets (mainly) | 9,322 (55.0%) |
1,223 (7.2%) |
6,418 (37.8%) |
16,963 |
| Kmets | 58,895 (73.9%) |
3,653 (4.6%) |
17,116 (21.5%) |
79,677 |
Source: Srećko Džaja, Bosnien-Herzegowina in der österreichisch-ungarischen Epoche (1878–1918), Munich: Oldenbourg (1994), pp. 40–1.
In the South Slavic provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1878–1918 saw the creation of newspapers, cultural associations, and political parties that represented the various currents of Croat, Serb, and Yugoslav nationalisms. However, this situation did not yet indicate that national identities were predominant within the broader population. Even the nationalist elites showed a strong provincial bent and were divided in their strategies for allegiance with Budapest or Vienna. Moreover, as Croat and Serb national identities took shape, tensions arose that the imperial authorities used to their own advantage. However, these tensions did not put an end to the idea of a political union among the South Slavs, either through the creation of a third South Slavic entity within the Empire or—the approach favored by the most radical parties and youth movements—through a union with neighboring Serbia. In 1905, a Croat-Serb coalition was formed in Dalmatia and Croatia-Slavonia, giving renewed impetus to the idea that Croats and Serbs were in fact a single people under two different names. Thus, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of an Austro-Hungarian Empire in which national boundaries were uncertain and shifting.
In 1878, the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian Empire aimed mainly at containing the territorial expansion of Serbia. Yet the Austro-Hungarian authorities had little enthusiasm for incorporating another million South Slavs into an Empire increasingly torn apart by nationalist claims. In this context, one of the preoccupations of the Austro-Hungarian authorities was to prevent Serb and Croat nationalist ideologies from taking hold in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Benjamin von Kállay, who served as the Austro-Hungarian Minister of Finance from 1882 to 1903 and as such drove Austro-Hungarian policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, attempted to promote a provincial identity shared by all inhabitants: Bosnism (bošnjaštvo). To support his project, Kállay combined numerous repressive measures with cultural initiatives. Thus, in the 1880s, cultural associations were prohibited from using the terms “Serb” or “Croat” in their names. Beginning in 1883, the vernacular was officially called “the Bosnian language” (bosanski jezik). In 1888, a Provincial Museum (Zemaljski Muzej) was founded to lay the cultural foundations for a Bosnian provincial identity by studying and promoting the pre-Ottoman history of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its ethnographic heritage.
For his Bosnism project, Kállay relied mainly on the Catholic community (whose members did not yet identify massively with Croat nationalism) and the Muslim community (which he sought to distance from the Ottoman Empire by emphasizing its Slavic identity and pre-Ottoman roots). In reality, however, Kállay’s project only won support within a small circle of Muslim notables who favored the Austro-Hungarian policy. The figurehead of this group was Mehmed-beg Kapetanović. A former Ottoman official and member of the Ottoman parliament, Kapetanović became the main promoter of Bosnism through the newspaper Bošnjak (“The Bosniak”), which he founded in 1891. Like most Muslim notables, Kapetanović viewed the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the new protector of Bosnian Muslims. Nevertheless, for this former Ottoman official, the Austro-Hungarian occupation was also an opportunity to implement the type of modernizing reforms that had barely been sketched out before 1878, thus becoming thoroughly modern and European. He called on his fellow Muslims to break with any nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire and to accept their new situation fully:
We Mahometans of Bosnia-Herzegovina, if we work and make efforts as the current period so requires, if we learn and accept everything that does not harm our faith, then there is no doubt that our future will be better and safer.… Look around us, where we are and in what period we are living, and we shall see that we are living in the nineteenth century in the heart of Europe.5
Thus, in Kapetanović’s view, the Austro-Hungarian occupation was an opportunity to be seized, and Bosnian Muslims should take an active part in European economic and cultural modernity in order to ensure their survival in post-Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina.
However, the proponents of Bosnism were faced with the same ambiguities as the partisans of various South Slavic nationalisms. Was Bosnism meant to include all inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or even all those of the Yugoslav space, or was it reserved for the Muslim community alone? In February 1892, the newspaper Bošnjak proposed a union of South Slavs around the common name “Bosnian” (Bosanac) because:
The name Serb is closely linked to Orthodoxy, and the name Croat to Catholicism, whereas Bosnian would be a neutral ground, not connected to one or the other, and would therefore not offend the religious convictions of the first group, the second or the third.6
Yet a year and a half later, the same newspaper stated that:
Bosnism, the idea of a Bosnian people, has its roots and its foundation, hard as the heart of a stone, in the history of our homeland, and we Mahometans have always been the main representatives and bearers of this sublime idea.7
In reality, the Bosnism project came up against the hostility of the Orthodox and Catholic elites, who were increasingly influenced by Serb and Croat nationalist ideologies. Kapetanović himself had to acknowledge the obvious, and although in 1886 he proclaimed that “the Bosniak, regardless of his religion, is still attached to his nationality,”8 seven years later he stated that “in truth, some time ago our neighbors began to divide into two separate camps, based on religion; the Orthodox assert that they are Serbs, and the Catholics that they are Croats.”9 Yet the final blow came from the Muslim elites: whereas the newspaper Bošnjak argued in favor of full acceptance for Austro-Hungarian modernity and a supra-confessional provincial identity, the traditional Muslim elites remained profoundly attached to the Ottoman Empire and mobilized for autonomy for their religious institutions, as we shall see later on.
Bosnism’s failure as a political project should not overshadow its importance in creating modern identity markers for Bosnian Muslims. By seeking to justify their presence in a Central European and Christian empire, the newspaper Bošnjak linked the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the family of South Slavic peoples, promoting their pre-Ottoman past. More specifically, Bošnjak borrowed a thesis formalized by Croat historian Franjo Rački in the nineteenth century, asserting that Bosnian Muslims were descended from Bogomil heretics who had voluntarily converted to Islam when the Ottomans arrived.10 This thesis gave the Muslims a historical continuity that they had been lacking. As Bošnjak wrote in April 1892:
A great majority of us Bosnian Muslims are the descendants of the ancient Bosnian Bogomils who made up the mass of the Bosnian people, … and our ancestors realized that the Islamic faith was pure and rational, and they wanted to adopt it rather than emigrate, and we have preserved the treasure of local traditions in the best and most faithful way possible.11
The Bogomil thesis thus helped legitimize the presence of Bosnian Muslims in Europe in opposition to those, especially among the Serbs, who regarded them as “Turks” and wanted to expel them to Asia Minor for having “betrayed” the faith of their ancestors.
Bosnism did indeed sketch out the contours of a nationalist ideology, with a founding myth, an affirmation of historical continuity, and more specifically, a justification for the Islamization of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and for their presence in Europe. The related cultural productions—from the collection of Muslim epic songs published by Kosta Hörmann in 1888 to the first Bosnian grammar guide published in 1890—were later reused and expanded, and the themes raised by Bošnjak would constantly fuel debates about the national identity of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The best illustration of this cultural legacy is the case of Safvet-beg Bašagić, the son of an Ottoman official and one of the first Bosnian Muslims to study at the high school of Sarajevo and later at the University of Vienna. Bašagić was a young contributor to Bošnjak in the 1890s, quickly becoming the most influential Muslim intellectual of the Austro-Hungarian period. In his A Short Introduction to the History of Bosnia-Herzegovina, published in 1900, he repeated and expanded on the thesis of a widespread conversion of Bosnian “Bogomils” to Islam, and emphasized that Bosnian feudal elites continued to enjoy broad autonomy in Ottoman Bosnia.12 Likewise, in 1912, he published an anthology of writers from Bosnia-Herzegovina who had written in Oriental languages, thus helping build a literary corpus specific to Bosnian Muslims.13 Bašagić was thus the first to arrange the various markers of a specific Bosnian Muslim cultural identity in a systematic fashion. However, like many Muslim intellectuals of his generation, for reasons we shall see later on, he identified as Croat.
In their attempts to preserve Bosnia-Herzegovina from outside nationalist ideologies, the Austro-Hungarian authorities gave considerable importance to their control of religious institutions. Hence the Austro-Hungarian Empire signed an agreement with the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1880 and with the Vatican in 1881, allowing it to appoint the main leaders of the Orthodox and Catholic churches in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Setting up an Islamic religious hierarchy under the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s control proved more complex, as the Novi Pazar Agreement guaranteed Bosnian Muslims the right to maintain their ties with Ottoman religious authorities. In March 1882, however, the appointment by the Austro-Hungarian authorities of a Reis-ul-ulema (head of the ‘ulama’) for Bosnia-Herzegovina, advised by a four-member ulema-medžlis (council of ‘ulama’), signaled the establishment of an Islamic religious authority specifically for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and ushered in a period of reorganization for Islamic religious institutions under Austro-Hungarian tutelage. In 1883, a provisional commission for the management of waqfs (religious endowments) was tasked with identifying all existing waqfs, supervising their management, and centralizing their revenues. In 1894, this provisional commission was superseded by a Provincial Waqf Commission (Zemaljsko vakufsko povjerenstvo) with twenty-one members, and by a three-member Provincial Waqf Board (Zemaljsko vakufsko ravnateljstvo). These centralization and streamlining efforts are shown by the fact that the number of waqfs identified by the Provincial Waqf Commission rose from sixty-eight in 1878 to 250 in 1883, 622 in 1899, and 995 in 1904.
At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian authorities began a reform of the Shari‘a courts in charge of matters of personal status (family law). In 1883, a law incorporated these courts into the Austro-Hungarian judiciary, creating a Supreme Shari‘a Court (Vrhovni šerijatski sud) based in Sarajevo. Furthermore, to foster modernization of Shari‘a courts, a School for Shari‘a Judges (Šerijatska sudačka škola) opened in 1887, and several collections of Shari‘a jurisprudence were made available to judges. Lastly, the Austro-Hungarian authorities attempted to improve the system of religious schools by opening in 1893 a Muslim Pedagogy School (Muslimanska vjeroučiteljska škola), and by encouraging the opening of reformed mektebs (mekteb-i ibtidai) that used more modern teaching methods. In all, between 1879 and 1914, the number of mektebs rose from 499 to 1,436 (of which 203 reformed), and the number of madrasas from eighteen to thirty-two.
In light of this record, it may appear surprising that, from 1899 to 1909, the grievances of the traditional Muslim elites of Bosnia-Herzegovina crystallized around the issue of Islamic religious institutions. This mobilization paralleled that of Orthodox/Serb elites, who had begun demanding religious and school autonomy since 1896. The event that caused the Muslim elites to mobilize for the autonomy of Islamic religious institutions took place on May 5, 1899, when Muslim notables from Mostar convened following the conversion to Catholicism of Fata Omanović, a young Muslim girl. Following their meeting, a committee was created under the direction of Ali Fehmi Džabić, the mufti of Mostar, and tasked with presenting the Austro-Hungarian authorities with a demand for autonomy for the Islamic religious institutions of Herzegovina. In the following months, this demand was rejected, and Ali Fehmi Džabić was removed from his duties. Yet the mobilization of the Muslim elites remained strong, and in December 1900, an assembly of notables from all of Bosnia-Herzegovina met in Mostar to approve a memorandum to the Austro-Hungarian authorities.
This memorandum was something of a manifesto for the movement for autonomy of Islamic religious institutions. It began by stating that following the disappearance of the Ottoman imperial order in 1878, “the Islamic element has lost not only its dominant political and social position, but also its moral and material backing.” Then, the memorandum described the situation of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina in dramatic terms, mentioning “mosques destroyed, cemeteries overturned and sacked, the foundations of pious Muslims annihilated,” was indignant that due to Catholic proselytism, “children are being taken away from their parents, women from their husbands,” finally citing an “outcry from the people who have matured for more than four hundred years with Islam … and who now, after twenty-two years of occupation, see their religious survival threatened in the country that they defended with their bodies and washed with their blood for centuries.”14 More precisely, the memorandum denounced the Austro-Hungarian Empire for failing to respect the Novi Pazar Agreement, and the religious leaders appointed by the occupying power were accused of not properly fulfilling their functions. To resolve this situation, it presented a draft statute regarding Islamic religious institutions, whereby these would be designated by the Muslim community itself, with the Reis-ul-ulema only being allowed to take office after obtaining a menšura (accreditation) from the Şeyh-ül-islam of Istanbul.
The alarmist tone of this December 1900 memorandum may seem surprising, given the development of Islamic religious institutions and the very small number of Muslims converting to Christianity. Many historians thus view Muslim elites’ mobilization on behalf of their religious institutions as nothing more than a strategy to gain support from the Muslim population in a conflict actually aimed at preserving the landowning privileges of the begs and agas. Hence Robert Donia writes that “the Muslim activists were careful to cloak their goals in the garb of religious devotion, but their real objective was to preserve or increase their own power.”15 Yet while a substantial share of the notables involved were indeed landowners, and although agrarian claims were mixed with religious demands between 1905 and 1910, we should not conclude that the religious demands were a mere tactic.
For the Muslim community, the focus on a few cases of conversion and the description in dramatic terms of the state of religious institutions reflected a more general feeling of insecurity and decline, as the community confronted a non-Muslim political power and chose to turn inward in the face of European modernity. From this standpoint, the feelings of Muslim notables were diametrically opposed to Mehmed-beg Kapetanović’s optimism as he celebrated the opportunities made possibly by the Austro-Hungarian occupation. The demand for autonomy for Islamic religious institutions also showed the attachment of most Muslim elites to the Ottoman Empire, as illustrated by the request for a menšura from the Şeyh-ül-islam. In addition, the movement for the autonomy of Islamic religious institutions gained strength at a time when Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid was using pan-Islamism as a means to bolster his legitimacy, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire, and the Muslim notables had frequent contact with émigrés settled in Istanbul and with Ottoman authorities.
By focusing on religious demands, the Muslim elites of Bosnia-Herzegovina were inspired by the way the Ottoman Empire managed its non-Muslim millets. Unlike the Orthodox and Catholic communities, which were increasingly under the sway of Serb and Croat nationalist ideologies, the Muslim community regarded itself as a non-sovereign religious minority, trading its allegiance to the central imperial power in exchange for assurances of physical and material protection, on the one hand, and autonomous religious institutions, on the other. The movement for the autonomy of Islamic religious institutions resulted in Bosnian Muslims withdrawing into their religious identity. Significantly, in the late-nineteenth century, the Orthodox and Catholics of Bosnia-Herzegovina were increasingly referred to by the national names “Serb” and “Croat,” while the Muslims continued to be described as “Mahometans” (mohamedanci) and then, beginning in the early 1900s, as “Muslims” (muslimani). The movement for the autonomy of Islamic religious institutions, combined with its allegiance to the Austro-Hungarian imperial power, is thus an essential explanatory factor for the national indetermination of the Bosnian Muslim community, both during the Austro-Hungarian period and afterward.
Although Benjamin von Kállay also believed that the Muslim notables were mainly interested in defending their landownership privileges, he was aware of the larger stakes involved in the movement for the autonomy of Islamic religious institutions. In a letter to his representative in Sarajevo about the 1900 memorandum, he distinguished between specific demands for autonomy for waqfs and religious schools, which he considered possible to accept, and more general demands aimed at “making the Mahometans an autonomous national political unit with an administrative body, and thus a political factor equivalent to a state within the state.” Obviously, Kállay rejected the latter possibility, and recommended that his representative should avoid any action that could favor the formation of a “Mahometan political nation” (mohamedanische politische Nation).16 Moreover, Kállay was very much opposed to a rapprochement between leaders of the Muslim movement for religious autonomy and their counterparts in the Orthodox/Serb community. Therefore, the Austro-Hungarian authorities implemented repressive measures, notably banishing Ali Fehmi Džabić after he travelled to Istanbul in January 1902. The Muslim movement for religious autonomy then stagnated for several years before regaining momentum around 1905 and giving birth in 1906 to the Muslim People’s Organization (Muslimanska narodna organizacija—MNO), led by landowner Ali-beg Firdus. Soon thereafter, a new series of negotiations began between the Austro-Hungarian authorities and the MNO leaders, and a compromise slowly started to take shape. On April 15, 1909, a Statute for the Autonomous Administration of Religious Affairs, Waqfs and Islamic Schools in Bosnia-Herzegovina was adopted. This statute called for the election of the members of bodies in charge of managing waqfs and appointing the Reis-ul-ulema following a complex procedure: an electoral curia would select three candidates, then the Emperor would choose one of these as Reis-ul-ulema, and this choice would be confirmed via a menšura from the Şeyh-ül-islam. More generally, the 1909 statute officialized the transformation of the Muslim community into a non-sovereign religious community that implicitly renounced any national project of its own, and as such, this statute played an important role well beyond the Austro-Hungarian period.
As in the rest of Europe, the emergence of the intelligentsia—a new literate elite that had enjoyed a modern, secular education—was an important factor of social and cultural transformation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Despite its low level of school attendance, the Muslim community was no exception to this rule. Beginning in the 1890s, a small Muslim intelligentsia emerged in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Its members attended the high schools opened by the Austro-Hungarian authorities and went away to study in Vienna, Budapest, or Zagreb. This nascent Muslim intelligentsia initially gathered around the newspaper Bošnjak and its idea of Bosnism, then became involved in other newspapers such as Behar (“Flourishing,” 1900–11), Gajret (“Zeal,” 1906–8), or Biser (“The Pearl,” 1912–14). In 1903, it took part in the creation of the first Muslim cultural society, Gajret (“Zeal”).
Like their predecessor Mehmed-beg Kapetanović, the young intellectuals Safvet-beg Bašagić, Edhem Mulabdić, and Osman Nuri Hadžić emphasized the need for Muslims to give up their Ottoman nostalgia, to take hold of European economic and cultural modernity, and to begin by sending their children to modern schools. The first Muslim intellectuals were generally from the families of notables or Ottoman officials, but the underlying conflict between those who described themselves as “progressive Muslims” (napredni muslimani) and the rest of the Muslim community soon became quite apparent. The young Muslim intellectuals criticized the conservatism and apathy of the traditional Muslim elites, and in turn, they were accused of cutting themselves off from their own people and accepting anything that came from the occupant. Culturally, one of the stumbling blocks was the issue of language. The traditional elites were attached to the Ottoman language, as shown by the publication of an Ottoman-language weekly (Vatan—“Homeland”—from 1884 to 1897, then Rehber—“The Guide”—from 1897 to 1902). The leaders of the Muslim movement for religious autonomy also requested that the Ottoman language remain the language of Shari‘a courts and religious schools. The intellectuals, however, promoted the vernacular written in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, favored translations for religious texts written in Arabic or Ottoman Turkish, and explored new literary forms such as novels and plays. In so doing, they became key players in beginning the cultural modernization of the Bosnian Muslim community.
The conflict between the nascent Muslim intelligentsia and traditional elites was also political. The Muslim intellectuals were sympathetic to Austro-Hungarian initiatives to modernize Islamic religious institutions and kept their distance from the Muslim movement for religious autonomy, which they considered to be backward. On this topic, Bašagić wrote:
Each movement, each upheaval by Bosnian Muslims these recent times has deliberately avoided anyone who thinks with one’s head, anyone who moves along the path of progress, anyone who has absorbed some modern knowledge, anyone who can handle a pen, anyone who knows and can represent and defend Islamic interests, anyone that could help, in speech or in act, to bring order to Islamic affairs. In short, every Islamic movement has avoided the intelligentsia, viewing it askew as if it were an enemy of the people and the homeland.17
Conversely, Musavat (“Equality”), the MNO’s mouthpiece, was of the view that the educated Muslim youth:
has never shown much of a spirit of sacrifice for its oppressed people, because it has grown away from its brothers, has become what might be called too “modern”, and has sometimes shown through certain signs that it was ashamed of the traditions of its fathers, that the ideals of the people matter little to it, that it was unable to sacrifice itself for the rights of the people and to courageously defend what is sacred to it.18
The Muslim intelligentsia, having remained outside the movement for religious autonomy, nevertheless took on many religious issues, importing into Bosnia-Herzegovina some reformist authors from the Ottoman Empire (e.g. Namık Kemal, Musa Kazım, and Mehmed Akif) or other parts of the Muslim world (e.g. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Ismail Gasprinski). Borrowing the major themes of Islamic reformism, the Muslim intellectuals of Bosnia-Herzegovina denounced the taqlid (uncritical imitation) practiced by the ‘ulama’ and called for renewed ijtihad (effort at independent reasoning) intended to reconcile Islam and European modernity. Thus, in a brochure entitled The Muslim Question in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Osman Nuri Hadžić wrote that:
All the apathy, negligence, idleness, the refusal of education and progress and the fear of any “innovation”, and thus the total indolence of our people must be attributed solely to our hodžas [religious men] of all kinds and sorts. They are therefore guilty for the fact that the population is so ruined spiritually and materially.19
The secular Muslim intelligentsia thus disputed the monopoly on interpreting Islam that was held by the ‘ilmiyya (body of ‘ulama’). It launched numerous debates on the management of waqfs, the reform of Shari‘a law and religious teaching, the licitness of banking, and already at this early stage, education and work for women—a question that would become central after the First World War.
In the same vein, instead of the Ottoman pan-Islamism promoted by some leaders of the Muslim movement for religious autonomy, the reformist intellectuals supported another form of pan-Islamism, religious and modernizing in nature. Thus, in 1913, the newspaper Biser promoted pan-Islamist ideas in these terms:
The awakening that we observe today in the Islamic world is nothing other than the natural consequence of European aggressiveness, and Europe’s arrogance in the East as well as in the West. If Europe regards this awakening of Muslims as a harbinger of unity, or even as an already-achieved pan-Islamism, we proclaim that it is only a unity of ideas that tests and applies the means and conditions for today’s cultural progress, and these means are nothing more than freedom and education… So it is nothing other than a thought shared by all Muslims, borne of their aspiration to enter the concert of progressive, cultivated nations.20
For Biser, the pan-Islamist movement was therefore not an expression of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, but a way for the Muslim world to appropriate European political and cultural modernity.
During the Austro-Hungarian period, Islamic reformism remained the prerogative of secular intellectuals who, as such, had only a limited influence on religious institutions. A majority of the ‘ulama’ were still holding fast to conservative stances. Nevertheless, during this period, one atypical figure appeared who would play a crucial role in the changes that would affect Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Džemaludin Čaušević.
Having studied law in Istanbul and discovered Muhammad Abduh’s reformist ideas while in Cairo, Čaušević was partway between the ‘ilmiyya and the secular intelligentsia. Thus, he took part in the founding of the cultural society Gajret in 1903, became a member of the ulema-medžlis in charge of teaching issues in 1905, was editor in chief of the newspaper Behar in 1906–7, and founded the Organization of the ‘Ilmiyya in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1912. During the Austro-Hungarian period, Čaušević’s main combat was to promote the vernacular written in the Arabic alphabet (arebica) because in his view, Arabic writing must remain the shared writing of all Muslims in the world. Čaušević published several newspapers written in arebica, in which he translated many reformist authors. However, although arebica textbooks were introduced in the mektebs in 1912, arebica failed to assume a lasting place alongside the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, and its usage would decline and disappear during the interwar period. Nevertheless, Čaušević’s intellectual and institutional influence persisted, and he was appointed Reis-ul-ulema in October 1913.
More generally, the nascent Muslim intelligentsia was unable to pose a serious challenge to the traditional elites. Nevertheless, it laid the first milestones for cultural modernization in the Muslim community by imposing the use of the vernacular in writing and by spreading Islamic reformist ideas. Lastly, as another important consequence of the Muslim intelligentsia’s activism, the term “Turk” was no longer used to refer to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Seeking to return to an Islam purified of its Ottoman “dross,” intellectuals such as Osman Nuri Hadžić were opposed to the use of the name “Turk”—in a religious sense—and the expression “Turkish faith” (turska vjera), as well as the term “Mahometan” (mohamedanac) introduced by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. For these intellectuals, these terms were in contradiction with the very essence of Islam, and they preferred the terms “Muslim” (musliman) and “Islamic faith” (islamska vjera). The Austro-Hungarian authorities officially approved the term “Muslim” in 1902 and used it in the population census of 1910. However, at a time when the national denominations “Serb” and “Croat” were increasingly used in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the fact that a religious term became the main term for identifying the Muslim community highlights how it was reduced to the status of a non-sovereign religious minority that had implicitly renounced any national project of its own. Hence the emergence of the name “Muslim” cannot be understood without taking account of the attitude of the intelligentsia and the traditional elites towards the issue of the national identity of Bosnian Muslims.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the mobilization of the Orthodox/Serb and Muslim communities for their religious and school autonomy caused Benjamin von Kállay’s idea of Bosnism to gradually be abandoned. In 1903, Kállay died. The arrival of his successor, Baron István von Burián, marked a major turning point in the policy of the Austro-Hungarian authorities, who began to encourage Bosnian society to organize along communitarian lines. Significantly, the Austro-Hungarian authorities renamed the vernacular “the Serbo-Croatian language” (srpskohrvatski jezik) in 1907. At the same period, cultural societies were formed for the various communities: Serb (Prosvjeta—“Education”), Muslim (Gajret—“Zeal”), Croat (Napredak—“Progress”), and Jewish (La Benevolencia—“Benevolence”). Political parties were formed to represent the three main communities of the province: the MNO was created in 1906, with the Serb People’s Organization (Srpska narodna organizacija—SNO), and the Croat People’s Union (Hrvatska narodna zajednica—HNZ) following a year later. Lastly, in 1909, a clerical group led by the Archbishop of Sarajevo, Josip Stadler, created a second Croat party, the Croat Catholic Association (Hrvatska katolička udruga—HKU). In 1913, communitarianism’s hold on the modernizing Bosnian society was reflected in the fact that, out of 833 associations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 227 were Serb, 167 Croat, and 139 Muslim. However, the finishing touch to this communitarianism came in 1910 with the adoption of the provincial constitution, just two years after its annexation to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This constitution gave Bosnia-Herzegovina consociational institutions:21 the seats of the new provincial parliament were divided up along a strict communitarian basis (thirty-six Orthodox, thirty Muslims, twenty-three Catholics, and three Jews), and twenty of ninety-two seats were reserved for unelected members, namely religious dignitaries or local notables. In 1910, the first parliamentary elections heralded a victory for the three major communitarian parties: the SNO won thirty-one of the seats reserved for Orthodox deputies, MNO twenty-four of the seats reserved for Muslims, and the HNZ twelve of the seats reserved for Catholics, with the remaining four going to the HKU. However, the communitarianism of Bosnian political life was neither total nor rigid. On the one hand, some political forces sought to go beyond communitarian divisions, including the Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratska partija—SDP) created in 1909, or the semi-clandestine organizations that appeared in the 1910s among the student population, who were close to socialist and anarchist ideas and favored a union of South Slavs.22 On the other hand, in the provincial parliament elected in 1910, the parliamentary groups of the three main communitarian parties quickly broke into rival factions participating in increasingly complex government coalitions.
For the Orthodox and Catholic communities, the growing communitarianism of social and political life went hand in hand with the crystallization of the Serb and Croat national identities. Yet no similar process occurred in the Muslim community. Indeed, many historians emphasize that in the Austro-Hungarian period and even later, a large majority of Bosnian Muslims did not identify in terms of nationality, and the few who did sometimes changed their national identification over their lifetime. Most often, this national indetermination is explained either in terms of political opportunism, with the emphasis being placed on the complex itineraries of certain intellectuals or political leaders, or in terms of proto-nationalism, where the simple fact of not identifying as Serb or Croat is interpreted as the sign of an underlying Muslim national identity. Historian Robert Donia combines these two approaches when he writes: “Thus the declarations [of nationality] were mostly tactical and political in character; some Muslims changed from one camp to the other on several occasions. Simply stated, a separate Muslim identity was too advanced to be easily renounced by any significant number of Bosnian Muslims.”23 However, while there was indeed a strong feeling of belonging to the Muslim community during the Austro-Hungarian period, this feeling was simply not a national one. The essential question is thus not to know who in this community identified as Serb or Croat, but who considered national identity to be a pertinent category. Yet from this standpoint, a deep, lasting divide separated the nascent Muslim intelligentsia from the traditional Muslim elites and, furthermore, the rest of the Muslim community.
For the Muslim intellectuals, national identity was an indispensable part of political and cultural modernity. This conception can be found, for example, in the brochure On the Nationalization of Muslims published on the eve of the First World War by Šukrija Kurtović, a student with ties to the cultural society Gajret. In this brochure, the author regrets that “our people are still in the shadows of religious fanaticism and ignorance. They do not know and cannot conceive what a national community is. They only know the religious [community].”24 In Kurtović’s view, this withdrawal into religious identity created the risk of turning Bosnian Muslims into “Muslim Jews,”25 namely, a religious minority stripped of any political power. Yet Kurtović—and this is a feature he shared with all Muslim intellectuals of the Austro-Hungarian period—was not in favor of forming a nation specifically for Bosnian Muslims:
Separating into a distinct group, being only Muslims, fighting only for our specific “Muslim interests”, would mean creating in Bosnia-Herzegovina a new political nation, a Muslim one. This would mean defying and turning against us the entire Serb and Croat nation[s], it would mean that we would really become this “insolent parasite” in the body of the other. Naturally, they would all rise up together against us, and they would surely annihilate us, for we have neither the numerical strength nor the cultural strength for such a combat.26
Kurtović thus shared the feelings of insecurity and weakness that existed in the Bosnian Muslim community, but far from calling for the community to turn inward and accept a non-sovereign and protected minority status, he recommended a rapprochement with Christian South Slavs and, even more specifically, opting for “a pure, complete nationalism, and this is Serb [nationalism] today.”27
Muslim intellectuals shared this common principle—adhering to the principle of nationalism while refusing a national identity limited to Bosnian Muslims alone—but then separated into two camps, with partisans of a Croat national identification on the one hand, and partisans of a Serb national identification on the other. This divide within the Muslim intelligentsia made it even more isolated and powerless, and may have prevented it from playing the role that nationalism theories attribute to the intelligentsia in the gestation of national identities. However, this divide was not a mere question of opportunism: while there were changes in national identification over time, these were mainly due to the fact that the contours of Serb and Croat nationalisms were not set in stone during the Austro-Hungarian period, and the hopes for emancipation of the South Slavs alternated between creating a South Slavic entity within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and expanding Serbia to the detriment of the Empire. Apart from the wide range of individual trajectories, there were some generational phenomena affecting the national identification of Muslim intellectuals. As Robert Donia notes, “more Muslims declared themselves as Croats prior to the turn of the [twentieth] century. They tended to be young intellectuals schooled in Zagreb, Vienna, or elsewhere in the Monarchy. After 1900 more declared themselves Serbs, probably drawn by the magnetic military and political successes of independent Serbia.”28 Safvet-beg Bašagić can be regarded as the main representative of the first generation, while Šukrija Kurtović is representative of the second.
The attitude of the traditional Muslim elites towards the national question contrasted sharply with that of the intelligentsia. Indeed, among the traditional representatives of the Bosnian Muslim community, the dominant feeling toward the national question was either indifference (without ruling out a tactical usage of Serb or Croat national identifications), or a deeper reticence to be included in one of these categories. For example, reacting to the interminable parliamentary debates on whether the vernacular of Bosnia-Herzegovina should be called Serbian or Croatian, Member of Parliament Derviš-beg Miralem wrote in 1911:
Although some of our young people have sympathies with one or the other party on this question, I am convinced that the large majority of our people is indifferent to the matter, as they feel themselves to be simply Muslims, and for this reason alone, this subject should not be decided by [Muslim] members of parliament whose electors feel no need to think about or decide on this question. My stance, to tell the truth, is that this question must be resolved by the Serbs and Croats, and I declare beforehand that I will enthusiastically support any mutual agreement, assuming that it is not achieved at the price of significant concessions on an economic or other level.29
This quote shows how Bosnian Muslims’ withdrawal into their status as a non-sovereign, protected minority went hand in hand with their national indetermination, while also giving their political representatives certain possibilities for political bargaining and tactical alliances. Moreover, at the end of the Austro-Hungarian period, the opposition between Muslim intellectuals and traditional Muslim elites on the very principle of national identification did not prevent the two sides from coming together to demand autonomy for Bosnia-Herzegovina. But what exactly did this demand mean?
In the early 1900s, the question of autonomy for Bosnia-Herzegovina was one of the subjects of disagreement between the traditional Muslim elites and the nascent intelligentsia. During that period, the leaders of the Islamic religious autonomy movement were allied with the Orthodox/Serb elites, who were also fighting for their own religious and school autonomy. Together, they demanded that “Bosnia and Herzegovina shall obtain autonomy under the supreme authority of their sovereign the Sultan,” after which “the people shall, of its own free will, define the internal order of the province.”30 The nascent Muslim intelligentsia was mainly in favor of the Austro-Hungarian occupation and a Croat national identification. It therefore denounced this project for autonomy as a sign of the traditional elites’ nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and as a ruse by the Orthodox/Serb elites to make it easier for Serbia to annex Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the other. To counter the MNO, and with the support of wealthy merchant Adem-aga Mešić, the pro-Croat intellectuals created the Muslim Progressive Party (Muslimanska napredna stranka—MNS) in August 1908. In its program, the MNS rejected any idea of autonomy under Ottoman sovereignty, and stated that it would use every means available to oppose Bosnia-Herzegovina being attached to Serbia or any other Balkan state. Barely a month later, the MNS leaders approved the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whereas the MNO leaders vigorously denounced it. The conflict between the pro-Croat Muslim intelligentsia and the traditional Muslim elites was at a peak. Precisely during this period, the MNO took control of the Muslim cultural society Gajret away from the pro-Croat intelligentsia, placing pro-Serb poet Osman Đikić in charge.
However, over the following years, several factors led to a gradual rapprochement between the MNO and the MNS, which was renamed the Muslim Independent Party (Muslimanska samostalna stranka—MSS) in 1910. On the one hand, the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina—which the MNO finally acknowledged in February 1910—made the plans for autonomy under Ottoman sovereignty obsolete. On the other, the religious and school autonomy awarded to the Orthodox/Serb community in 1905 and the Muslim community in 1909 halted the convergences around their demands for cultural and religious autonomy. Lastly, in the May 1910 parliamentary elections, the MNO won a landslide victory, with all twenty-four seats reserved for Muslim deputies. The conditions for a vast political shakeup had been brought together. Hence the MNO and the MSS merged in August 1911 to form the United Muslim Organization (Ujedinjena muslimanska organizacija—UMO), and the Muslim deputies formed an alliance with Croat deputies in the provincial parliament. Within this context, the Croat deputies supported a law giving kmets the option of buying the land they farmed, whereas a majority of Serb deputies wanted to make such purchases mandatory. In turn, the Muslim deputies supported a law that described the vernacular as “Croatian or Serbian,” whereas the Serb deputies wanted the term “Serbian” to appear first. This shift from a Serbo-Muslim coalition in the 1900s to a Croato-Muslim one in the early 1910s illustrates how the Muslim political representatives’ national indetermination gave them possibilities for political bargaining, and heralded the changing alliances throughout the interwar period.
The formation of a Croato-Muslim coalition in 1911 did not prevent Muslim politicians from continuing to insist on autonomy for Bosnia-Herzegovina. This demand, which was increasingly becoming the common denominator for all political representatives of the Muslim community, is presented by some historians as a form of Muslim proto-nationalism. But through this demand, Muslim politicians were not seeking to grab as much power as possible from the Empire, but to place their community under its direct protection to compensate for their relative demographic weakness in Bosnia-Herzegovina and within the larger Yugoslav space. From this point of view, the demand for the autonomy of Bosnia-Herzegovina was the expression of a “search for empire.” Indeed, we must not forget that the Muslim community at the time was smaller than the Serb community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and too much autonomy for this province could result in it being annexed by Serbia, similar to the way that Bulgaria had annexed the province of Eastern Rumelia in 1885. Conversely, if Bosnia-Herzegovina were to be absorbed into a political entity grouping together all the South Slavic provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the relative weight of the Muslim community would shrink. This fear of demographic marginalization contributed to a more general feeling of insecurity and decline that characterized the Muslim community. Thus, the UMO newspaper wrote in 1911 that “with the attachment of Bosnia-Herzegovina to any other part of the current Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Muslims would be entirely lost, they would become a quantity that each party could neglect or despise.”31 Opposed to the Croato-Muslim coalition, independent deputy Derviš-beg Miralem attributed his stance to his fear that the Muslims would be marginalized politically if Bosnia-Herzegovina merged with Croatia. In his view, “We Muslims would, in a unified Croatia, become a minority doomed to disappear, in much the same way that the Jews are in our current parliament.”32 Here again, the Jewish community was used as the negative example of a marginalized religious community, albeit in a period when the idea of a Jewish nation was beginning to emerge. The Muslim political leaders’ emphasis on the autonomy of Bosnia-Herzegovina thus coincided with a search for a direct, lasting link to the imperial center, and with a demand for imperial protection. From this standpoint, at least during the Austro-Hungarian period, the demand for autonomy for Bosnia-Herzegovina should not be regarded as a form of Muslim proto-nationalism, but rather as one of the ways in which the Muslim community expressed its allegiance to the imperial power.
The “call for empire” by the Bosnian Muslim elites explains the difficulties they faced confronting the crisis of the imperial order and the rise of nationalisms in the run-up to the First World War. In 1912, the Balkan Wars initially pitted the Ottoman Empire up against Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, before setting the Balkan states against one another. These wars ended with the Ottoman Empire being kicked out of the Balkan peninsula (see Map II). At the time, the UMO showed its support for the Ottoman Empire, appealing to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to provide assistance, while some Bosnian Muslims volunteered to fight in the Ottoman army. A smaller number of young Muslim intellectuals joined the ranks of the Serbian army. The partition of the sanjak of Novi Pazar between Serbia and Montenegro, followed by numerous exactions, sparked strong reactions among the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. More generally, the Balkan Wars killed all hopes of the province returning to the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the rise of Yugoslav sentiment within the Austro-Hungarian Empire fostered new political realignments. In the Bosnian provincial parliament, the language question was finally resolved in 1913, with a consensus being reached around the term “Serbo-Croatian” and equal treatment for the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. In summer 1913, a new governmental coalition was formed with the Muslim deputies, the Croat deputies and some Serb deputies. Together, they asserted that “the Serbs and Croats are one people with two different names, equal in rights,” and “in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbs, the Croats and the Muslims are of one blood and have one official language, Serbo-Croatian.”33 In an uncertain international context, the newspaper Biser wrote:
We belong, through our language, to this Slavic group of around ten million souls. It is a tribe [including] the Serbs, and the Croats, and us the Bosniaks. One people, but three names, as well as three religions. But no matter how many names there are, it changes nothing. It is a single people. And regarding the other components, our compatriots, we must maintain ties of sympathy with our fellow countrymen and love with our fellow citizens. Our house is united. If it catches fire—God forbid—we will all suffer the damage.34
On June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo, however, the young Serb Gavrilo Princip, a member of the revolutionary organization Mlada Bosna (“Young Bosnia”) shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, acting in the name of South Slavic unity and sparking a fire that would engulf the entire European continent.