From 1990 to 1995, the affirmation of political sovereignty for the Muslim/Bosniak nation went hand in hand with considerable changes in its national identity. Already in the months leading up to the outbreak of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the SDA sought to give the Muslim nation the national symbols it was lacking. During the 1990 electoral campaign, it promoted a national flag with two horizontal green stripes on top and bottom and a green crescent in the middle of a white background to symbolize Islam, a layout that was strongly reminiscent of the Israeli flag (a blue star of David on a white background, surrounded by two horizontal blue stripes). The Muslim national flag was visible at all the party’s electoral meetings. A year later, during its first convention in November 1991, the SDA unveiled an anthem for the Muslim nation, written by Džemaludin Latić and entitled “I Am Your Son” (“Ja sin sam tvoj”). In both cases, these new symbols were supposed to show that the Muslims had become a nation in their own right, and were chosen by the SDA, which positioned itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Muslim nation.
Alongside this symbolic production, the SDA began to set up the Muslim national institutions that some intellectuals had been demanding since the 1970s. These institutions were given the responsibility of continuing the “national affirmation” that had begun during the communist period. Preporod, the Muslim cultural society dissolved in 1949, was revived on October 5, 1990. At this occasion, its president Muhsin Rizvić stated:
For forty years until today, we have been the only nation, not only in the Yugoslav community of nations but also in Europe, not to have cultural autonomy, not to have its own cultural institutions and thus [the only nation] with a literature that is disputed, a language which in Yugoslav linguistics does not have the right to [be called by] its traditional name, much less to contribute to the shared vocabulary, a history repressed by historical guilt and a “Turkish [inferiority] complex”, [and] a culture accused of interrupting the development of intellectual life in Bosnia.1
Preporod regarded itself as the central venue for elaborating the Muslim national identity, and focused its initial efforts on formalizing a Bosnian language, publishing an anthology of Muslim literature, and drafting new school curricula. Muhsin Rizvić, a former Young Muslim who had a university career during the communist period, also viewed the society he presided over as a unifying factor for the Muslim intellectual elite, who were divided between a secular intelligentsia and religious ‘ilmiyya. In particular, Rizvić believed that the intelligentsia was characterized by an “inferiority complex verging on self-denial,” but the end of communism would give it the opportunity to be “decontaminated” and to “get closer to the people.”2 As a matter of fact, most of the intellectuals that had participated in the “national affirmation” during the communist period joined Preporod, contributing in their own way to the reconfiguration of the Muslim elite triggered by the end of the communist regime. Some intellectuals trained during the communist era—such as historians Atif Purivatra and Mustafa Imamović or literature professors Alija Isaković, Enes Duraković, and Munib Maglajlić—even played a decisive role in Preporod. However, not all Muslim intellectuals answered this rallying call. In particular, several Muslim members of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia-Herzegovina kept their distance from Preporod, which they regarded as a communitarian and partisan institution.
The creation of Muslim national institutions linked to the SDA went beyond the cultural sphere. Following the November 1990 elections, other similar organizations were founded, such as the charity Merhamet (“Mercy”), whose national chairman was Edah Bećirbegović, a former Young Muslim. Beginning in 1991, these various organizations helped found other more political national institutions, such as the Muslim National Council of Sandžak in May 1991 or the National Defense Council created a month later. Presided over by Alija Izetbegović, the National Defense Council brought together the SDA members of parliament and the leaders of Preporod and Merhamet, as well as various Muslim intellectuals and notables; it was in charge of supervising the military preparations of the Muslim nation. In affirming the political sovereignty of the Muslim nation, the SDA thus created parallel institutions whose members were coopted by the party leaders, but that claimed to express the political will of all Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and thus threatened the legitimacy of Bosnian state institutions. This ambivalent relationship between Muslim national institutions and Bosnian state institutions became fully apparent after war broke out in April 1992. Bosnia-Herzegovina’s independence went hand in hand with the promotion of new state symbols, and on May 4, 1992, the Bosnian Collegial Presidency adopted a new Bosnian flag, showing a blue shield with six gold fleurs de lys, all on a white background; the fleur de lys symbolized the ties between the medieval kingdom of Bosnia and the house of Anjou. Some confusion arose between the symbols of the Bosnian state and Muslim national or religious symbols. For several months, the units of the Patriotic League and the nascent ARBiH hesitated between the Bosnian shield and more specifically Muslim symbols such as the crescent and star or a Qur’an flanked by two swords. The song “I am Your Son” was used as the unofficial national anthem throughout the war, with an official anthem only being adopted a few weeks before the signing of the Dayton Agreement.
Because of the war, it became simultaneously more complex and more necessary to form national Muslim institutions. Territories under ARBiH control were isolated from one another and affected by powerful centrifugal forces, as shown by the great autonomy enjoyed by the social-democratic city council of Tuzla, the rising tension between the SDA’s national leadership and some political and religious notables in Mostar or, in 1993, the secession led by Fikret Abdić in Cazinska Krajina. To prevent localism from gaining sway, a Coordination Committee of the Muslim Institutions was created on May 17, 1992, grouping together representatives of the SDA, Preporod, Merhamet, and the Islamic Community. Seven month later, on December 22, 1992, a Congress of Bosnian Muslim Intellectuals met in Sarajevo. This convention adopted several resolutions denouncing Serb crimes, rejecting plans to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina, and reasserting the existence of the Muslim nation as an “autochthonous European nation within the borders of the former Bosnian paşalık”,3 “elevated by Islam” and having “its own Bosnian (Bosniak) language.”4 The convention called on the intelligentsia to support the war effort and elected a Council of the Congress of Bosnian Muslim Intellectuals, presided by Alija Isaković and in charge of defining the interests of the Muslim nation in the war circumstances. This process of forming representative institutions for the Muslim nation culminated on September 27, 1993 with the opening of the Bošnjački sabor (Bosniak Assembly), which brought together the main political, military, religious, and intellectual representatives of the Muslim nation, at the very time that Fikret Abdić was seceding in Cazinska Krajina. A 1995 brochure from the ARBiH even stated that the Bošnjački sabor was “the equivalent for Bosniaks of the World Jewish Congress for Jews.”5
The Bošnjački sabor acted as a kind of informal parliament of the Muslim nation, and thus appeared to embody its political sovereignty. Therefore, it is no surprise that this assembly, while rejecting the Owen–Stoltenberg Plan, decided to abandon the “Muslim” national name in order to “give our nation its historical and national name, ‘Bosniak’, thus to link ourselves closely to our country Bosnia, its continuity as a state and legal entity, to our Bosnian language, and to the entire spiritual tradition of our history.”6 More generally, 1993 was the year that clearly revealed the will of the Muslim political, cultural, and religious elites to affirm their nation’s political sovereignty and to establish it as a “political nation” (politički narod). Thus, in his opening address to the Bošnjački sabor, Alija Isaković emphasized that since 1878, Muslims had been “marginalized as a political nation, physically and materially annihilated, their culture despised, their religion vilified as an Asian-Islamic residue,” and still during the communist era, formed “the only nation in Europe without national institutions, with a political elite made up of apatrides and cowards, with political repression against our religious and secular intelligentsia, with no right to our national name, to our language, our literature, our customs or our faith.”7
To affirm the political sovereignty of the Muslim/Bosniak nation, its leaders had not only to promote the various symbols of its identity, but also to fight the centrifugal forces that threatened it. In his speech to the Bošnjački sabor, Isaković thus attacked local and regional particularisms, social and cultural divisions, immediate and selfish interests that, in his view, threatened the unity of the Muslim nation. Over the following months, criticism of the “pre-political” nature of the Muslim nation was expressed in many calls to reject “good neighborliness” (komšiluk) with Serbs and Croats, preferring “komšiluk among Bosniak-Muslims”,8 to look beyond one’s own backyard (avlija) to build the state (država), to cease being a “charitable nation” (merhametli narod) and become a “sovereign nation” (državotvorni narod, literally, “state-creating”). This nationalization of Muslims/Bosniaks, i.e. their transformation into a political nation conveying ambitions of statehood, is emphasized by the fact that, at the same period, Fikret Abdić’s partisans rejected the national name “Bosniak” and continued to call themselves “Muslims.” Speaking of them, Izetbegović stated:
The Muslims have become a political and sovereign nation [državotvoran] and this is an attempt to bring us back fifty years, to divide us into several tribes again, and there will be a Krajina tribe, and a Tuzla tribe, and lastly, a Sarajevo tribe.9
Asserting the Bosniak nation as a political nation meant going beyond centrifugal forces unleashed by the war, and was indissociable from the re-establishment of the Bosnian state begun by Prime Minister Haris Silajdžić in October 1993. Over the following months, Silajdžić re-unified the monetary and fiscal system, named four ministers in charge of regional coordination, nationalized public companies, and scaled back the powers of municipalities. Yet local and regional particularisms remained strong, as shown by the regional sabors (assemblies) held to represent the displaced populations of Eastern Bosnia, Bosanska Krajina, and Posavina. In addition, the creation in March 1994 of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, divided into eight cantons, gave these regional particularisms a new institutional basis. In this context, the army remained the main means for the nationalization of Muslims/Bosniaks. It underwent substantial centralization during the conflict, and its units—initially built by local strongmen or criminal gangs—gradually became disciplined, mobile units. From defending a village or a neighborhood, the army moved on to liberating the country. Even more than the national institutions created between 1990 and 1993, the ARBiH thus became the true birthplace of the Bosniak nation, promoting the new Bosniak national identity through the newspapers and brochures aimed at soldiers. It even published a history of Bosnia-Herzegovina intended for officer training, written by historians close to Preporod.10
Although the transformation of the Bosniak nation into a political nation received virtually unanimous support, the simultaneous reconfiguration of its national identity was much more fragile and controversial. Even the “Bosniak” national name was accepted with some reluctance. Barely three years after its first partisans had been excluded from the SDA, it was adopted by the Bošnjački sabor, a fact that attests to how quickly the Muslim/Bosniak nation saw its identity evolve. Yet this shift can chiefly be attributed to a change of heart of intellectuals involved in the communist-era “national affirmation”, who were still defending the national name “Muslim” in 1990. Their move to support the name “Bosniak” three years later is attributable to their desire to strengthen the ties binding the Muslim/Bosniak nation to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and to bolster its international legitimacy. Similar reasons led Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, a strong opponent to the national term “Bosniak” in 1990, to become one of its fervent defenders, while opposing plans to partition Bosnia-Herzegovina. But what about members of the pan-Islamist current, who were then tempted by the idea of a small Muslim nation-state? All evidence indicates that they came to support the national name “Bosniak” belatedly, due to the necessities of their national and international environment. In April 1993, Adnan Jahić—a leading pan-Islamist activist in Tuzla—was still denouncing the name “Bosniak” as “an attempt to redefine the Muslim nationality solely in Bosnian territorial categories, and to minimize the historical and religious aspects that transcend [them].”11 Six months later, Džemaludin Latić described the abandoning of the “Muslim” national name as a “sad separation”:
Oh, Lord! The Bosniaks will become a European nation, not only in a geographical sense but also in a cultural sense, a big, ugly copy, with a European lifestyle, a European neglect of God, religious and even moral indifference … Yes, we must become Bosniaks, which is what we are of course, if we want to survive in our own state! But in the future? Won’t there come a time of post-nationalism, when living faith, and not the dead nation, will determine our way of life?12
To a large extent, the members of the pan-Islamist current thus accepted the national name “Bosniak” without enthusiasm. However, this did not prevent them from playing an active role in the other ways in which the national Muslim/Bosniak identity was being reconfigured, and in particular in building closer ties with Islam, as we shall see later on.
As for the identity reconfiguration related to language or national history, these were also driven by intellectuals trained during the communist period. In many aspects, the elaboration of the new Bosniak national identity was merely an extension of the Muslim “national affirmation.” Thus, the recognition of a Bosnian language, which a few Muslim intellectuals had demanded in the 1970s, was made official in the early 1990s. Beginning in February 1991, SDA members of parliament presented a draft resolution to the Bosnian Parliament, recognizing the existence of a Bosnian language distinct from the Serbian and Croatian languages. Two months later, during the census, 37.5 percent of the inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared that they spoke Bosnian, 26.6 percent Serbo-Croatian, 18.8 percent Serbian, 13.5 percent Croatian, and 1.4 percent Croato-Serbian. During the same period, a spelling committee led by Alija Isaković and the linguist Senahid Halilović was in charge of formalizing the Bosnian language, but struggled to define its specific features. For example, should words of Turkish origin be promoted in the language of Muslims/Bosniaks, as advocated by Senahid Halilović, or should these words be replaced by “authentic Bosnian words,”13 as requested by Alija Isaković? Should the Bosnian language be identified with Muslims/Bosniaks alone, at the risk of weakening Bosnia-Herzegovina as a state, or should it be associated with all inhabitants, but at the risk of weakening the Muslim/Bosniak nation? Should the language be called Bosnian (bosanski jezik) or Bosniak (bošnjački jezik)? In the end, in September 1993, the Bosnian Collegial Presidency decreed that in Bosnia-Herzegovina, “the official language is the standard literary language with the ijekavica pronunciation of its constituent nations, which bears one of these three names: Bosnian, Serbian or Croatian.”14 Yet this decree was far from resolving all the contradictions related to the name of the language spoken in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a year later, the Ministry of Education and Culture introduced new textbooks entitled simply “Mother Tongue.”
Most often, the task of writing new language, literature, and history textbooks was given to intellectuals tied to the Muslim “national affirmation” of the communist period. However, the rewriting of the history of the Bosniak nation also gave rise to certain contradictions. Thus, during the war, the “Bogomil thesis” became the centerpiece of Bosniak national history. Indeed, referring to “Bogomilism” made it possible to counter the idea that conversion to Islam had been forced or opportunistic, by presenting this conversion as being religiously motivated and experienced as a liberation. Islamization was therefore no longer seen as renunciation or treason, but rather as a means to preserve an immutable religious and national identity. In this vein, Hajrudin Numić, a member of the Council of the Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals, stated his belief that, “due to the noted proximity between certain elements of the new Islamic religion and the old Bogomil religion, Islam was for Bosnian Muslims simply a way to perpetuate their religious existence in a new period and under new circumstances.”15 Under this interpretation, Bosnian “Bogomilism” was some sort of Islam before its time. This emphasis on Islamization as a voluntary and linear process was primarily aimed at proving the Bosniak nation’s age-old existence.
The Bogomil thesis was also useful to counter the “Turkish complex,” namely the feelings of inferiority and guilt that Serb nationalists allegedly inflicted on the Bosniaks because of their conversion to Islam and their role during the Ottoman period. In opposition to the idea of an “Ottoman yoke,” the five centuries of Ottoman presence were regarded as a long period of peace and tolerance, in contrast with the religious conflicts in the rest of Europe. The “Turkish complex” was thus supposed to give way to a feeling of pride rooted in the grandeur of the Islamic and Ottoman civilization. Nevertheless, this narrative did not prevent the same Bosniak historians from casting light on the various revolts of Bosnian Muslims against Ottoman power, such as the uprising led by Husein-kapetan Gradaščević, which began in 1831. These uprisings were presented as signs of an early national feeling. Between 1990 and 1995, the Muslim/Bosniak national identity thus underwent numerous transformations, building on the “national affirmation” of the communist period and partially repeating its hesitations and contradictions. However, the major identity shift of this period was still the redefinition of the ties between Islam and Muslim/Bosniak national identity, in which pan-Islamist activists played a central role.
Already during the 1990 electoral campaign, the SDA had highlighted the symbols of Islam to spark the Muslim population’s nationalist enthusiasm. In the following years, the intellectuals and ‘ulama’ with ties to the party continuously emphasized Islam as the centerpiece of Muslim national identity. Sociologist Šaćir Filandra thus stated:
Islam is what initially caused differentiation within the shared ethnic Slavic heritage, and the emergence of a specific Muslim national and cultural profile. More than any other historical, ethnic or political factor, Islam is what defined the Muslim essence [biće]”. Moreover, secularization under way since the nineteenth century did not change this because “although Islam, like Christianity, has been reduced in our regions to a simple theology due to a particular process of secularization, the ties between Muslim culture and Islam have not been broken.”16
Džemaludin Latić, an eminent pan-Islamist activist, also insisted on the central position of Islam, but refused to reduce it to a simple cultural substrate. On the contrary, he viewed Islamic transcendence as the ground for the superiority of Muslim nationalism. In his view:
Bosnian Muslims are a specific European nation, due to their relationship with the constituent elements of the nation. Indeed, while the European nations worship their language, their land and their destiny, Bosnian Muslims worship only the supreme divine being. Turned towards transcendence, towards monotheism (tevhid), they break free of the traps of contemporary idolatry (širk).17
This emphasis on Islam as the central element of national identity became even stronger after the “Bosniak” national name was adopted, with members of the pan-Islamist current using the term “Bosniak-Muslim” (Bošnjak-Musliman) to counter those who wished to extend the name “Bosniak” to all the inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1994, Hilmo Neimarlija, professor of sociology at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences, stated:
The Bosniaks are Muslims. Through their traditions, their culture, the faith of their forefathers, the faith of the vast majority of Bosniaks, as shown in their convictions and practices. The Bosniaks are Muslims in the same way that the Croats are Catholic… We will no longer allow anyone, not even ourselves, to raise this dilemma [between national identity and religious identity], because our national being, our national identity has been defined by Islam, not as a religion but as one of the three great universal cultures.18
The issue of the ties between Islam and Muslim/Bosniak national identity is where the intellectuals and ‘ulama’ close to the SDA broke with the “national affirmation” of the communist period. Whereas the intellectuals of the 1970s sought to minimize Islam in Muslim national identity, twenty years later, those close to the SDA attempted to place Islam at the heart of the Bosniak national identity. In fact, this re-Islamization of Muslim/Bosniak national identity was not mainly due to the actions of national institutions such as the Preporod cultural society or the Council of the Congress of Intellectuals, but the Islamic Community and, in a context of war, the ARBiH. Yet in both cases, the attempts at re-Islamization of the Muslim/Bosniak national identity stirred up many controversies, and actually led to a nationalization of Islam. This complex dialectic was clearly visible in the army, which beginning in 1993 became the main driver for the re-Islamization of the Bosniak national identity.
In 1993, assistants for morale, information, and religion (pomoćnik za moral, informisanje i vjerska pitanja) were appointed in each army unit. Imams were detached from the Islamic Community to fill these positions. These imams were responsible for making sure that the main precepts of Islam were respected and religious life developed within the ARBiH. At the same time, alongside the regular army units, new “Muslim” units appeared, emphasizing Islamic practice and the religious aspect of their combat. The largest of these was the 7th Muslim brigade, founded in November 1992 from the merger of several smaller units, and commanded initially by Mahmut Karalić, a hadith professor at the Gazi Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo (the hadith are the acts and words of the Prophet). Based in Zenica in central Bosnia, the 7th Muslim brigade quickly became one of the ARBiH’s main elite units. Other similar units were created during the war, such as the 4th Muslim brigade based in Herzegovina and commanded by Nezim Halilović, the main imam of Konjic, or the 9th Muslim brigade based in Tuzla. After the “Bosniak” national name was adopted, these units kept the name “Muslim,” emphasizing their religious and ideological nature. From this standpoint, the Muslim brigades of the 1990s should not be assimilated with the Muslim brigades of the Second World War, but instead with the highly ideological proletarian brigades created by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, or Iran’s Guardians of the Revolution. In fact, the latter assisted in arming and supervising the 7th Muslim brigade.
For the military, political, and religious leaders involved in the re-Islamization of Bosniak national identity, Islam was supposed to make combatants fight harder and to help overcome parochialism. Thus, the Reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Cerić told combatants in the 4th brigade of Hrasnica (a suburb of Sarajevo), “when Islam has become the tie binding us together, when it has become strong, then we can make it the foundation for our national identity, our language, [and] our army.”19 During a seminar on the “role of religion in strengthening patriotic unity,” Fikret Muslimović, the ARBiH Morale Department Chief, emphasized the positive impact of religious practice on combatants’ morale. He suggested to ARBiH officers that they “reassemble their people” and create a favorable setting for fulfilling religious obligations, with emphasis on funeral services:
It is desirable that commanding officers, notably those in key positions, should adapt their behaviour to the religious tradition of their people, during patriotic events and official events supporting our fight for freedom, or when honours are made to the šehids [martyrs] (for example, at funerals). In these circumstances, where respect is expressed with emotion to the victims of the genocide against our people, officers should show that they are aware that the genocide against our people is in fact being carried out with the aim of eliminating our religious traditions.20
This reinterpretation of the war in Islamic terms by the army coincided with fallen soldiers being described as šehids (martyrs of the faith). During the war, the Islamic Community, the SDA, and the ARBiH established a cult of šehids that involved widespread use of this term in funerals and obituaries, an increase in šehid tombs in mosque cemeteries and public gardens, and material support and special recognition for the families of šehids. In February 1995, the Islamic Community issued a decree that the second day of the feast ending Ramadan would be the day of šehids, dedicated to visiting the graves and families of martyrs. This cult of šehids became widespread during the war and saw little resistance from the population. But also in this case, the re-Islamization of Bosniak national identity came hand in hand with a nationalization of Islam: gradually, this cult of šehids became a national and secular phenomenon, as shown by the appearance of nišans (tombstones) in the shape of lilies (the symbol of Bosnia-Herzegovina), or the inauguration of monuments to the “unknown šehid” in public gardens, although the religious identity and motives of such soldiers were, by definition, unknown.
While the cult of šehids became widespread, the war was only described as jihad (holy war) by the Muslim units of the ARBiH. But even within these limited circles, the concept of jihad gave rise to substantial debate. Those in favor of jihad were unable to agree on its practical implications. For example, Mehmedalija Hadžić, an advisor to the Reis-ul-ulema for Shari‘a, believed that “the moral code of the Muslim soldier” prevented him from mistreating prisoners or pillaging civilians.21 However, in their Instructions for the Muslim Soldier (1993), the muftis of Zenica and Bihać stated, “It is up to the commanding officer to decide whether it is better for the common good to free, exchange or liquidate an enemy prisoner.”22 Mirsad Mahmutović, in charge of morale and religious matters at the ARBiH’s officer training schools, referred to the Prophet to conclude that “the commanding officer of the unit that took part in combat decides what the loot is, and how it is distributed. When it is done in this way, there is no problem, there is no pillage.”23 Lacking a substantial definition, jihad was reduced to a symbol, a folklore, and did not avoid the paradoxical nationalization process caused by the policy of re-Islamization of the Bosniak national identity. One piece of evidence is that in January 1994, before an audience of ARBiH officers, Enes Karić, a professor of tefsir (Qur’an commentary) at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences of Sarajevo, defined jihad as “all the activities that contribute to a worthy expression of Islamic faith, to the preservation of goods, honour, life, [and] descent.” He therefore deduced that “If Muslims need a state to protect all these values, then the creation of this state represents—from a religious viewpoint—jihad par excellence.” In this conception, jihad is reduced to a patriotic war.24
The re-Islamization of Bosniak national identity, driven by members of the pan-Islamist current and relayed by many ‘ulama’, secular intellectuals, and officers, thus led to a nationalization of Islam. This paradoxical evolution had many implications for Islamic religious institutions and for religious life in general. With regard to the former, note that in the early 1990s, the Islamic Community was still largely outside the reach of the pan-Islamist activists: Salih Čolaković, the chairman of the mešihat of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was hostile to this movement, while Yugoslav Reis-ul-ulema Jakub Selimoski was in favor of political neutrality for religious institutions. In 1991, the relationship between Čolaković and members of the pan-Islamist current grew even more hostile, after the former took control of the newspaper Preporod from the latter. The pan-Islamist activists then decided to revive the ‘ulama’ association el-Hidaje and to make it their instrument for taking over the Islamic religious institutions. At the same time, Selimoski and Čolaković stated that the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia would remain united even if the Yugoslav federation disappeared, and in September 1991, they organized a Conference of Eastern European Muslims in Sarajevo. Čolaković believed that the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia, the largest in Europe, should be the “guiding force” for European Muslims, and proposed that all European Islamic organizations establish their headquarters in Sarajevo.25 Thus, the Islamic Community’s leaders were promoting plans for pan-European Islamic religious institutions, which did not mix with the political pan-Islamism of the founders of the SDA.
The beginning of the war in April 1992 temporarily ended these ambitious European projects. By preventing the Islamic religious institutions of Bosnia-Herzegovina from functioning normally, the war gave pan-Islamist activists an opportunity to seize control of those institutions. On April 28, 1993, a refounding assembly (Obnoviteljski sabor) removed Selimoski and Čolaković from office, issued a decree dissolving the Islamic Community in Yugoslavia and “refounding” an Islamic Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, then designated Mustafa Cerić, the main imam of the Zagreb Mosque, as the new Reis-ul-ulema. Under the cooptation methods already used to form the Muslim/Bosniak national institutions, the refounding assembly of the Islamic Community was made up of ‘ulama’ (connected or not to the association el-Hidaje), as well as representatives of the Coordination Committee of the Muslim Institutions, the Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals, Preporod, Merhamet, and other lesser-known associations. Although this refounding assembly lacked legitimacy in the eyes of many ‘ulama’, it nevertheless allowed the pan-Islamist current to take control of the Islamic religious institutions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while dissolving the largest Muslim community in Europe.26 The emphasis on Islam as the central component of Muslim/Bosniak national identity thus went hand in hand with the nationalization of Islamic religious institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And, making this paradox complete, this nationalization was implemented by the supporters of pan-Islamist ideas. In this case as well, pan-Islamism proved to be merely a form of proto-nationalism. Although it was supposed to bring together “all the Muslims living in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and all Bosnian Muslims living abroad temporarily or permanently,”27 the new Islamic Community had difficulty gaining influence beyond the Bosnian borders, as the Serbian and Montenegrin authorities refused to recognize the new mufti of Novi Pazar, and the mufti of Zagreb took advantage of the circumstances to increase his autonomy. The “refounding” of the Islamic Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina thus not only resulted in the Umma being divided along national lines but also jeopardized the spiritual unity of the Bosniak nation.
Apart from religious institutions, all of religious life was affected by the nationalization of Islam during the war. Thus, this period saw an increase in the number of songs with martial or religious themes, presented as ilahije and kaside (Sufi chants) but sung in concert halls or during political rallies. Likewise, ARBiH units sent delegations to the Sufi pilgrimage of Ajvatovica in central Bosnia, soon transforming this event into a patriotic and military rally. Soldiers in the 7th Muslim brigade practiced dhikr (a Sufi ceremony) led by officers promoted to the rank of sheikhs in the Naqshbandi order. This often superficial combination of patriotic and martial messages with Sufi practices occurred despite the traditional hostility of pan-Islamists towards Sufism, which reappeared when the newspaper Ljiljan called for Ajvatovica to be cleaned up of “all the religious kitsch, rural folklore and širk [idolatry]” present at the event.28 Lastly, the nationalization of Islam threatened to transform some political conflicts into religious ones, as in Cazinska Krajina, where Mufti Hasan Makić warned the partisans of Fikret Abdić that “the path that Abdić wants you to follow goes against the Islamic faith”29 and decreed that, as murtats (apostates), they would not be entitled to religious burial. The imams supporting Fikret Abdić, for their part, refused to recognize the new leaders of the Islamic Community and called on “all sincere, faithful Muslims … to do without the services of the warring imams … who have, by force, torn religion out of the places of worship to place it at the service of politics and a partisan ideology.”30
Thus, the nationalization of Islam ultimately threatened its sacred nature, and was accompanied by substantial tension and numerous controversies of a religious nature. At the same time, it exacerbated the political divisions within the Bosniak community, as shown by the controversy that broke out in 1995 in the Bosnian Collegial Presidency. In February 1995, Izetbegović attended a parade of the 7th Muslim brigade in Zenica, giving the brigade high praise before the TV cameras. Immediately, the members of the Collegial Presidency linked to the civic parties denounced this as a sign of “ideologization of faith,” asserting that “the army that defends Bosnia-Herzegovina, and will defend it in the future, must be secular and plurinational, far removed from partisan influences and rivalry.” The ARBiH, they noted, “was formed in response to aggression, and was created by all patriots. They were not motivated by their political or partisan convictions, nor by their religious convictions, but by their responsibility to the state and the fatherland, and by a clear choice in favor of freedom and in defense of their own existence.”31 The next day, Izetbegović and Ejup Ganić retorted that the Zenica parade was simply an “expression of piety,” and that the religiosity of the Muslim units of the ARBiH was merely a “spontaneous reaction” to Serb forces’ destruction of mosques. They also asserted that these Muslim units “have defended, sometimes at the cost of enormous losses and sacrifice, many towns and villages, and have saved the population from genocide, without ever committing genocide.” And they concluded: “Count the graves! This country’s destiny will be decided by those who fight, act and die for it!”32 This controversy, unparalleled during the war, proves that the re-Islamization of Bosniak national identity was not a spontaneous or consensual process. It also shows that, to understand the transformations that Islam underwent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we must look not only at its ties with the new Bosniak national identity, but also at its place in the new one-party state established by the SDA.
As the Muslim/Bosniak national identity changed during the war, the continuities with the communist “national affirmation” were just as important as the discontinuities. The same holds true for the transformations of the political system of Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1990 and 1995. Despite the introduction of a multiparty system in 1990, each nationalist party tended to act as the hegemonic party for the nation that it claimed to represent, and to establish a new one-party state in the territories that it controlled. The SDA was no exception, and following the November 1990 elections, it began to take over the Bosnian legal institutions, on the one hand, while setting up parallel power networks on the other. Regarding the former, Alija Izetbegović gradually took over the powers attributed to the Bosnian Collegial Presidency, as illustrated by visits he made to various Muslim countries without preliminary concertation with the other members of the Presidency. Likewise, the SDA took over several strategic ministries, beginning with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, headed by Haris Silajdžić, a former student of the Gazi Husrev-Beg Madrasa and former assistant of the Reis-ul-ulema for international affairs. The SDA also managed several Muslim-majority towns. However, the major public companies generally held onto their autonomy thanks to their self-managed status and the nationalist parties’ inability to agree on how to divide them up. At the same time, members of the pan-Islamist current took part in the development of Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a “humanitarian” organization headquartered in Vienna and managed by Fatih al-Hassanein, a Sudanese member of the Muslim Brotherhood with ties to Izetbegović since the 1970s. TWRA was responsible for promoting the cause of Balkan Muslims throughout the Muslim world. Lastly, the pan-Islamist activists maintained control of the underground military networks of the Muslim community by placing the political leadership of the Patriotic League in the hands of Hasan Čengić, a co-accused with Izetbegović in 1983, and Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, an intellectual close to the pan-Islamist current.
After the war broke out in April 1992, the SDA’s domination of Bosnian legal institutions became even stronger. Izetbegović reluctantly agreed to step down as the SDA’s president, but with his advisors, he took control of the Bosnian Collegial Presidency and sidelined its other members linked to the HDZ or the civic parties. The SDA–HDZ coalition government led, first, by Jure Pelivan then by Mile Akmačić existed only on paper, as most power was held at the municipal level. Against this backdrop, the forming of the Silajdžić government in October 1993 signaled a certain restoration of the state, while also representing a crucial step in the SDA’s monopolization of power. The most important ministries were given to individuals with ties of some sort to the new hegemonic party. Firstly, several ministers were tied to the pan-Islamist current. This was the case for Irfan Ljubijankić, a doctor from a family of ‘ulama’, who became the new Minister of Foreign Affairs,33 and for Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, Minister for the Defense Industry, who would break with the SDA a few months later. The Silajdžić government also included ministers who had begun their careers under the communist regime but had sworn allegiance to the SDA, such as Bakir Alispahić, the new Minister of the Interior, and Hamdija Hadžihasanović, the new Minister of Defense. The Ministry of Education and Culture—another key position given the ongoing reconfiguration of the Muslim/Bosniak national identity—was initially awarded to Enes Duraković, a literature professor with ties to the “national affirmation” of the communist period, then to Enes Karić, a professor at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences of Sarajevo. Lastly, the four ministers in charge of regional coordination were all from the SDA. In the following months, public companies were nationalized, with their administrators either being replaced by or becoming members of the SDA. For example, Edhem Bičakčić, an engineer from a prestigious Sarajevan family who had been co-accused at the 1983 trial, was appointed as the head of the power company Elektroprivreda. Also, Edib Bukvić, an economist and the son of a former Young Muslim, became the head of the industrial group Energoinvest. Lastly, the SDA’s domination of positions of power sometimes took unexpected forms: the tunnel connecting besieged Sarajevo to Igman—a crucially strategic and profitable infrastructure—was managed by Nedžad Branković, a nephew of former Young Muslim Hasib Branković.
In wartime, control of the army remained the most important stake for the new one-party SDA state, and the SDA’s informal networks focused their activity on the army. Beginning in May 1992, Sefer Halilović, the military chief of the Patriotic League, was appointed Commander of the General Staff of the ARBiH. A year later, Halilović was regarded as making too many waves, and was replaced by Rasim Delić. Meanwhile, command of the army corps was given to officers who had joined the SDA, and the ARBiH’s Muslim units openly showed their support for the party. The SDA’s gradual takeover of the army was partly because, through the TWRA, the pan-Islamist activists controlled most of the funds gathered in Muslim countries. The TWRA, then co-directed by Fatih al-Hassanein and Hasan Čengić, was also responsible for the procurement and transport of substantial quantities of weapons, thus acting as an intermediary between the ARBiH and the outside world. Once these weapons arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they were stored in the ARBiH’s main logistics center in Visoko, managed by Halid Čengić, Hasan’s father, then redistributed within the army according to criteria of political and ideological allegiance. One sign of the SDA’s control of the army came in April 1994, when the ARBiH General Staff declared:
Support from ARBiH officers shall not go to any groups that think that “all nationalist parties are guilty for the war”, nor to individuals who deny the historical importance of the Patriotic League in the forming of the ARBiH or the special merits of the SDA as a political factor that answered its historical duty as completely and concretely as possible by creating the Patriotic League, the military organization that gave rise to the ARBiH.34
By presenting the ARBiH’s origins in this way, the decisive role of the Territorial Defense and its officers (who were often tied to the SDP) was ignored. In the same period, the establishment of the one-party SDA state was made official when Izetbegović became the president of the party again, with Minister of the Interior, Bakir Alispahić, and ARBiH Morale Department Chief, Fikret Muslimović, both joining the party leadership. Nine months later, Hazim Sadić, commander of the 2nd Corps of the ARBiH and the last army corps commander with ties to the civic parties, was replaced by Sead Delić.
There was some resistance to the establishment of a one-party state. In January 1995, the SDP protested that “the plurinational, multiparty Presidency is often a mere decor or veil enabling the policy of a single party to be implemented.”35 A month later, as we have seen, the members of the Presidency connected to the civic parties denounced the army’s Islamization. The ARBiH General Staff then publicly reiterated its support for Izetbegović, thus meddling in the internal affairs of the Presidency that it was supposed to be subordinate to. Shortly thereafter, in August 1995, the SDA presented a constitutional amendment whereby the Parliament would choose the Chairman of the Collegial Presidency, which would automatically reserve this position for a Bosniak. The civic parties protested that such a “change in the constitutional powers of the Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina requires the general consent of the citizens and constituent nations” of Bosnia-Herzegovina.36 Izetbegović then responded that, if something were to happen to him, “a Bosniak should come [to take my place], someone from the SDA should come,” because otherwise, the army would refuse to obey.37 Therefore, the ARBiH had been politicized by bypassing the authority of the Collegial Presidency, before this politicized army justified the SDA’s takeover of the Collegial Presidency itself. On a more local level, pockets of resistance to the SDA state appeared, as shown by the cases of the social-democratic city council of Tuzla or the Zenica steel plant. However, these strongholds of resistance were subject to significant pressure, and, in 1994, the directors of several large companies in Tuzla and the director of the Zenica steel plant announced that they were joining the SDA.
Thus, during the war, a new one-party state took shape in the territories under ARBiH control. However, this one-party SDA state cannot be simply identified with the former communist one-party state. Admittedly, the SDA tended to behave, and especially to present itself, as the single party of the Muslim/Bosniak nation. However, whereas the civic parties were gradually removed from positions of power, they continued to play their opposition role within the Collegial Presidency, the Parliament, and even the Bošnjački sabor, while non-nationalist intellectuals joined together in the Circle 99 in Sarajevo and the Forum of Citizens in Tuzla. Likewise, public television came under the SDA’s control, but independent media outlets still existed in territories under ARBiH control, including the daily Oslobođenje and the weekly Dani in Sarajevo, or the newspapers Front slobode (“Freedom Front”) and Tuzla-list (“Tuzla News”) in Tuzla. Therefore, the SDA state was in no way a totalitarian regime or even a classic authoritarian one. In the territories under ARBiH control, the SDA’s hegemony came through indirect channels, for example, with dissident intellectuals or overly curious journalists being beaten up by anonymous attackers or forcibly conscripted into the army. Media outlets were punished in discreet ways, such as cuts to electricity or to paper supply. Overall, the SDA state relied less on overt repression, instead using corporatism and clientelism to control the population, thereby perpetuating other practices of the late communist regime.
During the war, the absence of political repression in the strict sense was offset by widespread material uncertainty, making the population very dependent on political authorities. On the one hand, the authorities were fully responsible for the distribution of humanitarian aid, allocation of housing, and issuing of passports, commercial licenses, and the “working obligations” (radne obaveze) that made it possible to avoid conscription. On the other, the inevitable participation in the black market and payment of bribes meant that everyone was at risk of sanctions from the same authorities. In this context, few would risk the dangers of becoming involved in politics. Moreover, the new hegemonic party began to supervise the population through corporatist organizations, thus following the communist model. Yet here again, the wartime context caused substantial changes. While the League of Communists had relied on public companies and trade unions to distribute jobs, new apartments, and social benefits, the SDA relied chiefly on municipalities, refugee associations, and humanitarian organizations to distribute “abandoned” housing and humanitarian aid. In August 1994, the SDA created a foundation for families of šehids and disabled veterans. Founded at the same period, the United Soldiers’ Organization (Jedinstvena organizacija boraca—JOB) was largely controlled by the SDP, but the SDA managed to undermine it by starting separate organizations for disabled veterans and families of šehids, promising them special support and recognition. The SDA thus successfully oversaw the new social groups produced by the war and by ethnic cleansing, and controlled the material and symbolic resources distributed to them. The SDA was able to incorporate a large portion of the security and managerial elites of the communist period because it reused the corporatist and clientelistic practices of the League of Communists in a new framework.
As we have seen, the founding core of the SDA was made up of members of the pan-Islamist current that the communist regime had repressed in the 1980s. More broadly, at the national and local levels, the first generation of SDA cadres often came from former prominent families that had been marginalized after the Second World War due to political repression and economic reforms. During the war years, this first generation was substantially renewed, especially at the local level, with the emergence of military, political, or economic players who had contributed to the war effort, along with the sidelining of prominent local members who were more accustomed to the political manoeuvres of peacetime. This renewal often meant that representatives of the urban elite were sidelined in favor of outsiders newly established in the large cities or living in small provincial towns. Examples include the resignation of the mayor of Sarajevo, Muhamed Kreševljaković, the son of a famous historian from the interwar period, or that of the mayor of Bihać, Nedžad Ibrahimpašić, whose father was prominent in the interwar period and who was considered to be close to Fikret Abdić, or the sidelining in Mostar of Ismet Hadžiosmanović, an SDA leader from a family of Young Muslims and a partisan of an alliance with the Croat HVO. In the city of Tuzla, the local SDA leader, Mehmed Begović, a former Young Muslim, was kicked out of the party after refusing to overthrow the social-democratic municipal majority. Also in Tuzla, the founding of Tuzla-Podrinje Canton in 1994 brought to power politicians from the small surrounding towns, and the new canton governor was Izet Hadžić, mayor of the small town of Kalesija, which had ties to the “Black Wolves” (Crni vukovi) military unit and the Naqshbandi Sufi order.
By the same token, the establishment of the SDA state involved the cooptation of a portion of the former communist elite within the new hegemonic party and related institutions, in exchange for minimal political and ideological allegiance. Admittedly, few of the former regime’s high-level officials joined the SDA, either because they remained loyal to the SDP or because they were too compromised to hope for a political reconversion. The main exception to this rule was Ismet Grbo, the former vice president of the Socialist Alliance of Working People in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who became the director of the SDA’s center for analysis, documentation and public relations. Yet just as the cultural society Preporod welcomed intellectuals with ties to the “national affirmation” of the communist period, so did the SDA attract military officers, policemen, company directors, and other civil servants linked to the former regime. This trend took place on a massive scale beginning in 1993. The establishment of the SDA state thus prompted a substantial renewal within the political elite; new mid-level cadres emerged who had begun their careers under communism but moved up the ranks rapidly in a time of political upheaval and war.
The most surprising aspect of this complex combination of continuity and discontinuity was the ability of a pan-Islamist network with just a few hundred members to keep control of the SDA and thus to remain at the heart of the reconfiguration of the Bosniak political elite. The most striking example of political ascension for a member of the pan-Islamist current—apart from Alija Izetbegović himself—is that of Edhem Bičakčić, who at the war’s end was the director of Elektroprivreda, vice president of the SDA in charge of the party’s internal affairs and co-president of the joint SDA–HDZ commission. The persistent centrality of the pan-Islamist activists cannot be understood simply by focusing on Izetbegović’s institutional legitimacy and personal charisma, on the ideological, generational, and family ties uniting members of these circles, or on their experience in underground action (particularly useful in wartime). Certain specific features of the SDA state must also be considered. Firstly, some pan-Islamist activists were at the heart of two parallel power networks: the Patriotic League before the war, and the Third World Relief Agency during the war. This bypassing of legal institutions in favor of informal networks was also visible in the establishment of parallel national institutions: the Coordination Committee of the Muslim Institutions, the Bošnjački sabor, or the Islamic Community refounding assembly. Within these institutions, pan-Islamist activists co-opted relatives, long-term comrades, and circumstantial allies. In this context, the founding of Mladi Muslimani ’39 (“Young Muslims ’39”38), an association bringing together former members of the movement and their real or supposed relatives, made the affiliation with the Young Muslim movement an even more explicit criterion for upward mobility in the state and party apparatus. However, nepotism in the pan-Islamist current also caused tensions within the SDA itself. In particular, at the end of the war, Prime Minister Haris Silajdžić’s desire to bring fundraising efforts back under the state control led to conflicts with the informal networks controlled by the pan-Islamists. The informal practices of the pan-Islamist activists thus gave them short-term strength, but threatened the longer-term cohesion of the party and state.
The other specific feature of the SDA state that allows us to understand the persistent central importance of the pan-Islamist current is the fact that, in this new one-party state, Islam was placed at the heart of the Muslim/Bosniak national identity. Hence Islam could also be used as a new criterion of political and ideological allegiance, instead of communist ideology. This is what Izetbegović was expressing in subtle terms when, in March 1994, he called on the local SDA in Sarajevo to welcome former communist cadres by placing their “honesty” above their “competence.”39 With this statement, Izetbegović was seeking less to remove fraudulent practices from the party than to subordinate such practices to prior political allegiance. The proof is that such practices were often denounced during conflicts of a political nature. In particular, anti-corruption operations at the local level were first and foremost opportunities for settling of scores and redistribution of power. Examining the “honesty” of particular individuals thus became an essential means to control and renew the political elite. The pan-Islamist activists remained at the center of this system thanks to their skillful use of the secret police files, on the one hand, and the absolving powers of religion, on the other. Under these circumstances, it is unsurprising that upward mobility in the party and state apparatus was often attributable to family ties with a former Young Muslim, schooling at the Gazi Husrev-beg Madrasa or, if these were lacking, a belated but ostentatious religious enthusiasm.
The ideological function fulfilled by Islam in the SDA state prompts us to return to a question that was passionately debated during the 1990s: What was the potential for an “Islamic republic” in Bosnia-Herzegovina? In 1990, the Serbian press used Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration to evoke this threat. After the war broke out in 1992, these outcries against the Islamic peril became even more hysterical, including in the Croat press. Muslim political and religious leaders unanimously responded by stating their attachment to a secular state in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thus, in 1990, the Islamic Community said that it was in favor of:
A state that is neutral on questions of religion and personal conviction, where full freedom of conscience exists on an individual and collective level, where religious communities are separate from state structures and are autonomous in their area of activity, and where the legal status of citizens does not depend, either de jure or de facto, on their religious convictions.40
Five years later, addressing the governing bodies of the Islamic Community, Izetbegović stated:
Islam is not the state religion in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it cannot be, and moreover, it does not need to be. Only weak people or weak messages seek a protected, privileged position… Rather than privileges, Islam needs three things: freedom, possibilities for action, and dignity in its calling. The first two must be guaranteed by the state and the last one must come from you.41
However, Izetbegović’s stance must be viewed in light of the more ambiguous stances of other members of the pan-Islamist current. For example, in 1991, Džemaludin Latić stated that when Muslims represented more than 50 percent of the Bosnian population, they would say “what they want and what they don’t want,” including an “Islamic republic,” which “does not represent a monstrous or oppressive form of power.”42 Two years later, he noted with regret that it would be impossible to have an “Islamic republic” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, “not because this Islamic state would deprive Muslims or non-Muslims of their freedom, but because the harsh European environment of this state would destroy it with atomic bombs if necessary.”43
While Latić dared to say out loud what others were thinking, the most elaborate thinking about the question of an Islamic state in Bosnia-Herzegovina came from Adnan Jahić, a leading pan-Islamist activist in Tuzla. In Jahić’s view, “The state does not need to be formally Islamic to encourage a subtle Islamization of society. Bosnia is a good example: the president and the party in power, through their stance on the central question of the relationship between religion and the nation, provide a sound framework, acceptable for everyone, for striking a future balance between what is desirable and what is possible, between an Islamic optimum and national reality.” For Jahić, the harmonious relationship that the SDA had established between national and religious identity “paves the way for a happier Islamic society, without which there is no way and there can be no way to create a real and consequential Islamic state.”44 In another text that would become famous, entitled A Robust Muslim State, Jahić began by reminding his readers:
Islam is not a “religion”, but a political and religious ideology, a comprehensive Weltanschauung. Islamic principles never remain at the surface of individual consciences and private religious sentiments. The original Islam seeks to encompass the society in which it exists, and thus to encompass the political and state structures themselves.45
Hence he called for a “Muslim state” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where “the Muslim ideology would be established as a comprehensive political and legal system, from the state and national symbols to the educational, social and economic institutions, and even to the family, [the basic] cell of the entire state.” Moreover, he specified:
[In this state] full equality of rights would be guaranteed by law to all citizens, whereas the level of social success of each individual shall depend not only on his own economic activity, but also on the degree to which he consciously accepts and applies the principles and spirit of Muslim ideology.46
In some respects, Jahić’s writings are reminiscent of Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration: in both cases, it is assumed that re-Islamization of society would occur before that of the state, and “no political system is Islamic or non-Islamic per se, but only according to the people who make it.”47 However, Jahić confuses matters to a certain degree. On the one hand, he plays on the ambiguity between a “Muslim state,” i.e. one made up of Muslims in the national sense of the term, and an “Islamic state,” i.e. one founded on Islam. This confusion was frequent among Muslim political and religious leaders, and among their Serb and Croat critics. On the other hand, Jahić merely describes an authoritarian political system where Islam acts as the ideological criterion for selecting new elites. From this standpoint, he clearly expresses the implicit rationale of the SDA state, but within the continuity of dying Yugoslav communism rather than the Islamic Declaration.
In any case, Adnan Jahić’s ideas not only sparked outraged reactions from the civic parties and non-nationalist intellectuals, but also fueled lively debates within the SDA and the Islamic Community. Rather than considering Islam as a discriminating political ideology, some intellectuals and ‘ulama’ defined Islam as individual faith and shared culture. Fikret Karčić, a professor of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences and a tireless defender of the political neutrality of religious institutions, was also an ardent promoter of a secular definition of the state. In 1990, responding to Serb propaganda, he stated that “the secular state … is the best organization model for the relationship between political and religious authorities for multiconfessional societies,” and declared himself personally to be “reserved towards any ideological state.”48 In a programmatic text entitled The Meaning and Expression of Islam in the Secular State, Karčić justified the principle of secularism from an Islamic point of view. On a practical level, he asserted that with the separation of religion and the state, “religious communities lose many privileges … but, at the same time, become free to manage their own affairs without state interference” and “obtain the possibility to dedicate themselves entirely to their primary mission: meeting the religious needs of their members.” On a doctrinal level, he explains, “in a secular state, each religion is treated as a private affair of citizens, is excluded from politics, and exerts no influence on the law. Such is the status that Islam has and should have, in keeping with the principle of equality between religions… Islam can only be a religion, and its legitimate domain of expression is the private life of citizens.” Therefore, for Karčić, “certain components of the message of Islam take on a different meaning,” and “the value judgements expressed in the prescriptions regarding the mu’amelats [social practices] survive only insofar as they are conveyed in the customs and personal morals of individuals.”49
This defense of the secular state and individualized faith, elaborated in the early 1990s, lost part of its pertinence during the war. However, the use of Islam as a discriminating political ideology caused a new Islamic justification for the secular state to emerge. This justification was the work of Enes Karić, a professor at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences and Minister of Education and Culture, who supported Haris Silajdžić in his increasing conflicts with the SDA. In 1992 already, Karić told the Congress of Bosnian Muslim Intellectuals that the Muslim nation accepts the separation of religion and the state, hence Islam exists in Bosnia-Herzegovina “as a faith and as a culture, as a religious and cultural system of faithful Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is expressed and shown within a civic, civil state.”50 Three years later, in the same vein, Karić denounced the political instrumentalization of Islam:
Bosnia is a European country and it is very important that Bosnian Muslims have accepted, for a long time already, the principle of practising, expressing and manifesting Islam within a civil society and a civic state. This principle, in the European context and in the current period, is useful for Bosnian Muslims because it provides them with an expression of Islam without an ideological diktat and without a political or ideological decree of what “true Islam” is.51
For Enes Karić, Islam is the shared cultural heritage of all Bosniaks and thus cannot be used for ideological or partisan purposes:
Islam is, in Bosnia, the shared treasure of all Bosniaks, this valuable treasure from which they have for centuries drawn their numerous religious, cultural, artistic, literary, urban and architectural inspirations. In such a conception of Islam, which the Bosniaks have long adopted, Islam cannot become the property or exclusive reserve of anyone, nor can it be subject to pragmatic adaptations to the political imperatives of the day. For the Bosniaks must protect themselves from themselves, and from the various forms of religious, traditional, political or cultural ostracism.52
In opposition to Islam as a discriminating political ideology, as promoted by Adnan Jahić, we thus find Islam viewed as an individual faith (Fikret Karčić) or as a shared culture (Enes Karić). These three diverging definitions of Islam show how its use as a substitute ideology by the SDA state was far from unanimous in the eyes of Bosniak intellectuals and ‘ulama’. They also give us a better understanding of the close ties between Islam, national identity and the political system in wartime Bosnia-Herzegovina, even though they do not cover all facets of this complex issue.53 However, to understand better how Islam was transformed in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, we must now focus on the changes in religious life itself.
Islam’s central place in the SDA state prompts us to return to the changes in Islamic religious institutions in the first half of the 1990s, and to the relations that these institutions had with the SDA and various other political and religious players. Even before the November 1990 elections, the Islamic Community had expressed certain demands to Bosnian political authorities, notably regarding the celebration of the main religious holidays, media access for religious institutions, introducing religious education into schools, revising land use plans to allow for the building of new mosques, and denationalization of waqfs. There was a debate between the governing bodies of the Islamic Community, in favor of mandatory religious education, and the partisans of general “religious culture” education, of which Enes Karić was the spokesperson. In 1991, after nationalist parties came to power, the main religious holidays were recognized as public holidays again, with religious ceremonies broadcast on public television, and an experimental religious education curriculum was introduced in some schools, on a strictly confessional basis. Beginning in April 1992, the war caused a brutal change in the functioning of Islamic religious institutions: over the course of the conflict, 107 Islamic Community employees were killed and 729 mosques (out of 1,376) were destroyed. At the same time, the Islamic Community underwent a substantial institutional renewal, symbolized by the appointment of ten regional muftis and the opening of seven madrasas (in Tuzla, Mostar, Travnik, Cazin, Visoko, Novi Pazar, and Zagreb) and an Islamic Pedagogical Faculty (in Zenica). In territories under ARBiH control, religious education was introduced in schools in 1994 on a confessional basis, even though Enes Karić was Minister of Education and Culture at the time. Theoretically optional, this teaching soon became virtually mandatory because many local religious and political leaders refused to give families humanitarian aid unless their children attended the religious classes.
This institutional renewal of the Islamic Community nevertheless had its limits. On the one hand, the Islamic Community suffered from a lack of manpower, worsened by the death of around one hundred imams and dozens of others joining the army, the diplomatic corps, or the secret services. The new madrasas and the Islamic Pedagogical Faculty were created to offset this shortfall, and notably to train the staff needed to organize religious education in schools. On the other hand, the Islamic Community underwent serious financial difficulties. In 1990, not content with merely demanding the restitution of the waqfs that had been nationalized during the communist period, the Islamic Community considered developing various lucrative activities such as organizing the pilgrimage to Mecca or producing halal food. But it also had to defend its exclusive right to collect the zakat (obligatory alms), against unwelcome initiatives from the Merhamet charity and the ‘ulama’ association el-Hidaje (with ties to the SDA). During the war, some waqfs were recovered at the local level, but these were mainly symbolic moves. For example, the Faculty of Islamic Sciences was awarded the former building of the Higher Islamic School of Shari‘a Law and Theology. The main waqfs nationalized after 1945 comprised land and property assets that were very difficult to recover due to construction during the communist period. Lastly, the rapid impoverishment of the population caused the zakat resources to dry up and made the financial situation of the Islamic Community even worse. One of the main sources of funding was aid from the Muslim world, but these funds did nothing to strengthen the financial autonomy of the Islamic Community, exposing it instead to various outside influences, as we will see in Chapter 7.
More generally, the case of the waqfs shows how the renewal of Islamic religious institutions was in no way synonymous with a return to the pre–1945 situation. This is even more obvious with regard to Shari‘a courts: while some ‘ulama’ spoke about Shari‘a family law becoming an option for couples who requested it,54 nobody seriously considered restoring the Shari‘a courts that had been abolished in 1946. Beginning in 1990, the Islamic Community celebrated Shari‘a weddings in mosques, but these were mere symbolic acts with no legal value and were relatively few in number. Thus, in 1995, the Islamic Community counted 213 such weddings in the Sarajevo metropolitan area. From 1992, Shari‘a marriage was sometimes used by either member of a couple separated by war to remarry without obtaining a divorce, or by some foreign mujahidin (jihadi soldiers) seeking to wed young minor girls. However, faced with these abuses, the Islamic Community issued a reminder in 1994 that all Shari‘a marriages had to be preceded by a civil marriage.
Thus, the first half of the 1990s was not a pure and simple period of restoration for the Islamic Community. The Islamic institutions of the time were undergoing rapid, complex transformations in their relations with the SDA and other political and religious players. Between 1990 and 1993, as we have seen, the Islamic Community was largely controlled by adversaries of the pan-Islamist current that was the founding force of the SDA. With communism ending and the SDA rising to power, a debate developed about which side—the religious institutions or the political party—would have authority over the other or, expressed in different terms, what would be the main national institution of Bosnian Muslims. The confrontation between Čolaković and members of the pan-Islamist current also reflects a conflict between two conceptions of how the Islamic Community should operate internally. The first conception focused on the authority of the ‘ilmiyya, while the other was in favor of greater participation by the faithful. In April 1993, the Islamic Community refounding assembly (Obnoviteljski sabor) resulted only in the nationalization of Islamic religious institutions. Convened at the initiative of ‘ulama’ with ties to the SDA, this assembly also forced Čolaković to step down, with Mustafa Cerić being appointed Reis-ul-ulema for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Thereafter, the ties between the SDA and Islamic religious institutions grew closer: the Islamic Community refounding assembly was controlled by the party and related associations, and the new Reis-ul-ulema was a charter member of the SDA with close ties to the pan-Islamist current. The establishment of the SDA state in 1993 thus coincided with the SDA’s takeover of Islamic religious institutions, and with a substantial renewal of Islamic Community cadres. This was particularly obvious in the case of the regional muftis appointed in 1993, as a large number of these had been persecuted during the communist period (Husein Smajić in Sarajevo, Halil Mehtić in Zenica, and Hamed Efendić in Goražde) or had participated in the war effort, such as the mufti of Tuzla Husein Kavazović, a founding member of the Zmaj od Bosne unit in Gradačac. That Halil Mehtić, who had ties to Čolaković and the neo-Salafist movement, became mufti of Zenica and remained the president of the Association of ‘Ulama’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina nevertheless shows that the SDA’s control of Islamic religious institutions was far from absolute.
During the war, the Islamic Community took part in the establishment of various Muslim/Bosniak national institutions, and sent its representatives to the Coordination Committee of the Muslim Institutions and to the Bošnjački sabor. The participation of Islamic religious institutions in exercising Muslim/Bosniak national sovereignty was thus officially acknowledged. However, at the same time, the Islamic Community lost the status as a national proxy institution that it had gained during the communist period, and was rivaled by the SDA, the cultural society Preporod and other associations. Moreover, its monopoly over Islamic religious life was also challenged by the arrival of foreign Islamic NGOs and mujahidin, as we will see in Chapter 7. Destabilized by this pluralization of religious life, the Islamic Community issued a decree in August 1995, stating that “no institution, association, magazine or newspaper, or any other means of information whose initiator is not the Islamic Community can include in its name or programme the terms ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’ without authorization from the Islamic Community.”55 This decree illustrated the Community’s desire to preserve its monopoly on Islamic religious life in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but it quickly proved to be unenforceable. Therefore, the institutional renewal that the Islamic Community underwent in the first half of the 1990s should not overshadow another equally important change, namely, the loss of the privileged institutional position that it had enjoyed, paradoxically, during the communist period. This context must be kept in mind when examining the difficulties that it faced in its attempts to re-Islamicize the Muslim/Bosniak population and to control its religious practices.
Between 1990 and 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina undeniably experienced an upturn in religious activity. For Muslims, this increase became clear in 1990 in many forms, including the revival of the Ajvatovica pilgrimage in central Bosnia and other Sufi pilgrimages, the organization of major religious events to inaugurate new mosques, the wide-scale celebration of the main religious holidays, increased attendance at Friday prayers, women wearing the headscarf and men growing beards, or the use of the religious greeting “Selam alejkum!” However, these various phenomena reflect more the increased visibility of Islam in the public space than an actual increase in religious piety: daily prayers or fasting during Ramadan were still the reserve of a pious minority, payment of the zakat declined due to the impoverishment of the population, and the introduction of religious education in schools caused an unexpected decline in attendance of classes held in mosques. After the war broke out in April 1992, Islam became even more visible. The religious greeting “Selam alejkum!” became widespread in the army, and the Islamic Community even sent a resolution to Bosnian authorities, calling for “the introduction of the greeting selam in all segments of our social life, with equal legal standing to other greetings used in our nation.”56 The main religious holidays were celebrated in a more official fashion. For example, the second day of the feast of the end of Ramadan became the day of šehids. Lastly, religious and political authorities sought to re-Islamicize public space and social life. As a result, mosques or šehid gravesites were built in certain public spaces that had no previous religious connotations (e.g. on important squares, public gardens, etc.), prayer rooms were opened in gymnasiums and shopping centers, and the call to prayer was broadcast on state television, especially during Ramadan.
Thus, the wartime context did not foster a spontaneous increase in Islamic fervor within the Muslim population so much as it encouraged authoritarian forms of re-Islamization. This was blatant when, for example, receiving humanitarian aid was conditional on the children attending religious classes or women wearing the headscarf. Nevertheless, it was not until 1994 that these authoritarian attempts at re-Islamization turned into actual press campaigns orchestrated by the political or religious authorities. In June 1994, a heated debate broke out between the weekly Ljiljan (close to the SDA) and the daily Oslobođenje (close to the SDP) on the subject of mixed marriages. Journalists at Ljiljan asserted that such marriages, a product of the communist regime, led to unstable couples, frustrated children, and ruined the Bosniak nation. At this occasion, Mustafa Spahić—one of the accused of the 1983 trial—went so far as to write:
Even if these rapes [of Muslim women by Serbs] are burdensome, intolerable and unforgiveable for all of us, from the point of view of Islam, they are lighter and less painful than mixed marriages and the resulting children and ties of friendship.57
In August 1994, the Islamic Community entered this debate, recalling the stance adopted by the Reis-ul-ulema Fehim Spaho in 1939, whereby all mixed marriages are prohibited under Shari‘a.58 This campaign against mixed marriages occurred shortly before another Islamic Community campaign aimed at curbing the consumption of alcohol and pork in territories under ARBiH control. During the second half of 1994, a veritable “fatwa fever” overtook religious authorities, who issued numerous “communiqués” on dietary matters. The Islamic governing bodies of Tuzla, for example, took advantage of the plum harvest—plums are used to make rakija (fruit brandy)—to publish a communiqué about alcohol. After decrying that alcohol was present everywhere in the private and public spheres, the religious authorities regretted that “no social body publicly advises against, places limits on, or, why not … prohibits its consumption, production and sale” and called for “our public areas to be cleansed of this evil and for each individual, in this very case the Muslim believer who must not be ignored in our city, to be able to use public areas (cafés, squares, etc.) in keeping with his moral and religious convictions.”59 Soon thereafter, in October 1994, the Reis-ul-ulema joined this campaign. In an official communiqué, Mustafa Cerić called for the sale and consumption of alcohol to be banned outside places especially set aside for that purpose, denounced the UNPROFOR for bringing pork into Sarajevo, “forcing Muslim Bosniaks to transgress their way of life and diet,” and called on Muslims to “reject the trash from Europe: alcohol, drugs, prostitution.”60
These campaigns against mixed marriages or alcohol and pork consumption were part of the authoritarian policies aimed at re-Islamicizing the Muslim population. However, they also show the limits of such policies. On the one hand, their actual results were quite mitigated. Mixed marriages still represented 10–15 percent of all new marriages in Sarajevo during the war (versus 32 percent before the war), and although pork gradually disappeared from the market stalls of towns under ARBiH control, alcohol continued to be sold in grocery stores, cafés, and restaurants. On the other hand, each of these re-Islamization campaigns sparked considerable reaction. The religious authorities then had to explain that their “communiqués” were not actually fatwas that had a legal value, but simply recommendations for the faithful. Ismet Spahić, deputy to the Reis-ul-ulema, thus explained that Mustafa Cerić had never called for pork to be prohibited, but simply for halal butcher shops to open for the faithful, and his October 1994 communiqué had been “misunderstood and instrumentalized.”61 More generally, religious authorities had to go back to a more restricted definition and use of fatwas. In December 1994, for example, Mustafa Cerić hoped that “fatwas will be issued less often, but will have a practical impact for Muslim Bosniaks.”62 Fatwas then became less and less frequent, gradually limited to simply providing details on how to adapt the main Muslim rituals to the unique wartime circumstances.
Although the “fatwa fever” quickly went away, new controversies continued to break out on religious questions. On May 25, 1995, a Serb shell fell right in the middle of a crowded café terrace in Tuzla, killing seventy-one young people celebrating the Youth Festival. The Tuzla city council decided, with support from many families, to bury all the victims together. While the local religious authorities accepted this idea, the Reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Cerić demanded separate burials per religion, causing an outcry from the civic forces. In the end, the choice was left up to the families, and forty-eight of the seventy-one victims were buried in the Slana Banja Park, next to the monument to the Partisans of the Second World War. Six months later, the Christmas and New Year’s holidays became a source of conflict. On January 1, 1996, just after the signing of the Dayton Agreement, Bosnian television showed Sarajevans celebrating the New Year with much joy and a considerable amount of alcoholic drinks. The next day, Alija Izetbegović published an open letter to the television management, denouncing “the shameless, insensitive individuals who dared, with the wounds and graves still fresh, to get drunk and make faces in front of the TV cameras,” as well as those who had broadcast these images without commentary. Then he added:
I would ask you not to impose upon us with these “Father Christmases” [“djeda mrazovi”] and other symbols that are foreign to our people. They can be kept at home by whoever really wants to. But television is a public institution, and our people is no longer an idiot being led by the nose. Of course, we will not resort to censorship or bans, but we will make sure that the people refuses, with contempt, the dubious values that others try to impose upon it in the name of culture and freedom, which is in reality false culture and false freedom.63
Over the next few days, the controversy grew. Accused of attacking the traditions of the Catholic community, the SDA backed down by explaining that Father Christmas was a communist creation, with no ties to St. Nicholas.
Hence the “top-down” attempts to re-Islamicize the Bosniak population appear to have been exhausted quickly, with no tangible results on a religious level. However, in reality, the re-Islamization campaigns led by the SDA and the Islamic Community facilitated the political reconfigurations underway in territories under ARBiH control. By attacking mixed marriages, multiconfessional burials or the celebration of Christmas, they helped widen the divide between communities and pushed local minorities to move away. In the war context, this contribution to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina was admittedly modest and these re-Islamization campaigns targeted Bosniaks first and foremost. On the one hand, they encouraged the secularized elite to leave Bosnia-Herzegovina, thus favoring the transformation of the intellectual and political elites of the Bosniak community. On the other hand, the re-Islamization campaigns were opportunities for SDA leaders to test the political and ideological allegiance—or “honesty,” as Izetbegović would say—of the new elites co-opted into the party. These campaigns therefore played an essential political role in the new one-party state.
Apart from their role in renewing the elites, the authoritarian re-Islamization campaigns also helped redefine the relationship between the public and private spheres. Hence they contributed to another essential aspect of the political changes started by the SDA. Opposition to the re-Islamization campaigns led by the Islamic Community and the SDA sometimes resulted in more or less overt political protest. The controversy over mixed marriages, for example, was a key moment in the wartime political changes because it was the first open confrontation between civic forces and the SDA since the war began. By defending mixed marriages, the daily Oslobođenje implicitly stood for the idea of a multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina as opposed to territorial partition along ethnic lines, at a time when certain SDA leaders were considering such partition. The debates sparked by these re-Islamization campaigns can therefore be regarded as a sign of a certain degree of political pluralism in the territories under ARBiH control. However, this remark must be taken in relative terms. Firstly, in most cases the controversies over religious matters were substitutes for genuine political debate in a wartime context when it was difficult to openly dispute the SDA’s political orientations. Moreover, most of the practices imposed by authoritarian re-Islamization did not spark open, articulate debates, but rather verbal jousting of an implicit, diffuse nature. For example, the issue of which greetings were appropriate led to daily verbal jousting within the population.
As a result, opposition to the re-Islamization campaigns of the Islamic Community and the SDA mainly consisted of a defense of the private sphere. Therefore, the religious controversies during the war most often ended in implicit compromise, with the political power deciding not to interfere in the private sphere, and citizens in turn relinquishing control of the public sphere to the authorities. Far from encouraging the political mobilization of the population, these controversies ultimately kept it passive, thus also fulfilling an essential function in the new one-party state. The relationship between the private and public spheres, as shaped by these re-Islamization campaigns, was similar to that of the late communist period, when the League of Communists renounced control of the private sphere in exchange for minimal political allegiance. However, there was one essential difference: far from protecting the private sphere from political interference, Islam in the 1990s became a privileged means for controlling the public sphere. Mustafa Cerić’s oft-repeated slogan that “faith is a public affair, disbelief is a private one”64 was simply an eloquent way of expressing this reversal.
From Islam as a discriminating political ideology to authoritarian re-Islamization campaigns used as tools to redefine the relationship between the public and private spheres, religion held a central place in the political system set up in territories under ARBiH control. Nevertheless, can we say that the Muslim/Bosniak population was “re-Islamicized”? Islam’s new central place was obvious in the transformations of the Muslim/Bosniak national identity, but it was actually much less noticeable in citizens’ daily behavior even though many people returned to religion on an individual basis. From this standpoint, there was no real re-Islamization in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The best indication of this reality is that, as Islam’s role in the public space grew, religious practice became increasingly assimilated to political careerism and religious hypocrisy. Thus, in everyday language, a former communist cadre who joined the SDA and became a practicing Muslim would be called a “Muslim ’92” (“Musliman ’92”) or a “watermelon” (“lubenica”), i.e. green on the outside but red on the inside. The Reis-ul-ulema himself had to take a stance against this underlying hostility to “new Muslims,” when in 1994 he told the faithful of the city of Gračanica:
Do not divide yourselves into “new” and “old” Muslims. You have always been Muslims and it must remain that way. For a period of time, things were awry, but you have now returned to the right path and are all lined up in a single row to preserve our religious, national, cultural and political existence.65
However, the idea of a fake and ostentatious return to Islam could be found even in the SDA press, with the newspaper Zmaj od Bosne (“The Dragon of Bosnia”) writing during the war:
Intellectuals behave in a certain way. Their servile mentality, a legacy of the old system, adapts crudely to another era. The servile intelligentsia has replaced Marx’s Capital not with the Qur’an, but with the surat Al-Fatihah [the first chapter of the Qur’an] … and this results in jostling in the front rows of the faithful.66
The Islamic Community and the SDA’s authoritarian attempts to re-Islamicize social life thus ultimately led to a certain disenchantment with religion. This reversal caused reconfigurations that were quite unexpected. Thus, accusations of religious hypocrisy leveled against former communist cadres were most often refuted by SDA and Islamic Community leaders, but willingly echoed by the civic opposition. As Islam took on a central place in the Bosniak national identity and the SDA state, it also became a target for gradual reappropriation by a multitude of social and political players. In January 1995, in an interview with the local newspaper Ratna tribina (“War Tribune”), Selim Bešlagić, the social-democratic mayor of Tuzla, presented himself without hesitation as a defender of the Qur’an to support his point of view:
Today, many people refer to the Qur’an. But they should not use this Holy Book for political purposes [because] it is written and does not require interpreters… I am reading it again at the moment, and I realize that, in its surats and its verses, there is room for everyone. We must [therefore] consider that Bosnia needs a united front.67
This kind of reappropriation of Islam could be found in the independent press. Also in Tuzla, a city with a particularly vibrant and diverse press, references to Islam were frequent in the verbal jousting between Zmaj od Bosne, Front slobode, and Tuzla-list. In the latter newspaper, for example, Šefket Vejzović contrasted a definition of Islam “according to the Qur’an,” i.e. as “religion and divine word,” with the definition given by Islamist writers, namely Islam as “revolutionary ideology and programme.” Vejzović then noted that “these are two different meanings of Islam, or even two Islams,” and asks Allah to “destine the Earth to all those who have a spirit and a soul, who think, do and preach good, and [to] wreak divine punishment in this world or the beyond on all the munafiks [hypocrites] and those who are human only in body, face and appearance.”68 By reappropriating Islam in this way, representatives of the civic forces helped weaken the monopoly held by the leaders of the Islamic Community and the SDA on the symbolic resources of Islam. These leaders were thus faced with an impossible predicament. Either they accepted this pluralist reappropriation of Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina and renounced using Islam for their own political and ideological purposes, or they attempted to maintain their monopoly on Islam and risked exacerbating the identity dilemmas and divisions afflicting the Bosniak community. In either case, the entire political system established by the SDA during the war was under the threat of collapsing.