Between Mosque and State: The Meaning of “Muslim” in Bosnia, 1918–47

From 1918 to 1947, Muslims in Yugoslavia were immersed in a lively debate over the place of Islam in European cultural and political life. Journals covering a range of opinions flooded local kiosks providing a forum for theologians, philosophers, intelligentsia, and politicians to debate the relationship among faith, social norms, and modern politics in a secularizing European nation-state. At the heart of the matter was an issue of definition that is still contested today: what does it mean to be a “European Muslim”—if indeed, such a category existed at all? By examining the discursive and legal shifts surrounding this question—focusing particularly on conflicts over property, marriage, and custody —this paper explores the blurry, shifting line between religious and secular identity at a critical moment of social transformation. In particular, it teases out the implications of the emergence of factions of Muslims seeking alliances with discrete national and international movements. These included Muslim Croats, Muslim Serbs, Muslim socialists, Muslim fascists, and Islamists, a group inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Each camp had its own idea of what it meant to be a Muslim in the post-Ottoman world, as well as what it meant to be a Muslim in Europe.  In examining the evolving dialogue—one that took place within the context of liberal, fascist, and socialist state policies that aimed to limit and secularize the Islamic Religious Community—the paper argues that Muslim leaders proactively adapted the norms and customs of the practice of Islam in order to preserve core facets of their collective life, rather than wait for the government to impose meaning on their community of faith.