 Unwilling
warriors
Bosnian Muslims
By Omer Hadziselimovic
November 19, 2003
The Iranian
When in the spring of 1991 the quarrels of Yugoslav nationalists "switched
from words to deeds," to use the Communist jargon, and when
the first armed conflicts in the country truly became a preview
of coming attractions, Bosnian Muslims were as obscure a nation
as any smallish people tucked away in an out-of-the-way corner
of the world. Until then they had been for the outside world
largely hidden by a broad and complex Yugoslav national nomenclature.
If you said to a Westerner, for example, that
you were a Bosnian or Yugoslav Muslim, you often got a baffled
smile or an unconvincing
nod in return. But when in the fall of 1991 talk began of an
independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, and when that independence
became effective--although costly in blood and lives--in 1992,
the Bosnian Muslims, perhaps for the first time truly, became
a nation for the rest of the world. Perhaps for themselves, too.
Who are the Bosnian Muslims? What is their identity
and how do they differ from other Balkan nations? How Muslim
or Islamic
are they? Are they connected to Arabs or Iranians? Are they,
because of the recent Balkan war, on the way to becoming militants
or terrorists?
Bosnian Muslims are a South Slavic people who
go back to the Middle Ages for their national, religious and
cultural roots.
And they, like the Serbs and the
Croats, may very well be connected with the Iranians: according to quite a few
historians, these nations came to the Balkans from somewhere north of the Caucasus,
where they had lived under the rule of Iranian nomadic tribes or had themselves
been Iranians who had conquered and assimilated Slavic populations before moving
westward.
The medieval Bosnian situation, with Catholicism,
Eastern Orthodoxy and Bogumil heresy (or "Bosnian Church"), all contending for primacy in a relatively
small area of the Balkan hinterland, created the conditions for the conversion
of many Bosnians to Islam. The conversion was a direct consequence of the Turkish
invasion of Bosnia in 1463 (Turkey was to rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina for
the next four hundred years) and it was largely non-violent.
Most people who
embraced Islam did so voluntarily and for a variety of reasons, of which
the psychological and the economic were the most prevalent. It
seems that the Bogumil
heretics, who had been especially severely persecuted by the Catholic-oriented
King Stjepan Tomas just before the Turkish invasion, were the most numerous
converts to Islam. Economic privileges granted the new converts
by the Turkish conquerors
were frequently quite substantial, in the form of land, offices, and titles.
Thus Islam has been part of Bosnia and Herzegovina's
historical and cultural landscape for over five hundred years.
In this time of close and intensive
coexistence with Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam in Bosnia and
Bosnian Muslims have
acquired a separate, unique identity. "I do not understand [Bosnian]
Islam," says
a character in a Bosnian historical novel. "Here [Islam] is both
religion and law, but more than anything else it is an attitude toward
life. ... Bosnian
Islam is more hard and inflexible, without the Eastern mysticism and
poetry, with less imagination but with more discipline; it is more severe
than [Turkish
Islam] for the believer but more tolerant of the non-coreligionist."
And yet, Islam in Bosnia is closest to its Turkish
variant, from which it is originally derived. It was the Turkish
administrators, religious
leaders
and
writers who influenced the Bosnian Muslim cultural elite. If they wanted
to go to Arabic or Iranian sources or authorities, Bosnians regularly
used Turks
as
cultural mediators. And although Bosnian Muslims have always spoken
Bosnian (or Serbo-Croatian, as it used to be called in much of
the former Yugoslavia)
and
very rarely Turkish, the language of the centuries-long rulers of Bosnia
left a strong imprint on the Bosnian vocabulary.
Some of the "Turcisms" have
become part of the Bosnian language, and even today do not have a
native, Slavic substitute--words for "color" (boja), "kidney" (bubreg), "cotton" (pamuk), "steel" (selik), "bed-sheet" (sarsaf)
etc. Bosnian Muslim first names, having come via Turkey and Turkish,
often differ, however slightly, from Arabic, Iranian or Indian Muslim
names. It is "Omer," not "Omar," "Ahmed" (or "Ahmet"),
not "Ahmad," "Serif," not "Sharif," "Besir," not "Bashir," and
so on. Also, Bosnians love shortened or hypocoristic names, so "Mustafa" is
usually "Mujo," "Abdulah"--"Avdo," "Muhamed"--"Hamo," "Sulejman"--"Suljo," "Mehmed"--"Meho," "Husein"--"Huso."
As a rule, the first name among the early converts
to Islam in the 15th and 16th centuries was "Abdullah," which
means "God's slave," but
the surname frequently remained the same as before, i.e., Christian.
The Christian family name has in numerous cases been retained
until it has lost its value as
a clear national or religious marker, like the surname "Filipovish," which
can be Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim in Bosnia or former Yugoslavia
today. (Muhamed Filipovish is, for example, the name of a Bosnian
philosopher and politician.)
Another "interdenominational" surname
is "Karadzic";
the Sarajevo prewar phone book lists ten Karadzices, most of whom
were Muslims, one
a Croat, and two or three Serbs--including Radovan Karadzic, the
indicted war criminal now sought by the Hague. (One would think
that a person with such an "impure" name--and
Turkish-derived at that--would find it quite frustrating to embark
on the career of a leading nationalist! But, as a Serbian humorist
once said, referring to
someone else and ridiculing paranoid Communist propaganda, "He
is a nationalist of all hues.")
Unlike the family name, for centuries the Bosnian
Muslims’ first name was
not a matter of compromise; it was always traditional and recognizably Islamic--Ibrahim,
D_emal, Esma, Emina. But in this century, and especially during the last two
generations coinciding with general secularization and Communist rule, many Muslims
started giving their children "neutral," cross-national, sometimes
newly invented names, usually based on or derived from words for trees, mountains,
natural phenomena: Jasenko ("aspen"), Jadranko ("Adriatic"),
Zlatan ("gold"), Planinka ("mountain"), Ognjenka ("fire").
These names were particularly popular in mixed marriages, in which
the naming children most often required a compromise, usually a
natural and
benign one.
In material culture and customs Bosnian Muslims
took over much from the Turks, so that mosques in Bosnia look
mostly like those
in Turkey
and
are unlike
those in the Arab world, or in India, for instance. (Today, many
of these mosques,
including several time-honored landmarks from the sixteenth century,
no longer exist; they were destroyed in the recent war.) Traditionally,
houses
often
had the characteristic second-story overhang and latticed windows,
so women could
look out on the courtyard or the street but could not be seen from
outside.
In interior furnishings, cushions and carpets were
emphasized rather
than tables and chairs, which were a nineteenth-century "European" arrival.
A typical--and usually the only--seating piece that looked like
Western-style furniture was
the sesija, a long box-like sofa covered with mattresses and cushions
used as a back-rest. It ran the whole length of a wall (sometimes
two walls) and was
aligned with the windows. The mattresses and cushions, which were
filled with wool, cotton or straw and often placed on the floor
to provide
additional seating,
reflect the Bosnian Muslims' love of physical comfort, while the
sesija's fixed place by the windows testifies to the high regard
the Bosnians
had for a view
from their houses.
In the past, Bosnian Muslims wore Turkish-style
clothes, which included the unavoidable baggy trousers, turbans
or fezzes and
veils for women.
Nowadays,
most tradition-oriented
Muslim men in Bosnia are recognized by what is for the outsiders
a quite subtle sign--a black beret. Muslims ordinarily take off
their shoes on
entering the
house (as they do on entering the mosque), and when indoors feel
most
comfortable in stocking feet. This custom is often shared by Bosnian
Serbs and Croats
too.
So, when the contemporary Bosnian Muslim author
Nedzad Ibrihimovic writes, with deliberate pathos, during the
current war and out
of the besieged Sarajevo, "Take
off your shoes when you enter Bosnia," he creates an appropriate
image of his war-ravaged country, one easily understood by Bosnians.
The image and the
metaphorical reverberations point to the violation and rape of
Bosnia and its unique culture, a culture which Serb and Croat nationalists
now deny. This denial
is the more absurd since the nationalists, by destroying the common
store of Bosnian culture, are undercutting part of their own cultural
heritage
as well.
For just as a Catholic or an Orthodox church or shrine is frequently
a centuries-old landmark in a predominantly Muslim town in Bosnia,
so is a mosque or a Turkish
clock-tower often an inevitable element in the landscape of a mostly
Serb or Croat community there.
Bosnian Muslims traditionally observe the taboo
of not eating pork. This dietary interdiction began to break
down for many Muslims
a few decades
ago, although
a majority still shun pork. There are people who never buy pork
and never prepare it at home, but who would not mind having it
at another
person's
home or at
a restaurant. This modern looseness is reminiscent of the anecdote
about a Bosnian
village which, in early times, decided one fall that it would embrace
Islam, but not till the following spring, after it had eaten its
already prepared
store of pork meat!
Another Islamic prohibition--has never been
much observed by Bosnian
Muslims, especially among men, and Sljivovica, or plum brandy,
has been so popular that it has been honored with the status of
the "Muslim national drink." Interestingly,
wine has never quite caught on and is avoided more scrupulously.
Wine has all along been considered a more outlandish drink and
associated
with other Balkan
regions, particularly Dalmatia.
Bosnian Muslims, a small nation of about two million
surrounded by larger nations, both in Bosnia and Herzegovina
and beyond it,
have
felt acutely
all the vicissitudes
of Balkan history. Never an absolute majority, and for most of
their history not even a relative majority in Bosnia, they sought,
especially
in the
20th century, a political modus vivendi with their neighbors. This
often involved
a quest for
their fuller identity as well; being ethnic and linguistic first
cousins of Serbs and Croats, speaking the same language and looking
the same,
they often
had trouble
seeing who they really were and how different they felt.
In times
of peace--in the last decades of the Yugoslav federation, for instance--they
felt quite
comfortable striking a balance between Serbs and Croats in Bosnia
and
the wider Balkan area;
at times of conflict and war, their position was precarious, as
their identity was more radically questioned by others and even
by themselves.
For nationalistic
Serbs, they were "Islamicized Serbs"; for nationalistic
Croats, they were "Muslim Croats." In addition, a number
of Muslim intellectuals within the last hundred years or so identified
themselves as Serbs
or Croats. This self-questioning was perhaps best expressed by
the Bosnian
Muslim author
Mesa Selimovic (1910-1982) in his novel The Dervish and Death,
published in 1966. Here is what he says about Bosnian Muslims,
stressing their
struggle with the
question of their common ancestry with Serbs and Croats:
The most complicated people on earth. History
never played such a joke at anybody's expense as it did at ours.
Until yesterday
we were
that
which today
we want
to forget. But we have not become something else either. We have
stopped half-way, astonished. We can no longer go anywhere. We
have been torn
off from one body
but have not been accepted by any other. Like a backwater which
a torrent has separated from the mainstream, with no longer a course
or a mouth,
too small
to be a lake, too big for the earth to absorb. With a vague feeling
of shame because of our origin, and guilt because of our apostasy,
we do
not want
to look
backward though we have nowhere to look forward to; so we are stopping
the flow of time in fear of any solution. We are despised by our
brothers and
by newcomers,
and we shield ourselves with pride and with hatred.
This kind of national soul-searching led Mesa
Selimovic to declare himself a Serb author toward the end of
his life, one writing in
the Serbian
vein and within
the Serbian literary tradition. Ironically, all his best work is
immersed in Bosnia, its history and traditions, particularly that
of the Muslim
community. Equally ironically, and equally strangely, The Dervish
and Death does not
include
any Serb or Croat characters, only Muslim.
In trying to articulate their national and political
identity, Bosnian Muslims have also searched for a proper national
name,
particularly
in the last hundred
years or so. Historically, during the entire Turkish rule, they
called themselves "Bosnjaci" or "Turci"--Turks,
because they identified with the ruling power and its (and their) "Turkish" faith,
as they called it. The real Turks they called either "Osmanlije" (Osmanlis)
or "Turkuse," terms with little tenderness in them, as
there was among Bosnian Muslims an undercurrent of chronic suspicion
and animosity towards the
Turkish administrators and their main and most visible exponent--the
land's governor.
The term "Bosnjak" (Bosniak) was replaced
during Austro-Hungarian rule by the word "Muhamedanac" ("Mohammedan"),
but that was not accepted by the people. After 1900, the name "Muslim" became
prevalent and was used more or less consistently in the twentieth
century. It became the
official term for census and other purposes after the Muslims were
recognized as a separate nation in the late 1960s, following decades
of existing in a state
of limbo. Before that, they could state that they were nationally "undeclared" or "undetermined" or
could, if they so wished, identify themselves as Croats or Serbs,
as some did. In the 1971 census the Muslims appeared for the first
time as a legitimate nation
in Bosnia, or Yugoslavia, equal in name and status with Serbs and
Croats. In the 1991 Bosnian/Herzegovinian census, Muslims stood
for 43% of the country's
population, Serbs for 31%, and Croats for 17%. The rest were "Yugoslavs" and
others.
But this does not end the story of the Bosnian
Muslims' name. Before the collapse of Communism, a movement was
started to change the
nation's name
from what
many perceived as an inadequate, religion-based term, to one that
would reflect better
the nation's link with the country. And so Muslim intellectuals
came up with the old, historical name of "Bosnjaci." The
name was semi-officially installed as the new appellation for Muslims
by Bosnian Muslim intellectuals
and political and religious leaders in Sarajevo in the fall of
1993. But the name sounds like a linguistic anachronism, especially
to the younger generation,
who will probably take some time accepting it.
"Bosnjaci" also
clashes with the more modern "Bosanci" (Bosnians), a
term which has for decades denoted all the inhabitants of Bosnia,
regardless of their national membership.
Furthermore, if "Bosnjaci," containing the name of the
country, comes to mean only Muslims, that excludes other Bosnian
nations, or parts of them,
which also consider Bosnia their homeland. Many Bosnian Croats
(and also the representatives of the Catholic Church in Bosnia),
have thus expressed their
dissatisfaction with the name "Bosnjaci" referring only
to the Muslims. "We
are Bosniaks, too," they rightly say, although most of them
after the recent war probably prefer the name "Croat."
It should be emphasized that "nation-naming" and national identification
in the Balkans is a relatively new phenomenon; until well into the nineteenth
century, even the "older" nations like Serbs and Croats thought of
themselves primarily as Orthodox or Catholics rather than as Serbs and Croats.
The name of a nation is not important, and as long as there is no need for a
more precise name (that need usually coincides with a new, consolidated national
awareness), the old name serves its purpose well. Americans, for instance, were
quite comfortable with the name of "Englishmen" until
the 1760s.
Parallel with the change of the Bosnian Muslim’s national name, the name
of the language in Bosnia is being transformed from "Serbo-Croatian" to "Bosnian." This
is another political decision, which has elements of a forced move, because in
a situation when all Croats call the common language Croatian, and Serbs Serbian,
the Muslims felt that the only natural thing would be to call it at least Bosnian.
That also happens to be the traditional, historical name for the language in
Bosnia among Muslims. (Serb and Croat nationalists have virtually banished the
word "Bosnia" or "Bosnian" from their vocabulary.)
Muslim nationalism, which lived its heyday in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, was a relatively mild affair
compared to its western
and eastern
counterparts,
those of Serbia and Croatia. It has never acquired the expansionist
dimensions so characteristic of its neighbors. It concentrated
on Bosnia and Herzegovina:
Muslims never thought they had resort in another, "reserve" homeland,
as their Bosnian Croat and Serb neighbors did. Although charged with Islamic
fundamentalism by the chauvinists among their neighbors, they recently chose,
and insisted upon, not the crescent but a medieval (and Christian) fleur-de-lis
emblem for the Bosnian flag. (After the Dayton Accord, the country’s flag
was changed into a nation-neutral, history-neutral flag, echoing European-Union
iconography.)
No worse and no better than their Serb and Croat
neighbors, except in the recent war, where they were "better"
victims, Bosnian Muslims
sometimes commit the error of thinking they are the only true Bosnians,
the only representatives and defenders of the elusive yet enduring "Bosnianness" of
the country they share with others. But a more prevalent sentiment
among them, especially in times of conflict, is probably that of unrequited
love, love which
they expect but do not get from their neighbors.
Also, in peacetime,
politically and physically positioned between Serbs and Croats,
they always longed for their
neighbors to agree and live in harmony, suffering because of their
disputes,
like children covering their ears when their parents are quarrelling.
By virtue of this position, and with a deep sense of tradition
of cultural interaction
with others, even among the uneducated classes, Muslims have preferred
a civic to an ethnic state. Small wonder then that at the beginning
of the disintegration
of Yugoslavia in 1990/91 Bosnian Muslim leaders insisted on a federation,
or confederation, that would include both Croatia and Serbia and
would not side
with either.
The position of Muslims in Bosnia can be illustrated
by the case of wartime Sarajevo, where a psychological gradation
was visible
among
the city's
different nations.
The Serb extremists' leaders knew full well that if you encircled
a city and let it soak in its own juice long enough, you were likely
to produce
internal
discord. Serbs, Muslims, Croats, Jews and others, though feeling
equally
victimized by Serb shelling, must surely have begun thinking differently
about the whole
situation under such trying conditions.
Differently from before
the war, that is, when most thought of Sarajevo-Bosnia-Yugoslavia
as
their own
city-republic-country. While other groups could now think (of course,
some never did) that "this
is not our war--this is a Serb-Muslim conflict," "I do
not belong here," "I
am, after all, not one of them," and so on, Muslims by and
large did not have a choice but to think of Bosnia as their country
and Sarajevo
as its capital,
which before the war was 49% Muslim, 29% Serb and 7% Croat. Muslims
could not easily, though many did so, seek a psychological and
physical way
out, a separation.
They did not have a place or a country to flee to, like a Belgrade
or a Zagreb, a Serbia or a Croatia.
But in spite of isolated incidents, Sarajevo's
wartime conditions never produced the intra-national hatred the
besiegers longed for.
Sarajevans,
like Bosnians
generally, have, to quote the novelist Miroslav Karaulac, "acquired the
fatal habit of living together, a quality which the various armies now fighting
one another are ... attempting to correct."
As elsewhere in Bosnia, Muslims
could not, even if they wanted to, play the "role model" assigned
to them by their nationalistic enemies--that of mujahedin and Islamic
fundamentalists.
To reach that, they would have to travel a long way, shedding their
Western and secular orientation. But nothing is impossible, in the
long run,
and if the newly
fabricated nationalisms and intolerance continue, Muslim culture in
Bosnia probably can be bent into something it was not before. Author
Omer Hadziselimovic, formerly Professor
of English at the University of Sarajevo (1972-1994), is now an independent
scholar living in the U.S.; he is currently teaching at Lake
Forest College and Loyola
University Chicago. Hadziselimovic is author of several dozen articles, reviews,
and translations in the fields of American Studies, English literature, and
travel writing. His books include Messages and Responses: The
American Social Novel
in the Criticism in the Serbo-Croatian Language from 1918 to 1941), Sarajevo,
1980; and (editor) At
the Gates of the East: British Travel Writers on Bosnia and Herzegovina from
the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, Boulder, Colorado/New
York, 2001.
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Unwilling
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