A Bosnian intellectual confronts a thorny topic: the national identity of Bosnian Muslims
In his polemical article “Only a Crazy Muslim…”, published in Prometej, Bosnian intellectual Tarik Haverić confronts a thorny and emotionally charged topic: the national identity of Bosnian Muslims. Written three decades after the horror of the Srebrenica massacre, the piece strikes a raw nerve in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In the deeply fractured Balkan country where memory and trauma shape politics, Haverić poses a fundamental question: what forges national identity – culture, religion, language or DNA? Rejecting rigid views that tie national identity solely to religion, Haverić presents a more flexible model: the Bosnian Muslim subject should be free to “shift” (vrdati) their self-identification according to their situation.
Haverić traces the contested history of the term “Bosniaks” (Bošnjaci), now commonly used for Bosnian Muslims. It was only at the First Bosniak Assembly in September 1993, amid the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, that the name was reintroduced to denote Bosnian Muslims – “as if they hadn’t vigorously rejected it themselves!” he retorts.
The article challenges influential views on Bosnian Muslim identity. One belongs to Sunni theologian Mehmed Handžić, whose History of the Bosniaks enjoys cult status among contemporary Bosniak readers – “mostly because it lacks footnotes,” Haverić remarks cheekily, “which tend to exhaust the Bosnian Muslim subject.”
Handžić’s 1940 treatise, The Islamisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Origin of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims, aimed to prove that Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina are indigenous, not newcomers. Yet, even in a follow-up text from 1941, Patriotism, Nationality and Nationalism from the Islamic Perspective, Handžić avoided clearly delineating their nationality.
Haverić attributes Handžić’s reluctance to define Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim nationality to the subordination of all identities to the universal community of believers (umma) in traditional Islam. The umma was a primary identification that, through centuries of Ottoman rule, filled Bosnian Muslims with pride.
Until Yugoslav times, children memorised the following lines from the religious education textbook Sual i dževab (Question and Answer): “The teacher, the hodža, asks the question, the pupil answers, for example: – What are you? – I am a Turk, a mumin, a Muslim, alhamdulillah.”
Haverić picks apart the essentialist and anti-secularist bias of Handžić’s position. The French, he contends, are neither Catholic nor Huguenot; they have abandoned religion as a marker of their national identity. Today, there are “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Orthodox, Muslim, Evangelical, Mormon, Hindu, and even atheist (naletosun!) French.” (A loanword from Turkish, “naletosun” is an exclamation that roughly translates to “damn it!” or “to hell with it!”)
Accordingly, in the Balkans there have long been Muslim Croats and Serbs, such as the late 18th-century Ottoman Bosnian military leader Smail-aga Šarić, who once exclaimed: “I am a Serb, alhamdulillah! Long live King Peter!”
Amid this confusing medley of identities, the theologian Handžić bluntly stated in 1941: “Only a mad Muslim could embrace a nationalism that included even the slightest element from a faith other than exalted Islam.” Strikingly, just six months later, Handžić enthusiastically embraced the creation of a fascist puppet regime in his homeland: “By the boundless will of God… He has bestowed upon us, as a blessing, the Independent State of Croatia!”
However, if “only a mad Muslim” accepts a non-Muslim nationality, Haverić rightly asks, how did Muslims come to embrace Croatness, defined by Catholicism? Either they all went mad overnight or they came to a sobering realisation: in the face of war, the wisdom of 7th-century ḥadīths held little weight. The community had to make radical decisions grounded not in theology but harsh political reality.
For Handžić, only Muslims see Bosnia as their homeland – everyone else betrays it when convenient. Haverić accuses Handžić of resorting to “patriotic chest-thumping” when asserting: “When it comes to the interests of this homeland of ours, almost no one participates in the effort except the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims.”
An alternative theory of Bosnian Muslim identity came from politician Suljaga Salihagić, who outlined his position in the 1940 pamphlet We, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims within the Yugoslav Community. He advocated for a “wavering” stance in political affairs: those at each other’s throats yesterday might be embracing and kissing today.
Similarly, one could not blame Muslims seeking help from non-Muslims: “We want to survive, and we have the right to that – that is our struggle for survival.” Despite adopting such a strategy of “shifting” (vrdanje), Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims suffered devastating losses in WWII and the Yugoslav breakup in the 1990s, exposing a trend of fatal decisions by their leaders which, for Haverić, persists.
So, when and how did Bosnian Muslims adopt the name “Bosniaks”? According to Mustafa Imamović, Bosniaks are defined by “Islam, together with the medieval Bosnian heresy that preceded it.” But are the Bošnjaci a distinct national community or merely a part of the larger umma?
Haverić insists on preserving the historical ambivalence that clashes with “today’s official version of Bosniak autofiction, which claims that they had always been aware of their national distinctiveness, but others denied them the right to a name and existence.”
There was strong controversy before Bošnjaci was accepted as an ethnonym. In the 1991 booklet Muslims and Bosniakhood, Mustafa Imamović claimed that the name of the “Islamised Slavs in the Yugoslav historical space” is Muslims, who consciously chose to abandon Bosniak identification. (There was, however, a strong pro-Bosniak sentiment among the diaspora.)
Haverić sees dissent on questions of religious and national identity as stifled today. Paradoxically, the old dogma that one couldn’t be both Muslim and nationally conscious has flipped: now, to be Bosniak, one must be Muslim. However, there’s hope: “whenever faced with a moral crossroads, the Bosnian Muslim subject boldly and decisively marches forward.”
Original article (“Samo lud musliman…”) by Tarik Haverić first published on 27 March.
It’s available here.
Based in Sarajevo, Prometej is a socio-cultural website advocating for a unified yet decentralised Bosnia and Herzegovina, embracing its religious diversity and grounded in the principles of secularism.
Summary by IJ
