hugh poulton the muslim experience in the balkan states (1919-1991)

Nationalities Papers, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2000

THE MUSLIM EXPERIENCE IN THE BALKAN STATES,1919–19911

Hugh Poulton

During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire retreated from the Balkans, andunderwent a steady decline culminating in its � nal demise in the early part of thetwentieth century. Sizeable communities of Muslims, derived both from those whohad arrived with the Ottomans and from indigenous inhabitants who had convertedto Islam, remained in the new successor states of southeast Europe. With theexception of Albania, where the Muslims formed the majority of the population,these communities became established as minorities within the new states. Upheld asethno-national states each based on one dominant nation, the new states sufferedfrom irredentism on the one hand, and internal tension between majority andminority populations on the other. Tension was particularly evident in the relationsbetween the new Orthodox Christian rulers and their Muslim minority populations,which were seen as undesirable relics from the Ottoman past. In spite of suchattitudes and the continuing waves of emigration, however, these Muslim communi-ties remain an integral part of the present-day Balkans.

In spite of claims to the contrary,2 all the Balkan states are new states, the earliestof which only appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The nationalistideology that penetrated the Balkans from western and central Europe in the courseof the nineteenth century, and which contributed to the demise of the OttomanEmpire, was essentially a secular ideology. However, the close correlation betweenreligion and ethnic or national identity in in the Balkan context, which can be seenas a legacy of the Ottoman millet system, issued in an entwining of nationalism andreligion, and of national and religious identities. This was especially so in the caseof Orthodox Christianity, and is apparent even today in Greece, where Orthodoxy,ethnicity, and citizenship are often confused.3 Furthermore, the Balkan peninsula isvery mountainous and communications have in the past been dif� cult. This geogra-phy has historically contributed to a situation where communities tend to be inwardlooking and compartmentalised, rather than outward looking and uni� ed.

The Muslim communities of the Balkans are predominately Sunni. However, theheteredox Bektashi Su� sect4 was widespread among Albanians in the south centralregions, and the associated Kõ zõ lbash õ sect has been evident in the Dobrudzharegion.5 While the penetration of Islam had already begun before the Ottomaninvasion,6 this brought large numbers of Muslims from Anatolia and other parts ofthe Empire into the Balkans. While most of these were Turkish speakers, they also

ISSN 0090-5992 print; 1465-3923 online/00/010045-22 Ó 2000 Association for the Study of Nationalities

H. POULTON

included other Turkic groups, Circassians, and other Muslim groups. Traces of thesegroups do remain, but on the whole they have gradually become assimilated into thethree main linguistic branches of Balkan Islam: the Turkish, Albanian, and Slavicspeaking concentrations.

Following on the Ottoman invasion, sizeable groups of indigenous inhabitantsconverted to the religion of their new rulers. These included the majority of theAlbanians, the Pomaks (Islamicised Slavs) of the Rhodope mountains, and Serbo-Croat-speaking Slavs in Bosnia-Hercegovina and the SandzÏ ak. In addition, manyGreeks, Slavs, and Vlachs7 in what is present-day Greece converted to Islam, butwere expelled to the Republic of Turkey during the 1920s, following the defeat ofGreece by the forces of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) in 1922. In these populationexchanges some 390,000 Muslims emigrated to Turkey and some one millionOrthodox people left Turkey, of whom some 540,000 settled in Greek Macedoniaalong with about 100,000 more Greek refugees who had come before 1920. In theseexchanges, due to the in� uence of the millet system (see below), religion notethnicity or language was the key factor, with all the Muslims expelled from Greeceseen as “Turks,” and all the Orthodox people expelled form Turkey seen as “Greeks”regardless of mother tongue or ethnicity.

Ottoman rule in the Balkans was essentially non-assimilative and “multinational”in spirit. It also lacked the technological and institutional facilities for integrating andunifying subject peoples: in contrast, in western Europe states were for the most partable to transcend regional loyalties and lay the foundations for the new nation states.As a result the peoples of the Balkans were able to retain their separate identities andcultures. Many were also able to keep alive a sense of a former glorious history,when they had controlled a particular territorial area. During the national awakeningsof the nineteenth century such claims were revived, often at the expense ofneighbours who made similar historical claims to the same territory.8

The Millet System

The arrival of Islam in the Balkans through the Ottoman conquest was of particularsigni� cance, as the Empire was ruled in theory by Islamic precepts for most of itsexistence. In line with these, the Empire was divided not along ethno-linguistic linesbut by religious af� liation—the millet system;9 this system remained in place untilchanges beginning with the Tanzimat reforms from the mid nineteenth century. Inaccordance with traditional Islamic beliefs that uphold them as “People of the Book,”the Christian and Jewish populations were readily accepted; Muslim tolerance wasillustrated by the acceptance of large numbers of Jews, for example, as in the caseof the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the late� fteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of whom settled in Salonika, which becamepredominately Jewish. Within the Islamic Ottoman state the millet system achieveda separation of the different religious groups, with speci� c regulations governing, for

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MUSLIMS IN THE BALKANS, 1919–1991

example, the colour and type of clothing Jewish and Christian subjects werepermitted to wear.

Leaders of the various millets enjoyed wide jurisdiction over their members, whowere bound by their own regulations rather than the Shariat (Islamic Law). TheOttoman state treated the millets like corporate bodies. It encouraged the perpetua-tion of their own internal structures and hierarchies by dealing exclusively with theirleaders as opposed to the individual members. These structures included educationalsystems speci� c to each religious community. The millet became established as theprime focus of identity outside of family and locality, bequeathing a legacy of aconfusion in modern times between concepts of citizenship, religion, and ethnicity.Furthermore, as the millet system placed control of education and much of themillet’s internal affairs in the hands of the millet hierarchy, and hence beyond of� cialstate control, it proved ideally suited to the transmission of the new ideology ofnationalism intruding from the West. This was especially so in the case of theChristian millets in spite of frequent tension between the traditional millet leadersand the new nationalist radicals.

The system was also an ideal tool for assimilating different Orthodox people intoa single national body, and the Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul controlled the milletinto which the Orthodox Balkan populations were organised. Until the nineteenthcentury, when the Bulgarian Exarchate Church was � nally established (see below),only the Serbs escaped Greek spiritual tutelage for the majority of the period underOttoman rule, due to the granting of the autocephalous patriarchate in Pec in 1557.The autocephalous Archbishopric of Ohrid, demoted from a patriarchate followingSamuil’s defeat by Basil II, had become a Greek institution, ceasing to be head ofan autocephalous church in 1772. For centuries the non-Greek Orthodox populations(i.e., Slavs, Albanians, Vlachs, Roma) under the control of the Phanariot Greeks andthe Istanbul Patriarchate were (consciously or not) subject to being Hellenicised. TheBulgarian case illustrates clearly the implications of the fact that the millet systempermitted control of Christian populations by a speci� c church. Following theOttoman invasion, the separate Bulgarian church and its corresponding educationalsystem were placed under the control of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the GreekPatriarch in Istanbul. Prior to the Bulgarian national revival in the nineteenth century,it can thus be argued that the Bulgarians faced as serious a threat of assimilationfrom the Greeks, who controlled religious services and education, both of whichwere held in Greek, as they did from the Ottoman Turks. As far as the ChristianBulgarians were concerned, the illiterate peasants in the countryside spoke the Slavvernacular, while the urban educated became Hellenicised and spoke Greek.

While the Christian population hence faced a threat of ethnic assimilation arisingout of the nature of the millet system itself, Muslim populations in the OttomanEmpire clearly faced a parallel threat of Turki� cation. It is important to note,however, that the Ottoman state recognised no of� cial differentiation by language orethnicity among its Muslim citizens: the modern notion of being a “Turk” was until

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H. POULTON

the end of the nineteenth century alien to the Ottoman elites, who regardedthemselves as “Ottomans” rather than “Turkish.” In fact the term “Turk” had theconnotation of being an uneducated peasant. Ottoman Turkish, the language of state,was not the vernacular of the mass of the Turkish-speaking population, and alongwith being a Muslim, knowledge of it was a requirement of high of� ce in theOttoman state.10 Ethnicity per se was not a factor in this respect and many GrandVezirs and high of� cials were originally from Albanian, Muslim Slav, or otherOttoman Muslim populations. Indeed when the devsirme system—whereby thesubject Christian populations had to give up a number of their most able sons, whowere then educated and raised as Muslims to run the Empire in both civilian andmilitary capacities—was still in operation (it fell into abeyance in the seventeenthcentury and had disappeared by the eighteenth) the state of� cials were necessarilyfrom non-Turkish Christian backgrounds. In spite of this, however, vernacularTurkish became widespread as the mother tongue among the Muslim populations(and even the Christian populations) of Anatolia, although this process was lesspronounced in the Balkans.

Muslim Identity

A crucial legacy of the millet system has been to raise questions concerning thenational/ethnic identity of Muslims in the Balkans. A consistent thread in recentBalkan history has been the change from Muslim identity solely based upon Islam,to one in which an ethnic content has become an important factor. It is noticeablethat in the main the new Muslim political elites couch their programmes in terms andlanguage that are essentially secular. However, such a shift has been relatively easyfor groups like ethnic Turks or Muslim ethnic Albanians whose identity is differen-tiated from Orthodox Christians by language as well as by religion and religiouscustoms. Additionally both these groups have kin states in the regions to provideboth emotional and at times material support, and, as shown below, there has beena tendency for these groups to assimilate smaller Muslim groups cohabiting withthem. For others, especially Muslim Slavs who share the language with the respect-ive majority Christian population, the situation is very different.

The situation of the Slav Muslims in Bosnia-Hercegovina and the SandzÏ ak andhow their separate identity has evolved and strengthened are detailed below. Anotherexample illustrative of changes in national identity, especially of minorities whosedistinctiveness from the majority is based almost exclusively on their religiousadherence and traditional related customs, is the situation of the Bulgarian Pomakcommunity of Islamicised Slavs living predominately in the central Rhodope moun-tains. The state has oscillated between viewing them on the one hand as aliens whoshould be encouraged to go to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and on the other as agroup who should be assimilated, forcibly if necessary, into the Bulgarian nation.During the Balkan Wars there were forcible conversions of Rhodope Pomaks to

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Orthodox Christianity as well as massacres. This policy of forced conversion andname changing from Islamic forms to Bulgarian ones was soon abandoned. In the1920s and 1930s there was a movement among some of Bulgaria’s intellectuals toview religion as not being of paramount importance and thus to view the Pomaks aspart of the national body, and Rodina, a cultural-educational organisation, was set upin 1937 to further this aim. The Koran was translated into Bulgarian and a RhodopeMufti separate from the central Turkish one was set up. In 1942, the practice offorcibly christening all new-born children with Bulgarian names was introduced andthe National Assembly introduced a law to facilitate the changing of names of adults:many Rhodope Pomaks, either voluntarily or under pressure, changed their names.The Communists initially changed all this and in October 1945 a decree restored oldMuslim names.11 However, following the rise of Todor Zhivkov in the 1950s,Communist Bulgaria progressively pursued a policy of homogenisation of its minor-ities and the Pomaks were subject to severe pressure to assimilate and become partof “the uni� ed Bulgarian socialist nation.” At the same time, in the eastern Rhodope,where the Pomak and the ethnic Turkish communities overlap, the BulgarianCommunist Party’s policy was to view the Pomaks in these areas as essentiallystandard bearers of Bulgarian identity among the Turkish mass, and correspondinglythe Pomaks there were given a privileged position (most party bosses and factoryheads in these areas were Pomaks rather than ethnic Turks). This has led, despite themillet legacy which would encourage intermarriage and assimilation, to a separationof the two communities.

Since the fall of Zhivkov and the end of the Communist era, the Pomakcommunity, estimated to number some 250,000, has displayed different tendencies atdifferent times. In the early 1990s there was a strong movement of Pomaks in thewestern Rhodope (where they did not cohabit with Turks) to self-identify as Turks.This has declined in recent years along with the beginnings of a possible movetowards the creation of a separate “Pomak” identity12 similar to that which hasoccurred in Bosnia with the adoption of the term “Bosniak” to denote Slav Muslimsthere.13 The basis for this view seems to be the large numbers—65,000 as per the1992 census—who declared themselves as “Muslims,” “Pomaks,” “Bulgarian Mo-hammedans,” and the like. On the other hand, the use of terms like “BulgarianMohammedans”—a term used by the Zhivkov regime to denote Pomaks (and laterethnic Turks as well) and one that a practising Muslim would be very loathe touse—perhaps merely illustrates the present temporary confusion over national self-identi� cation of such groups, rather than a process like that in Bosnia where a largerand more dominant group had previously been recognised as a separate “nation” ofYugoslavia and whose identity has been cemented during the course of a war.14

Balkan Nationalism and the Creation of the Modern State

The dynamics of nationalism in the Balkans appear to correspond to a paradigm ofchange from pre-modern agrarian systems to those based on idealised nation states,

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as put forward by Ernest Gellner.15 This model stresses in particular the roleof culture and education, distinguishing in pre-modern societies between theof� cial “high” culture of the state and its rulers, and the “low” cultures of the generalpopulation, which were often very local in nature and varied considerably.Gellner argues that a modern economy depends both on mobility and on communi-cation between individuals, which can be realised only if the people have beensocialised into a single high culture, thereby enabling them to communicate properlywith each other. Only a relatively monolithic education system can achieve thissocialisation.16

Thus, for Gellner, “nationalism is essentially the general imposition of a highculture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of themajority, and in some cases the totality of the population.” This necessitates the“generalised diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom.” As mo-bility of labour is essential in a modern society with individuals required if necessaryto move from one occupation to another within a single lifespan due to constantinnovation, what is needed is “[t]he establishment of an anonymous, impersonalsociety, with mutually substitutable atomised individuals held together by a sharedculture of this [high] kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups,sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves.”17

In contrast, nationalists usually claim the reverse, maintaining that they are actingin the name of a putative, often imaginary, folk culture. This accounts for theransacking of history which nationalists tend to indulge in. Indeed Gellner seesthe intelligentsia as the prime movers, who often invent the past completely to � t therequirements of the “imagined community.” In this context, it should be noted thatsuch inventions and distortions are not the prerogative of nationalists alone, as shownby Hobsbawm and others,18 who demonstrate how similar methods have been usedby a variety of people and interest groups to help forge or strengthen a commonidentity or allegiance. The term “imagined” here refers to the “imagined community”as coined by Benedict Anderson.19 In the Ottoman context, for the mass of thepopulation the “real” community was the village whose inhabitants one personallyknew, while the “imagined” one was the religious community as per the milletsystem. In the post-Ottoman period the “nation” (however de� ned) competed for theallegiance of the religious “imagined” community.

Gellner posits the high cultures of the agrarian age as the minority accomplish-ments of privileged specialists. These were differentiated from fragmented, un-codi� ed, majority folk cultures, and tended and indeed aimed to be trans-ethnic andtranspolitical, and frequently employed a dead or archaic idiom with no interestwhatsoever in ensuring continuity between its mode of communication and that ofthe majority. In contrast with the privileged specialists, the mass of the people wereexcluded both from power and from the high culture, being tied to a faith and achurch rather than to a state and a pervasive culture.20 The case of the Ottoman

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Empire � ts in well with this view. As shown above, the population was divided byreligion, and the language of the state elite was sharply differentiated from that of themasses by being a mixture of demotic Turkish, Arabic, and Persian which wasdif� cult to understand and use. By contrast an industrial high culture is no longerlinked—whatever its history—to a faith or a church, and it requires “the resourcesof a state co-extensive with society rather than merely those of a church superim-posed on it.”21 However, as indicated above, the Orthodox Church in states likemodern Greece has tended to become intimately entwined with the idea of the nationand thus in such cases the pre-modern imagined community has become confusedwith the modern one—i.e. the nation.

The Break-up of the Ottoman Empire: Muslims in Orthodox Christian NationalStates

The Orthodox Christian national states arising from the Ottoman Empire wereBulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia. However, after the First World War, thelatter two became incorporated into the multinational, multi-religious Yugoslav state.The gradual loss of Ottoman control in the Balkans in the nineteenth century waswitnessed by the emergence of small states at the periphery of the peninsula. Firstto break away were Serbia in the north and Greece in the south; but these were joinedlater by Romania and Bulgaria, as well as well as Montenegro. All these newnational states followed policies of aggressive expansion to enlarge themselves, andto incorporate their perceived fellow nationals. Initially, this expansion was at theexpense of the decaying Ottoman Empire, but by the early twentieth centuryexpanding states like Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia were directly competing with eachother for some regions—most notably Macedonia.

In the aftermath of the establishment of the new Bulgaria following the Russo-Turkish War of 1875–1878, large numbers of Muslims emigrated to the rumpOttoman Empire. This process, which was not con� ned to Bulgaria alone, hascontinued, with sizeable groups of Muslims (Slavs and Albanians as well as Turks)later emigrating to what became the Republic of Turkey. After 1953, Tito’sYugoslavia permitted the extensive emigration of “Turks,” a term that in practiceextended to Muslim Albanians and Slavs as well as ethnic Turks, to Turkey.Non-Turkish elements in this ongoing stream of migrants quickly became assimi-lated into the new Turkish identity propagated since the establishment of theKemalist state in Turkey. Turks in Greece have continuously emigrated to Turkey;this process has been facilitated by Article 19 of the current Greek Nationality Lawwhich the Greek state has used to deny re-entry to Turks, and to deprive ethnic Turkswho leave the country, even for temporary periods, of their Greek citizenship.22

There remain close connections between Turkey and Muslim communities in theBalkans, many of which are themselves made up from ethnic Turks. Turkey also has

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an interest in maintaining close ties with Turkish Muslims who have emigrated fromTurkey to western Europe.23

In spite of the considerable emigration of Muslims from the Balkans to Turkey,sizeable Muslims communities remained in the new states. In Bulgaria, for example,a large number of Turks remained in the southern part of the country aroundKardzhali, as well as in the northeast. Large numbers of Turks also remained in whatbecame Yugoslavia, concentrated predominately in Macedonia, as well as in Greecein western Thrace. The latter were exempted from the forced population transfers (ofChristians to Greece from Asia Minor, and Muslims from Greece to Turkey)following Mustafa Kemal’s victory over the Greeks in Anatolia in 1922. AlongsideTurks, Albanians also formed a signi� cant Muslim group. There were also regionalconcentrations of Slavs who had been Islamicised, most notably in Bosnia-Hercegovina but also in the SandzÏ ak plus the Pomaks of the Rhodope mountains inwhat became Bulgaria and Greece. Other Pomaks, known as Torbeshi, resided inMacedonia. Finally a large percentage of the numerous Roma (Gypsy) population,who originated in northern India and were dispersed throughout the peninsula, werealso Muslim. These latter have traditionally suffered from indigenous prejudice andat times outright racism. As such, many Roma have tended to self-identify insuccessive censuses not as Roma but as members of other groups—usually ChristianRoma will identify with the majority Christian group, while Muslim Roma willidentify with the majority Muslim group (Turkish, Albanian, or Slav, depending ongeography). Recently some Roma in Kosovo and western Macedonia identi� edthemselves as “Egyptians” rather than be stigmatised as Roma.24

The new successor states were essentially ethnic states based on one dominantnation. Consequently, they suffered from the associated problems of irredentism onthe one hand, and of how to treat their minorities on the other, and these problemshave continued to the present. Together with the relative newness of these states,their subsequent turbulent history of internecine wars with neighbours over disputedterritory and the resulting expansion and contraction of boundaries has prolongedfeelings of insecurity. These feelings have intensi� ed as a result of the end of thestagnant stability of the Cold War era, plus the bloody wars in former Yugoslavia.

In many ways the legacy of the Ottoman millet system has endured, as religioncontinues to be an important differentiating factor among people. Minorities whoshared the Orthodox religion of the new state have tended to be more easilyassimilated into the mass of the new nation. This was especially so for “non-territorial” minorities—i.e. those without a mother nation with its own state toprovide support. Such minorities were the Vlachs and, as mentioned above, theRoma: Orthodox Christian Vlachs and Roma tended to join the relevant majoritygroup—Bulgarians in Bulgaria, Greeks in Greece, etc. In some cases, even if amother state did exist, assimilation of Orthodox minorities took place on a largescale. This is illustrated by the Orthodox Albanians in Greece; the mother state inthis case (Albania) was especially weak. In contrast, it was much more dif� cult for

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the Orthodox majorities to assimilate Muslim minorities.25 There was, however, atendency for smaller Muslim groups to be assimilated by the dominant Muslimminority within a particular country. This phenomenon was clearly assisted by thelegacy of the millet system, as well as the concept of Islam as a transnationalcommunity of believers. In Bulgaria and northeast Greece, for example, smallMuslim groups including especially Turkic-speaking and Caucasian groups whoarrived during the Ottoman period tended to be drawn into the mass of MuslimTurks. Similarly, on Macedonia’s borders in the western Balkans, small Muslimminorities in Macedonia tended to be drawn into the great Albanian mass. WhileArabic is the language of the Koran, the language used by hodzhas and in mosqueschools has no doubt facilitated this process.26

Muslims in Multinational States: The Muslim Slavs of Bosnia-Hercegovina andthe SandzÏ ak

The experience of Serbo-Croat-speaking Muslims in Bosnia-Hercegovina and theSandzÏ ak has been different from that of Muslim communities in the other OrthodoxChristian national states. Serb statesmen in the mid nineteenth century consideredBosnia-Hercegovina and the SandzÏ ak to be areas into which the new Serbian statewould naturally expand, with the aim of achieving union with perceived Serbianco-nationals. The SandzÏ ak, for example, separated Serbia from what it construed asthe fellow Serbian state of Montenegro. Russia’s defeat of the Ottoman Empire in theRusso-Turkish War of 1875–1878 was followed by a Russian attempt to construct alarge Bulgaria, made up of all Orthodox Christian parishes that had opted by atwo-thirds adult male majority for the Bulgarian Exarchate Church: this was theso-called San Stefano Bulgaria,27 named after the San Stefano Treaty. This attemptwas aborted, however, due to pressure from the other Great Powers, notably Britainand Austria-Hungary, who feared that such a Russian client state with areas on boththe Black and Aegean Seas would dominate the Balkans. In its place instead aseverely truncated Bulgaria emerged as a result of the Treaty of Berlin (1878). Thistreaty also established the administration of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the garrisoningof the Sanjak of Novibazar (the SandzÏ ak) by Austria-Hungary. Although theoreti-cally still subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, the Serbo-Croat-speaking Muslims ofBosnia-Hercegovina and the SandzÏ ak experienced a transfer from the control of themultiethnic and multidenominational Ottoman Empire to the similarly multiethnicand multidenominational Hapsburg Monarchy.

In spite of � erce Muslim resistance to the new Austro-Hungarian rulers, theHapsburg government did not dispossess the Bosnian Muslim elites: instead itallowed them to retain many of their former privileges, and indeed coopted them.Although many Bosnian Muslims remained in village communities, the continuanceto the present day of a Muslim urban elite marked the Bosnian Muslims out asdifferent from other Balkan Muslim groups (outside of Turkey in Europe) who

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remained in essentially peasant communities only. Bosnia-Hercegovina came underthe administration of the Joint Ministry of Finance, which was one of the threeministries that owed allegiance to the Hapsburg crown rather than to either of the twohalves of the empire.28 The Muslims of Bosnia quickly established that their survivaldepended on maintaining good relations with the central authorities. Their strategyin this respect continued after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the First WorldWar and the incorporation of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the SandzÏ ak into what becamethe Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–1941), which was effectively another multina-tional, multiethnic, and multidenominational state (albeit in reality dominated bySerbs29).

In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia the Muslim elites continued with their efforts to becoopted by the central authorities. The main Serbo-Croat Muslim political organis-ation, the Yugoslav Muslim Organisation (JMO) led by Mehmed Spaho, was aregular coalition partner throughout the life of this � rst Yugoslav state. While thisstate was obviously multinational, it tended in its � rst form to be Serb dominated.The Serbs considered the Serbo-Croat-speaking Muslims to be ethnically Serbs,while the Croats viewed them as ethnically Croat. Consequently they were notconsidered to be alien in this state.30 The survival strategy was continued in thepost-1945 era. In the initial Communist period, the ethnic identity of the Serbo-CroatMuslim Slavs remained unde� ned. In the 1948 census they were classi� ed as“indeterminate Muslims” (neopredeljeni muslimani), in the 1953 census as“indeterminate Yugoslavs” (neopredeljeni Jugoslaveni). From the 1960s onwards theTito regime attempted to end the competition between Serbs and Croats over theethnic ownership of the Bosnian Muslims by constructing the term “Muslim” asreferring to a separate ethnic group. In the 1961 census they were referred to as“Muslims in the ethnic sense” (Muslimani u etnicÏ kom smislu) while in the census of1971 they were de� ned as “Muslims in the sense of nationality” (Muslimani u smislunarodnosti ), until � nally in 1981 they were of� cially recognised as one of the“Nations of Yugoslavia.”31

It should be noted that religious observance in Bosnia-Hercegovina as measuredin an opinion poll in 1985 was low—only 17%32—and thus the identity of the“Muslims” rested more on customs and culture and the millet legacy than onreligious observance. However, the Islamic religious community (IZ) was, for mostof former Yugoslavia’s life, dominated and controlled by the Sarajevo Muslim Slavs;and the prevalence among Yugoslavia’s Muslim Albanians of Su� sects like theRufai of Prizren, as opposed to the orthodox Sunnism of the IZ, can on one level beseen as expressions of ethno-national differences within Yugoslav Islam.33 By thelate 1980s the IZ began to change and attempted to become less Bosnian dominated,culminating in the unanimous election of Jakup Selimovski—a Macedonian and the� rst ever non-Bosnian—as Reis-ul-Ulema in November 1989. The new line, whilecondemning Albanian irredentism showed solidarity with the Kosovo Muslims, andgave an increasing emphasis on supranational Islamic identity uniting Yugoslav and

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east European Muslims, but supported individual national identities. In line with thisthe IZ joined the SDA (Party of Democratic Action) in calling on Bosnian Muslimsto give their mother tongue as “Bosnian” rather than Serbo-Croat in the 1991census.34

Regarding the language issues, although many Croats have for some time insistedthat Croatian is a separate language from Serbian, linguistically this claim has beensomewhat tenuous as even the main ijekavian dialect used by Croats (as opposed tothe ekavian one that was more prevalent in the eastern part of former Yugoslavia) isshared by many Serb areas. Recently the Croatian state has encouraged the use of“pure” Croatian words at the expense of the former vocabulary in an attempt todistance “Croatian” from “Serbian.” There is now similarly an attempt by theBosnian Muslims (who now call themselves “Bosniaks”) to create a “Bosnian”language distinct from both “Croatian” and “Serbian,” with the introduction (orreintroduction) of Turko-Arabic word forms.

The question of intermarriage, which has only occurred since after the Ottomanperiod, is prone to be overemphasised. In the 1980s intermarriage was about 12%and equivalent to that of Yugoslavia as a whole and less than in Vojvodina (28%)and Croatia (17%), while Sarajevo, the Bosnian � ag bearer for multiculturalism, with28% lagged behind some Croatian towns like Pakrac (35%) and Vukovar (34%).Moreover, in Bosnia-Hercegovina mixed marriages “were essentially a feature of theurban elite and manual workers, and were most frequent between Serbs andCroats.”35 However, it is indisputable that mixed marriages were a feature inBosnia-Hercegovina while Albanian-Slav marriages in Kosovo and Macedonia werenot.

However, the slowly growing sense of national consolidation based on religiouscustoms (if not actual religious belief) which was evident in the 1980s was onlyallowed to develop within the con� nes of the Tito and post-Tito Communist system.Any form of perceived “Islamic fundamentalism” was until the great changes of1989–1990 seen as being party to a conspiracy to make Bosnia-Herceogovina an“ethnically pure Islamic Republic.” The most striking example of this was the trialin mid 1983 of 13 Muslims accused of “hostile and counter-revolutionary actsderived from Muslim nationalism.” The main defendant was Alija Izetbegovic, alawyer and retired director of a building company (later to become President ofindependent Bosnia-Hercegovina), then aged 59. He was found guilty by theSarajevo district court and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment, reduced on appealto 11 years. Four of the 13 on trial including Izetbegovic had been convicted in thelate 1940s for membership of the Young Muslims. In the indictment Izetbegovic wasaccused of claiming that Muslims had suffered considerably at the hands ofCommunists when partisans entered their villages at the end of World War II andthat the Young Muslims and other similar organisations were set up to counter this.The main charge centred on a 50-page treatise written by Izetbegovic in 1970 entitled“The Islamic Declaration.”36 Parts of this treatise had been legally published inYugoslavia some ten years previously. The prosecution mentioned that it indicated

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a desire to create an ethnically pure Muslim state out of Bosnia-Herceogovina,Kosovo, and other Muslim areas. Izetbegovic and his codefendants, however,stressed that the declaration was concerned with the general emancipation ofMuslims, not with Yugoslavia or Bosnia in particular, and that it was meant to applyto countries where the overwhelming majority of the population was Muslim.37 Thedefendants were also accused of having links with Iran.

Despite the above-mentioned lack of active religious practice among BosnianMuslims, the attitudes expressed by the “Sarajevo Muslims” (as the defendantsbecame to be known) appear to have elicited strong support from the Muslimpopulation in Bosnia. Izetbegovic was released in November 1988 and when politicalrelaxation came to Bosnia-Hercegovina, as it came to other republics, he founded inMay 1990 the Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Despite a split in the leadershipof the SDA between Izetbegovic and Adil Zul õ karpasÏ ic (a former leading � gure ofthe emigre Muslim community who returned to Yugoslavia but who fell out withIzetbegovic over what he saw as the latter’s “too rigid Islamic approach” and insteadfounded a rival party, the Muslim Bosniak Organisation, on 21 September 1990), theSDA triumphed in the elections held in December 1990 and became the largest partywith 86 of the 240 seats in both chambers of the assembly. However, a dangerousportent for the future was that the voting was predominately along national lines,with 72 seats for the Serbian Democratic Party and 44 for the Croatian DemocraticCommunity. In all there were 99 Muslims, 85 Serbs, 49 Croats, and seven declaringthemselves as “Yugoslavs” in the new assembly. Given this, it was not surprisingthat Izetbegovic (along with Macedonian leaders who similarly initially viewed thebreak-up of Yugoslavia as potentially disastrous) were among those who workedhardest at keeping the Yugoslav state together in some form or other.

However, when Yugoslavia did fall apart, Izetbegovic went for independence. Inthis he was not unanimously supported within the Muslim camp. The controversialFikret Abdic was a leading � gure in the Agrokomerc � nancial scandal in the 1980s.Agrokomerc was a huge agro-industrial combine which had greatly enriched theBihac area and had helped to make Abdic extremely popular. He was jailed for hispart in the fall of Agrokomerc, although his supporters claimed he had been framedby opponents in the Communist hierarchy who were jealous of his success. In the1991 elections he was a candidate for the SDA and polled the largest number ofvotes—1,010,618—compared with Izetbegovic’s 847, 386. However, his position inthe SDA was relatively weak and he allowed Izetbegovic to become Head of thePresidency of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The personal dimension aside, the Abdic affaircan be seen as a con� ict between two different points of view regarding the futureof the Bosnian state. Izetbegovic‘s position, nominally supported by the internationalcommunity, was that Bosnia-Hercegovina constituted an indivisible independentstate. In contrast, Abdic appeared prepared to have dealings with Serbia and Croatia,and to countenance a scenario whereby the Muslims would remain in some form ofYugoslavia.38

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While the concept of a “Muslim” (or “Bosniak,” as they now term themselves)national identity was perhaps weak within the lifespan of former Yugoslavia, it hasbecome cemented by war and bloodshed when the very existence of the state and ofthe Muslims, its largest constituent people, representing in 1991 44% of the popu-lation, seemed at times to be in doubt. Increasingly the SDA has adopted Islamicinsignia and symbols, and there has been a steady drift towards Islam as a basicsource of identity in place of the more citizen-orientated multiethnic, multidenomina-tional approach represented by Haris SilajdzÏ ic and others. The revival of Islamicfaith and practice as a central pillar of Muslim identity in Bosnia-Hercegovina is areality, and will have rami� cations for Muslims throughout the Balkans.

Muslims as the Majority: The Albanian Case

Albania’s late arrival in the nineteenth-century race for territory from the ailingOttoman Empire resulted from the fact that the majority of the population sharedtheir faith with that of the Ottoman rulers, and hence were initially less susceptibleto the new ideology of nationalism, as well as to external Western, Christianbenefactors. Indeed it can be argued that the impetus for the Albanian nationalawakening, which signi� cantly was initially led by Christian Albanians, arose out ofa realisation that unless the Albanians claimed their own state there was a danger ofbeing swallowed up by Greece from the south and Serbia and Montenegro from thenorth. The Bektashi Su� sect became a major factor in southern Albania and theAlbanian-inhabited areas of western Macedonia. Bektashism is a Su� order (namedafter its founder Hacõ Bektash)—which was widespread in the Balkans duringOttoman rule. Su� organisations tended to absorb popular movements, and theShiites in particular were forced, within the Sunni Ottoman Empire, to seek asylumwithin them. The heterodox Bektashi order gave this phenomenon its fullest ex-pression. This situation also applied in relation to Christian communities in theBalkans which adopted Islam. The Su� orders or tarikats indeed facilitated theconversion of non-Islamic peoples by allowing a certain symbiosis between Islamicand other religious beliefs and practices: the wandering dervishes who accompaniedor followed in the wake of the conquering Ottoman troops were thus a crucialcomponent in this conversion of large sections of the Christian Anatolian and Balkanpopulations. In the Albanian case, the presence of local power boss Ali Pasha ofJaninna, who was a Bektashi himself, seemed to have been a major factor inspreading the sect in the areas under his control and those adjacent. Indeed by theend of the nineteenth century Albania had become the second largest Bektashi areaafter Anatolia. This process was no doubt also aided by the similarity between manyBektashi rites and Christian rites. Bektashism tolerated Christian saints and rightsand many Bektashi saints were deliberately ambiguous: Christian pilgrimages wereallowed and stimulated by the Bektashis.39

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The � rst Albanian state which emerged in 1913 was politically very weak. Indeedit was barely a functioning state and came increasingly under Italian control.Following the Second World War the Communist authorities under Enver Hoxhainstituted an anti-religion campaign, severely persecuting all religious activity.Following this period of darkness, there appears to be a signi� cant level ofmulti-religious tolerance in Albania today. Rare in the context of the Balkans, thiscan at least be partly attributed to the simple fact that all religious groups sufferedequally under the Communist dictatorship, as well as perhaps to the in� uence of theheterodox Bektashis.

While all of the new Balkan states had sizeable minorities outside of theirborders—as clear lines of demarcation between different population groups hadfailed to emerge—Albania’s late arrival resulted in a situation where there werealmost as many Albanians outside of the new state as there were within it. Many ofthese to the south in the new Greece were Orthodox Christian, and tended to becomeassimilated by the Greeks, who have pursued a consistent policy of attemptedassimilation of all minorities. The Muslim Chams in northern Greece remained adistinct group, however. Their faith prevented them from absorption in the Greekidentity, to which Orthodoxy is central. Following the Second World War, they wereexpelled en masse from Greece and their mosques were destroyed.

The large majority of Muslim Albanians (and some Roman Catholics) remainingoutside of the new Albania found themselves not in Greece but in Serbia orMontenegro, in what became Yugoslavia. The majority resided in Kosovo, which,under the Titoist system as it evolved through the 1960s and early 1970s, developedinto a separate federal unit of the Yugoslav state. The destruction of this federal unitby the MilosÏ evic regime and the ongoing acute repression of the Kosovo Albanianssaw an end to this.40 In addition to Kosovo, many Albanians also resided in westernand northwestern Yugoslav Macedonia, where they made up compact regionalmajorities.41 The Albanians of former Yugoslavia continue to display an impressivesense of national solidarity which, especially in Kosovo where there is a sizeableAlbanian Catholic community, to a large degree overrides religious divides. This issomething of a rarity in the Balkans, where the millet heritage has tended to workin the opposite direction. Moreover, as Ger Duijzings convincingly shows, the risein Albanian nationalism in the 1980s can be seen to be directly linked with the riseof Su� tarikats in Kosovo and Macedonia (another rarity as elsewhere in theBalkans, the tarikats continued to decline) as the Muslim Albanians of formerYugoslavia sought to differentiate themselves from the Muslim Slav dominatedSunni community centred in Sarajevo.42

Minorities and the Balkan State

The classic Balkan state emerging from the Ottoman Empire was essentially anethnic state based on one dominant nation. Within these states minorities were

58


inevitably considered to be alien and objects of suspicion. The fact that all of thesestates, with the exception of Albania, had majority Christian populations made theposition of Muslim communities within them especially problematic. The differen-tiation of these communities from the majority along ethno-linguistic as well asreligious lines in certain cases merely intensi� ed perceptions of “otherness.” As theonly Balkan state with a Muslim majority, Albania stands out as an exception,characterised by a very low level of antagonism between its different religiouscommunities.43 In a hostile Balkan environment the demands of “Albanianism”apparently produced a united front out of the different Albanian religious groups,helped along by the sense of solidarity engendered by Enver Hoxha’s blanketrepression. Even here, however, where the religious divide coincides with an ethnicone, as in the case of the wholly Orthodox Greek minority44 that resides in the southof the country, the same problems arise as elsewhere in the Balkans. These problemshave been further aggravated by the dominant nationalisms which have led theemergence of the classic Balkan state to be characterised by a high degree ofcentralisation. The ideology that the state is the natural territory of one dominantnational group has tended to result in power being exclusively wielded by that groupwithin a centralised state where they control the central apparatus and where littledecision making is devolved to the regions where the minorities tend to reside.

The exception to this Balkan centralist model is the post-1945 CommunistYugoslav state. Although even here the history of the Communist state can be seenas one of swinging from centralisation (during the Rankovic period, for example) todecentralisation (the case of the 1974 Constitution for example). In this context,centralisation tended to be equated with dominant Serb nationalism. The state’sbreak-up can indeed be seen as a reaction to the return to acute centralisation, led thistime led by Slobodan MilosÏ evic, who rode to power on a wave of aggrieved Serbiannationalism over Kosovo. The successor states to Tito’s Yugoslavia have generallytended to revert to the classic Balkan model of centralisation, leading to anexacerbation of the frictions with minorities which this model brings. This is evidentboth in Franjo Tudjman’s Croatia and in the new Macedonian state (FYROM). In thelatter the large Muslim Albanian minority that predominates in the western andnorthwestern areas points with some justi� cation to the fact that its regionaldemocratic majorities mean little more than the power to sweep the streets, as allcrucial decisions are made at the centre.45

Conclusion

The entire period in the Balkans from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire to thepresent can be seen as corresponding to Gellner’s model. As demonstrated earlier,minorities within the state who share the religion of the dominant nation have in themain been assimilated: this has been most evident in the Balkans in the case ofOrthodox Christianity. Mass education has been employed by state elites to instil a

59

H. POULTON

uni� ed high culture based on what is perceived to be the essence of the dominantnation (and thus almost by de� nition with high nationalist content). The instilling ofsuch uni� ed high cultures has been particularly marked since the Second World War,as mass education has become a reality for the region’s countries.46 A crucial aspectin the success of this process has been the state’s monopoly over the means forpropagating the relevant high culture in the Balkan context. Until very recently thestate in the Balkans has been virtually the exclusive actor, not only in education butalso in radio and television. It has also made exclusive and effective use ofcensorship and other pressures.

This situation is changing, however, due to the communications revolution,47

which has had a profound effect. Greece and Bulgaria, for example, are no longerable to isolate themselves from the outside world, or to pursue policies of forcedassimilation of their minorities, including Turks and other Muslims, and in the caseof Greece Orthodox Slav Macedonians also. During the infamous forced assimilationcampaign of 1984–1989, Zhivkov’s Bulgaria attempted to completely seal off fromoutside in� uences the areas inhabited by Muslims and Turks. The advent of glasnostin the USSR made this policy unfeasible, however. The ethnic Turks made use of themeagre opportunities afforded by the new climate, including in particular theunjamming of foreign radio stations like Radio Free Europe, which could hence bebroadcast into Bulgaria. The use of such media by the ethnic Turks to coordinatetheir opposition to the assimilation campaign directly led to the defeat of thispolicy.48 Moreover satellite television broadcasts from Turkey helps to preserve anddevelop Turkish culture among Muslims in Greece, where locals can receive TurkishTV channels with as much ease as Greek ones. The only way to combat this is toban satellite dishes. This demonstrates how, far from creating a uni� ed worldculture,49 the global communications revolution can actually play a crucial role inpreserving and strengthening cultural differences.

Furthermore, the world community has � nally become aware of minority prob-lems. While the League of Nations (established after the First World War) had anumber of provisions regarding the rights of minorities in east and southeasternEurope, these were largely ignored by the states concerned, with little or no sanctionfrom outside. The explosion of German nationalism under Hitler which led to theappalling destruction of the Second World War produced a revulsion towards allforms of nationalism, which extended even to provisions for minorities. In thepost-war period minority rights were generally ignored in favour of individual humanrights. The dynamics of the Cold War issued in a further emphasis on individualrights as both sides used different aspects of these in the ideological struggle, withthe Soviet camp stressing economic and social rights while the West stressed civiland political ones. In the late 1980s with the ending of the Cold War and the collapseof the Soviet bloc, minority rights once more came on the human rights agenda.Since then the international community has moved towards standardisation andcodi� cation of minority rights, leading to the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of

60


Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities,adopted by the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 47/135 of 18 December 1992, andthe Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of NationalMinorities: the � rst legally binding international instrument devoted to the plight ofminorities. This has been followed by various regional declarations. While thereremains little real sanction against offenders, and even a European Union memberlike Greece can apparently continue to deny the existence of any minorities withinits borders apart from religious ones,50 it can at least be said that no Europeancountry appreciates being accused of trampling on minority rights by its peers. Itseems likely that a country’s minority record will increasingly come under scrutiny,and offenders will face increasing censure in the international arena.

Hence there is reason to argue that the attempt in the Balkans (and elsewhere forthat matter) to create homogenised nation states (i.e. monocultural, monoethnic, andmonoreligious, all based on the attributes of the dominant nation) is � nally runningits course. Indeed the current tragedy in Bosnia-Hercegovina can be construed as the� nal attempt at such forced homogenisation in the Balkans. The location of thisattempt can be explained on the basis of the observation that, as noted above, up untilthe break-up of Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Hercegovina had remained as a substantialelement in multinational polities, from the Ottoman Empire through Austria-Hungaryto the two Yugoslav states. It had thus avoided the classic Balkan state route. This,it must be stressed, does not mean that nationalism is a diminishing force in theBalkans. On the contrary, the break-up of Yugoslavia has seen an intensi� cation ofvarious nationalisms throughout the region. What it does perhaps show is that theidealised nation state can now be created only by genocide or by mass expulsion.Total assimilation is a thing of the past, as the states no longer totally monopolisethe means of propagating culture. While the process of homogenisation in theBalkans has been markedly successful in, for example, transforming multiethnicpeasants in Greece into Greek citizens, it has failed miserably when faced with theneed to bridge the gulf between Orthodox communities on the one hand and Muslimones on the other. Even in the case of the Orthodox Slavs in northern Greece thispolicy has met with a militant minority who refuse to abandon their perceivedethnicity in order to merge into the majority Greek one. The more pressure the Greekstate applies to this minority, the more the policy proves to be counter-productive.While hitherto and in accordance with Gellner’s analysis, an attempt was made toobliterate “low” peasant cultures and to replace them with a uni� ed high culture, thissituation may well be changing. The new possibilities created by mass communica-tions and satellite dishes, plus the growing ability of the private sphere to effectivelychallenge central dominance as a result of a general trend of economic privatisation,appear to permit some erstwhile “low” cultures to develop into sustainable “middle”cultures and even into rival regional high cultures. That this process is taking placein an atmosphere of heightened nationalist feeling following the collapse ofYugoslavia unfortunately increases the possibilities of further violence.

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In the light of these developments, and given its proven historical success as acivilisation-building religion, Islam appears destined to remain a major component inthe Balkan mosaic. This is already evident in the increasing number of new contactsbeing established between Muslim Balkan communities and Muslim countriesbeyond the Balkans. One big question remains. This relates to the nature of thepolitical development of these communities. A consistent thread in recent Balkanhistory has been the change from Muslim identity solely based upon Islam to onewhere an ethnic content has become an important factor. It is noticeable that in themain the new Muslim political elites couch their programmes in terms and languagethat are essentially secular. This is surely a result of the peculiar history of thesecommunities in the last two centuries and their relationship with the Balkan state.Whether this will continue or there will be a return to a more rigidly Islamic modeof political discourse remains to be seen. The tragic events in Bosnia-Hercegovinaperhaps show that, faced with a continuation of the traditional Balkan state model ofintolerance to minorities, and the attendant homogenisation, Muslims will be forcedto revert to the latter line. In the long term, however, continual confrontation cannotbe the optimum solution.

NOTES

1. This paper is a thoroughly revised version of “Islam, Ethnicity and State in the ContemporaryBalkans,” which � rst appeared in H. Poulton and S. Taji-Farouki, eds, Muslim Identity andthe Balkan State (London: Hurst, 1997).

2. For example, Greece’s claims to continuity to ancient Greece, and Bulgaria’s to 1,300 yearsof existence.

3. In Greece today the Muslim populations are regarded as suspect and are not considered tobe true citizens of the state. Furthermore, this also applies to non-Orthodox Christian groups,like Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is clear from statements likethat of the public prosecutor of Naxos, who described Roman Catholic Greeks as “foreignersgetting their orders from the Pope.” It is also illustrated by the arrest of large numbers ofJehovah’s Witnesses for proselytising: 67 have been sentenced to between four and sixmonths’ imprisonment since 1983. See D. Kunz, “Greece Accused on Minorities’ Rights,” LeMonde, 14 December 1994.

4. Bektashism is a Su� order (named after its founder Hac õ Bektash) that was widespread in theBalkans during Ottoman rule. On Bektashism and the Albanians, see below.

5. The Shiite K õ z õ lbashõ s (literally “red-heads”) were so named after their distinctive head wear.The Dobrudzha is the area south of the Danube delta, from Tulcea in Romania to Varna inBulgaria.

6. See H. Norris, Islam in the Balkans: Religions and Society between Europe and the ArabWorld (London: Hurst, 1994).

7. Vlachs were prominently pastoral peoples living south of the Danube who practisedtranshumance and spoke a form of Romanian. While some were Islamicised, most remainedOrthodox. Many were prominent supporters of Hellenism. They remain especially evident inthe Pindus mountains in Greece and in southern Albania. See H. Poulton, The Balkans:Minorities and States in Con� ict (London: MRG, 1993).

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8. This was most noticeable in the competition for Macedonia at the end of the nineteenth andbeginning of the twentieth century. For a full study of the Macedonian Question see H.Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians? (London: Hurst, 1995).

9. Uncertainty remains uncertainty over the origins of this system. Many trace the system backto the appointment by Mehmed II, conqueror of Istanbul, of Patriarch Gennadias, BishopYovakim of Bursa, and Rabbi Capsali as presumed hereditary leaders of the Greek,Armenian, and Jewish communities, respectively. In contrast, other scholars (includingBenjamin Braude) maintain that the term millet was used to refer to various mainly localarrangements which differed from one place to another. They point to the substantialevidence suggesting that the authority vested in the leaders of the millets was personal (ratherthan hereditary/institutionalised), and varied signi� cantly in its territorial extent. Thus, theGreek Patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch retained their autonomy at leastin canon law, while for the Armenians the see of Istanbul became “over the centuries … asort of de facto patriarchate, but its ecclesiastical legitimacy was grudgingly recognized, if atall.” See Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), pp. 72–82, and the review article by AndrewMango, “Remembering the Minorities,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1985,pp. 118–140.

10. At least as far as Anatolia is concerned, modern scholarship gives credit to the Karamanidsfor the � rst establishment of Turkish as the basis of the of� cial language. In the thirteenthcentury the Karamanids created a strong polity on the ruins of the Seljuk Sultanate. See M.Onder, “Turkcenin Devlet Dili Ilanini Yildonumu,” Turk Dili, Vol. 10, 1961, p. 507, quotedin David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism 1876–1908 (London: Frank Cas, 1977),footnote to p. 90. However, this was not the same as the demotic Turkish spoken by the massof the population.

11. See Boriana Panaiotova and Kalina Bozeva, “The Bulgarian Muslims (‘Pomaks’),” in TheCommittee for the Defence of Minority Rights, Minority Groups in Bulgaria in a HumanRights Context (So� a: The Committee for the Defence of Minority Rights, 1994).

12. Ibid.13. A crucial factor here is the terrible persecution the Bosnian Muslims have suffered in the

recent war due to being Muslim—a factor that has immeasurably helped to cement a nationalconsciousness.

14. War has often been a crucial factor in promoting national identity.15. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983).16. Ibid. p. 140.17. Ibid. pp. 57.18. See Eric Hobsbawm et al., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1983).19. Anderson, op. cit.20. Gellner, op. cit., p. 141.21. Ibid.22. Article 19 of Law 3370 of 1955 stated, “A person who is of foreign origin leaving Greek

territories without the intention of returning may be deprived of Greek citizenship.” This hasbeen used mostly against Muslims from western Thrace—the only “of� cial minority”—whohave been deprived without being consulted of their actual intentions, while even immigrantswho are ethnic Greek are normally recognised without problem despite years or evengenerations of absence. (Article 19 has also been used against ethnic Macedonians, who alsosuffer from the application of Article 20, which allows for stripping of citizenship from thosewho “commit acts contrary to the interests of Greece for the bene� t of a foreign state”). Fromthe time this law was introduced, more than 60,000 Muslims—predominately ethnic Turks—

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have been stripped of their citizenship, including an of� cial � gure of 50 people in 1997. Mostof those affected were forced to stay in Turkey or Germany, although some 1,000 continuedto live as stateless people in Greece without identity papers and the commensurate bene� ts—this in contravention to the U.N. 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons.On 17 December 1997, the authorities � nally decided to provide such people with identityand travel documents, and by early 1998 some 100 had bene� ted. Article 19 was � nallyabolished without retroactivity in mid June 1998.

23. The role of Turkey thus as a potential kin state for Muslims of different ethnic groups in theBalkans and Cyprus, and the relationship between Muslim Turkish workers in westernEurope and Turkey is discussed in Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: TurkishNationalism and the Turkish Republic (London: Hurst, 1997).

24. See H. Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians? (London: Hurst, 1995), pp. 141–143.25. The same applied in the case of Jewish minorities; many of the Jews in the Balkans had � ed

to the Ottoman Empire from persecution by intolerant regimes in western Europe. While Jewshad lived in the Balkans since antiquity, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews � eeing per-secution in central and western Europe � ed to the Balkans even before the Ottoman period.These new arrivals tended to overwhelm the ancient original Jewish population, but were inturn overwhelmed after 1492 by Ladino-speaking Jews expelled from Spain, who madeSalonika the spiritual and economic metropolis of the Jews in southeastern Europe; see H.Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians?, pp. 22–23.

26. On the Pomaks of Bulgaria see Yulian Konstantinov, “Strategies for Sustaining a VulnerableIdentity: The Case of the Bulgarian Pomaks,” and on the pressures on the smaller Islamicgroups, like the Pomaks of Greece, the Muslim Roma, and non-Albanian Muslim groups inMacedonia to assimilate into larger cohabiting Muslim groups see H. Poulton, “Changingnotions of National Identity among Muslims in Thrace and Macedonia: Turks, Pomaks andRoma,” both in H. Poulton and S. Taji-Farouki, eds, Muslim Identity and the Balkan State(London: Hurst, 1997).

27. This comprised modern Bulgaria together with what became Yugoslav Macedonia, large partsof Greek Macedonia, and Thrace. It even extended into modern Albania.

28. Robert J. Doina and John V. A. Fine, Bosnia-Hercegovina—A Tradition Betrayed (London:Hurst, 1994), p. 96.

29. See Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia; Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY,Cornell University Press, 1984).

30. This did not apply as much to other Muslim groups in Royalist Yugoslavia, however. TheSlavs of Macedonia—which included both Christians and a smaller Muslim community—were regarded as southern Serbs, and a policy of forced assimilation was employed againstthem. The Muslim Albanians, who of course are not Slavs, were viewed with acute distrustby the � rst Yugoslav state—“Yugoslavia” of course means “land of the South Slavs.” SeeBanac, op. cit.

31. In post-1945 Yugoslavia the Communist authorities’ nationality policy, which alwaysof� cially espoused the slogan “Brotherhood and unity,” evolved from upholding a Serb-ori-entated polity during the period when Aleksander Rankovic headed the all-powerful securityapparatus, to a three-tier system of national rights which was enshrined in the 1974Constitution. This system divided the population in descending order of recognised rightsinto: (a) the six “Nations of Yugoslavia”—Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Muslims,Serbs, and Slovenes—each with a national home based in one of the republics; (b) the“Nationalities of Yugoslavia”—the largest being the Albanians (more numerous than some ofthe “nations,” but whose “national home” was outside the country and so they were noteligible for the status of a “nation” of Yugoslavia), Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians,Roma, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, and Turks—which were legally allowed a variety of

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language and cultural rights; and (c) “Other Nationalities and Ethnic Groups,” which madeup the remaining ethnic groups—Austrians, Germans, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Russians,Ukrainians, Vlachs, and others, including those who classi� ed themselves as “Yugoslavs.”

32. This was lower than in Kosovo (44%), Croatia (33%), Slovenia (26%), and Macedonia(19%), but higher than in Serbia (11%) and Vojvodina and Montenegro (both 10%).Interview, Belgrade, 28 March 1986.

33. See Ger Duijzings, Religion and the Politics of Identity in the Balkans (London: Hurst,forthcoming), although Duijzings warns that this is somewhat simplistic, and is careful notto fall into the trap of ethno-reductionism.

34. Cornelia Sorabji, “Islam and Bosnia’s Muslim nation,” in Frank Carter and Harry Norris, eds,The Changing Shape of the Balkans (London: UCL, 1996), pp. 57–58.

35. X. Bougarel, Bosnie: anatomie d’un con� ict (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1996), p. 87.36. For the full text see South Slav Journal, Spring 1983.37. It is somewhat ironic that such a situation has become more likely in Bosnia-Hercegovina

with the effective partition by the Dayton agreement, which, if the Serbian Republika Srpskasplits off, will leave the state with a convincing Muslim majority.

38. In 1994 Abdic declared the creation of his own quasi-state, the Autonomous Province ofWestern Bosnia, and was consequently expelled from the Bosnian government. Bitterinter-Muslim � ghting ensued; the 5th Brigade loyal to Sarajevo defeated Abdic‘s “rebels,”many of whom � ed to Croatia. In November 1994, when the Muslim 5th Brigade broke outof the Bihac pocket and achieved notable victories over the Serbs, the inevitable Serbcounter-attack was aided both by Serbs from Croatia and by some 5,000 of Abdic‘ssupporters. The Bihac pocket was surrounded by Serb-held positions in both Croatia andBosnia. Its natural geography between rivers and Abdic‘s manoeuvrings and deals with boththe Serbs and Croats facilitated its survival. Despite being viewed as a traitor by the SDASarajevo leadership, Abdic has recently made something of a political comeback in his powerbase of Velika Kladusa in the Bihac pocket.

39. Additionally the elite praetorian guard of the Ottoman Empire—the Janissaries—had been astronghold of Bektashism for centuries up to their violent dissolution by Mahmud II in 1826.The Janissaries were initially formed from those Christian youths taken by the devsirmesystem to Istanbul, circumcised and brought up as the Muslim “slave elite,” and the toleranceand similarities in Bektashism of many Christian rights must surely have been a factor in thestrength of Bektashism in the Janissaries.

40. See H. Poulton and M. Vickers, “The Kosovo Albanians: Ethnic Confrontation with the SlavState,” in H. Poulton and S. Taji-Farouki, eds, Muslim Identity and the Balkan State (London:Hurst, 1997).

41. Their relationship with the new Macedonian state, the Former Yugoslav Republic ofMacedonia (FYROM), itself based on the relatively new concept of a separate Macedoniannation fostered by the Tito regime, is explored in H. Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians?,Chapters 7 and 9.

42. Sheikh Xemali of the Rifai tarikat in Prizren has been a key � gure in this. See Ger Duijzings,Religion and the Politics of Identity in the Western Balkans: The Case of Kosovo (London:Hurst, forthcoming).

43. Although it is likely that what remains of Bosnia-Hercegovina will also have a Muslimmajority if the Serb areas remain outside.

44. It should be noted that while the Greek minority in Albania is solidly Orthodox, manyOrthodox Christians in Albania are ethnically Albanian.

45. H. Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians?, p. 187.46. In Greece, for example, anthropologists studying the Slav Macedonian minority in the

northern part of the country have noted that the rate of assimilation has accelerated sharplysince the Second World War. Personal communication with Anastasia Karakasidou.

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47. This particularly covers the expansion of satellite TV sets and other means of transnationalcommunication which has occurred in the last few years.

48. See H. Poulton, The Balkans, p. 155.49. This view rests on the argument that there is a general tendency for differing states/cultures

to copy a particular model of what is perceived as modern. This can be seen in the apparentlyuniversal appeal of blue jeans and trainers and Western pop music (Michael Jackson,Madonna, etc.) in youth culture, along with the penetration of domestic economies bymultinationals so that even eating and drinking habits become homogenised, with the growinguniversality of brand names like McDonalds and Coca Cola. Such cultural invasions go handin hand with a parallel uni� cation of modern architectural styles, regardless of indigenouscultures, so that, for example, all modern airports and hotels tend to resemble each other. Inthis view the rise of this global culture, facilitated by the ongoing revolution in electronicsand the media (especially satellite broadcasts), signals the end of classic nationalism as adriving force on the world stage.

50. Likewise France, which represents the classic model of “territorial” or “civic” nationalism asopposed to the German “ethnic” model (see Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism(London: Duckworth, 1971), also refuses to recognise minorities within its borders and evenrefused to sanction Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,which deals with guaranteeing minority rights (and which Greece has not rati� ed). However,citizens in France do not face the same penalties for declaring themselves separate from themajority as they do in Greece. For a discussion of minority rights in Europe see Hugh Miall,ed., Minority Rights in Europe: The Scope for a Transnational Regime (London: ChathamHouse Papers, RIIA, Pinter, 1994).

51. See H. Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians?, pp. 165–171.

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hugh poulton the muslim experience in the balkan states (1919-1991)

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