In the current era, dedicated to pigeonholing and delineation between “us” and “them,” it is often useful to ask what history can tell us about successful and unsuccessful interactions among different peoples. In the case of this edited volume, the various authors have consulted the years between the beginning of Austro-Hungarian domination of Bosnia and Herzegovina and today's post-Yugoslav era. The particular focus of the thirteen chapters in this book is the interaction between east central European actors and the Bosnian Muslims. The theme of the tome is that the physical proximity to Europe of the latter rendered them into the prototype of the Muslim for the former; this accessibility, thus, made them into an ideal type to study when central Europeans contemplated the impact of Islam on the Christian west. While several scholarly studies have already considered the influence of Habsburg occupation policies and attitudes on the development of Bosnian Muslim society, less attention is devoted to how interactions with the Bosnian Muslims shaped the feelings of Austro-Hungarian citizens and policymakers toward Muslims in general, a lacuna filled by the volume under review. Authors in this book suggest that the perspectives they have uncovered have carried over into the post-Habsburg successor states, in certain respects coloring attitudes in that region even up to today.
The contributions to this book were the results of workshops, conferences, and presentations mainly about the interactions between central Europe and Balkan Muslims prompted by the European migration crisis peaking in 2015–16. The ensuing project illuminated by this volume was sponsored by Czech scholarly institutes. Interestingly, while the Czech Republic was one of the European countries least affected by the swarm of refugees, the racist response to the crisis among its citizens was apparently quite severe, resulting in “anti-refugee hysteria and Islamophobia.” Hence, this examination of “the Muslims we know best”—the Muslims next door, as it were: the Bosnian Muslims—is an attempt to illustrate the heterogeneity of the Muslim world (3).
Approximately the first half of this interdisciplinary book treats Austro-Hungarian views of Bosnian Muslims and how the Habsburg “civilizing mission” toward the Muslims who came under their occupation affected the empire in turn. The contributions in these chapters range from the more specific, such as Czech views of the threat of Islam, to the more general, such as the Habsburg perspective on the empire's contributions to the development and modernization of the Bosnian Muslims. The latter include discussions of the ambivalence of Austro-Hungarian attitudes toward Muslims—for example, that not all Muslims posed a threat to Habsburg civilization, as there was also the image of the “good Muslim,” featuring Bosnian Muslims, as opposed to the “bad” (Turk/Arab) Muslim (12). Foreshadowing the contemporary collapse of Yugoslavia, one chapter focused on how the success of incipient nationalist movements in occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina often depended on concealing similarities among peoples and emphasizing small differences. Such adopted exclusivism led the South Slavs in Bosnia and Herzegovina to break up into Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Serb, and Bosnian Muslim branches, which emphasized religious differences and papered over historical similarities (51). The paternalistic Habsburg attempts to educate/modernize Bosnian Muslims and to create a Bosnian identity for all Habsburg South Slavs to obviate these differences (bošnjaštvo or Bosnianism) were stillborn. (Socialist Yugoslavia's program to legislate South Slav unity, jugoslovenstvo or Yugoslavism, met with similar resistance.)
The latter half of the volume treats twentieth century perspectives about the Bosnian Muslims through travelogues, as well as sociological and anthropological views. Again, the western responses to different tropes suggested by Bosnian Muslim experiences and customs form the bulk of this portion. For example, Rebecca West and Vera Stein Erlich's treatments of the attitudes and practices of the Bosnian Muslims with regard to their origins (the former considering the largely deleterious influence of the Ottoman empire on the Bosnian Muslims, the latter theorizing that al-Andalus, which produced a “golden age” for Muslims and Jews, provided an important and positive influence on the Bosnian Muslims) highlight different perspectives during the interwar period.
Finally, post-Yugoslav attitudes about the Bosnian Muslims held by Bosnian Muslims in the diaspora and by citizens of Yugoslav successor states (Slovenia in particular) bring the reader into the present. These final chapters pose interesting questions but also illuminate some of the challenges faced by Bosnian Muslims, as well as those who confront their postwar situation. The ambivalence of the view of the Bosnian Muslims by central Europeans, stretching from Austro-Hungarian times to the present, is quite intriguing. As Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a plurality of Muslims, struggles to create a stable multinational nation-state, often against the wishes and plans of their non-Muslim co-inhabitants, does the sometimes benign historical view of them as “our” Muslims, somewhat “civilized” during their time under Habsburg control, speak to a tendency of their being welcomed into central Europe and its institutions, such as the European Union? Or are Bosnian Muslims more regarded for the (largely negative) influence of their long sojourn under the Ottoman Empire? Can Bosnian Muslims be considered part of the “essence of Europe” even though they are not part of “Christian Europe?” Indeed, could the institutional experiences of the Bosnian Muslims resulting from their Ottoman, Habsburg, and Yugoslav legacies serve as a model for other European Muslim communities of how to maintain their Islamic religious life while dwelling in a modern secular state? This ambitious volume places the Bosnian Muslims at a nexus of the variety of Balkan peoples—Jews, Christians, Muslims—contributing to this conversation.
