Nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Encyclopedia II - Nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Transformation of ethnicity to religion its cause and course

Nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Transformation of ethnicity to religion its cause and course

Originally, the Islamic Ottoman Empire didn't have a concept of private ownership of land. Rights to till the land (tapija) were given to deserving military commanders (spahi), and after their death this right was delegated to another person. However, considering the special circumstances of the border-line province of Bosnia, the Ottoman sultan made an exception allowing for tapijas to be hereditary. This resulted in a de facto feudal system. Bosnian landlords (begs) quickly acquired more land than they could possibly till themselves, therefore they allowed Christian peasants to settle and till the land, giving a percentage (usually one third) to their beg.

This system worked reasonably well until mid-18th century when, following several major military defeats, general economic situation in Ottoman Empire declined. Impoverished begs and widows hired čifluk sahibijas, persons that had the authority to collect taxes on a certain part of a begs land while keeping a portion for themselves. Sahibijas didn't feel any obligation towards peasants and treated them badly, often enforcing taxes and confiscating property. This combined with growing taxes that the Empire required for itself and several bad years for crops resulted in a series of uprisings of Christian peasants in Bosnia, Serbia and other European provinces. In Bosnia this meant a very deep chasm between Muslims and Christians of both denominations.

In the times following the Ottoman conquest, the name «Bošnjanin» was turkified into «Bošnjak» (Bosh-nyak, Bosniak in English).During early Ottoman rule, the term «Bošnjak» was applied exclusively to the Christian population, while islamized natives were referred to as «Bosnalu». However, in following centuries (16th to 19th), this name, under various hyphenated forms («Bošnjak-milleti», «Bošnjak-taifesi») had acquired additional nuances of meaning: it became the common term for all the inhabitants of Bosnian Turkish pashaluk/military province. However, it is just one regional reference. The bureaucracy of the theocratic Ottoman empire couldn't even imagine that Muslims and Christians in one of the provinces of the vast Islamic polity would constitute a separated, supradenominational community. Nor was it thinkable to the Bosnian Christians and Muslims.

This has left Bosnian Muslims in a sort of vacuum. When Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, Muslims saw it as their arch-enemy and many left Bosnia for territories still under Ottoman rule. Therefore, Austria-Hungarian project of a Bosnian nation was accepted only among Muslim intellectual elite and a small number of Catholics. Serbs formed a resistance organization that grew into an opposition party named Serb Peoples¹ Organization. A corresponding Muslim Peoples¹ Organization was organized in 1906, and immediately entered into alliance with Serb Peoples¹ Organization. These two parties combined with Croat Peoples¹ Community won the 1910 elections by a large margin. This gave birth to the well-known concept of three natio-religions that we still see alive today.

The origins of the three nations now present in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be traced back to the period (ca. 1500. to ca. 1800.) of intense islamization when "triple" ethnic-denominational differentiation served as the focal point for growth of modern national individualities based on ancient ethnic loyalties: as Camus has said, people become what they already are - notwithstanding the fact that they may not yet be aware of it. Bosnian Croats and Serbs have definitely crystallized into modern nations during the 19th century, simultaneously retaining their regional Bosnian and Herzegovinian identities rooted in history and conjoining with their compatriots in Croatia and Serbia. Bosnian Muslims, on the other hand, have set out on the trek for self-identity. Feeling in their bones the unbridgeable separateness and distance from both Croats and Serbs, these "Turkey's abandoned children" found themselves in an uneasy position: being a cultural/denominational transplant from Asia Minor grafted onto South Slavic ethnicities whose nascent Croat and Serb identities melted away in the process of islamization, they vacillated between a few national and semi-national individualities: Turkish, Croat, Serb, supranational Yugoslav and quasidenominational ethnic Muslim designation - Bosnian Muslims were officially recognized as a nation under the name of Muslims in the 1971 Yugoslav census. Finally, this identity crisis was resolved in an abrupt way: the Bosniak designation (actually, a Turkish word meaning Bosnian) was adopted in 1993. as a sign of differentiating ethnic identity from denominational loyalties. Although circumstances of the procedure may look somewhat weird (it was unanimously accepted on September 28th 1993, at the 2nd Bosniak Congress - an institution of Bosnian Muslim intellectuals and ideologues), it seems that, in all likelihood, Bosnian Muslims have definitively reached the goal in their quest for national identity.

¹ This word can also be translated as National or even Ethnic.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Transformation of ethnicity to religion its cause and course", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki