Buljina Stvaranje Muslimanske Nacije

Belated Nation
Yugoslav Communists and the Muslim Question, 1919-1971
Harun Buljina
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of:
Bachelor of Arts with Honors
March 29, 2010
Advised by Professor John Fine
In memory of
Memnuna Buljina
(1916 2009)
Beir Tanovi
(1928 2009)
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................ii
GlossaryofAbbreviations..............................................................................................................iii
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................1
HistoricalBackground...................................................................................................................4
1.Communists,MuslimsandtheNationalQuestion,19191940.................................................9
1.1BosnianMuslimsinInterwarYugoslavia................................................................................9
1.2YugoslavCommunistsandtheSocialDemocratLegacy......................................................15
1.3ThePopularFrontandtheMuslimQuestion.......................................................................21
1.4Conclusions...........................................................................................................................29
2.MuslimsandPartisans,19411945...........................................................................................31
2.1BosnianMuslimsandWorldWarII......................................................................................31
2.2BosnianMuslimsinPartisanPropaganda............................................................................35
2.3PartisanIntellectualsandMuslimNationhood....................................................................40
2.4MuslimsintheEmergingYugoslavStateStructure..............................................................46
2.5Conclusions...........................................................................................................................52
3.TheMuslimQuestioninSocialistYugoslavia,19461971........................................................54
3.1TheReturntoYugoslavism...................................................................................................54
3.2TheTurntoAcceptance........................................................................................................62
3.3ConstructingaMuslimNation..............................................................................................67
3.4FederalRecognition..............................................................................................................73
3.5NationalAffirmation.............................................................................................................82
3.6Conclusions...........................................................................................................................91
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................93
Bibliography...................................................................................................................................98
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to a number of people who, in one way or another, helped me over
the course of this project. First and foremost, to my advisor Professor John Fine, whose
interest and experience made this such a valuable learning experience. Also Professor
Micah Auerback, who helped prepare me for the writing process as a junior, as well as to
Professor Ian Moyer, who graciously dealt with any number of missed chapter deadlines.
I would also like to thank the three scholars I had the chance to meet with during
my visits to Bosnia-Herzegovina Sair Filandra, Husnija Kamberovi and Mustafa
Imamovi who all took time out of their busy schedules to talk with an American
undergraduate only barely in his 20s. I am particularly indebted to Hilmo Neimarlija,
who went out of his way to help me arrange these meetings and have anything I need for
my research during my stays in Sarajevo.
Lastly, I would like to thank all my friends and family, who supported me
throughout this entire process. I hope that in the next few months I will be able to spend
far more time with them than I have in the past five.
ii
Glossary of Abbreviations
AVNOJ
Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia
CKSKBiH
Central Committee of the League of Communists of BosniaHerzegovina
CKSKJ
Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia
CKSKS
Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia
IZ
Islamic Community
JMO
Yugoslav Muslim Organization
JMNO
Yugoslav Muslim Peoples Party
KPJ
Communist Party of Yugoslavia
NDH
Independent State of Croatia
SKBiH
League of Communists of Yugoslavia
SKJ
League of Communists of Yugoslavia
UDBA
State Security Administration
ZAVNOBiH
Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of BosniaHerzegovina
ZAVNOH
Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia
iii
Introduction
Josip Broz, better known as Tito, the long-time leader of Yugoslavia, once
famously described his country as having two scripts, three languages, four religions, five
nationalities, six republics and seven neighbors. 1 It was an amusing reference to
Yugoslavias institutional complexity and cultural diversity, but by the second half of the
1960s, not even halfway through the lifespan of the countrys socialist incarnation, it
proved obsolete. In 1968, in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the local
Communist leadership recognized Bosnian Muslims as Yugoslavias sixth nation. In a
matter of six years, the Party carried this recognition over to the federal level, listing
Muslims as a nationality in the 1971 Yugoslav census and including them as a constituent
nation in the 1974 federal constitution.
To an outside observer, this conflation of religious and nationalist terminology
may seem odd. After all, on a global scale, the word Muslim typically refers to one of
an estimated one-billion plus adherents to the religion of Islam. How is it possible that in
Yugoslavia this term also acquired a national connotation, so that one could identify as
nationally Muslim and religiously a Jehovahs Witness? 2 As a matter of fact, even among
Yugoslavs, the issue was the subject of protracted political quarreling and intellectual
debate. Who were the Bosnian Muslims? Were they a religious community or a nation?
And if they were a nation, how and under what name were they to be recognized by the
1
Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama (Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), p.
15.
2
Ivo Banac, "From Religious Community to Statehood," in The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
ed. Mark Pinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 146.
1
Yugoslav state? These polemics were collectively termed the Muslim Question, and
according to one scholar of socialist Yugoslavia, by the 1960 they formed one of the
chief axes of nationalist disequilibrium in the country. 3
For a number of reasons then, this Muslim Question represents a significant
episode in the history of the modern West Balkans. To begin with, Bosnian Muslims,
now officially termed Bosniaks, form the largest ethnic group in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
and therefore understanding the development of their national identity is crucial to
understanding the history of their homeland. This is all the more true because their
national identity was never merely a theoretical issue, but carried significant political
implications as well. In particular, the Muslim Question was closely intertwined with
the question of Bosnian autonomy, and so a study of the idea of a Muslim nation touches
upon everything from the Alexandrine dictatorship in the 1930s to the decentralization of
Yugoslav federalism in the 1960s. The Muslim Question simultaneously has
implications for a number of wider issues as well, ranging from the relationship between
religion and nationalism to the position of Muslim peoples in Communists states.
The development of Bosniak national identity has also fascinated me for more
personal reasons. As my name would suggest, I myself am of Bosnian Muslim heritage,
born in Sarajevo and raised there until I was nearly six. Spending the rest of my
childhood in the United States, I have often considered issues of personal, religious and
national identity. For these reasons, I was particularly intrigued by a book I found as a
teenager in my great-uncles home library in Chicago, Alija Isakovis O
nacionaliziranju Muslimana (On the Nationalization of Muslims). Isakovi compiled
3
Sabrina Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 285.
2
over 70 articles dealing with the issue of Bosnian Muslim national identity from 1886 to
1987, and I was fascinated by the wealth of views, arguments and personalities involved.
I was especially struck by the prolonged polemics about what Bosnian Muslims should
declare themselves on the census, whether Muslim should be written with an upper-case
or lower-case M and other such popular issues from the first two decades of Communist
rule. Now older and further along in my academic career, I am able to better understand
these issues and place them in their historical context. With this honors thesis, I hope to
explain this history and its context to the general reader.
My thesis specifically focuses on Yugoslav Communist views and policies toward
Bosnian Muslim identity, from the establishment of Yugoslavia in 1919 to the 1971
federal census. This project will therefore largely be an intellectual and political history,
analyzing the views of relevant organizations and individuals through Party programs,
newspaper articles, political speeches and propaganda brochures. At the same time, I will
try to offer a synthesis of the existing secondary scholarship on the issue, which is largely
in Bosnian and frequently either only mentions it briefly or has a narrower focus than the
one I have set out here. Ultimately, I hope that my work can provide a sound and up-todate overview of the subject to an English-language audience.
I have divided my thesis into three chapters, with each focusing on a distinct
chronological period. Chapter 1, Communists, Muslims and the National Question, 1940, focuses on the situation in the first Yugoslavia, prior to World War II. Chapter 2,
Muslims and Partisans, 1941-45, deals with the Partisan resistance movement during
World War II. Chapter 3, The Muslim Question in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1946-71,
looks at how the Bosnian Muslims positions changed during the first two-and-a-half
3
decades of Communist rule. I have also decided to end this introduction with a brief
overview of Bosnian geography and history for readers who are perhaps not familiar with
this part of the world.
Historical Background
Bosnia-Herzegovina is now a state in southeast Europe and home to three closely

related ethnic groups: Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. All three groups speak a mutually
intelligible Slavic language which they respectively identify as Bosnian, Croatian and
Serbian. Historically, the primary distinguishing feature between the three groups has
been religion; Bosniaks are traditionally Muslim, Croats are traditionally Catholic and
Serbs are traditionally Eastern Orthodox. The term Bosnian is geographic and refers to
any inhabitant of Bosnia regardless of ethnicity. Herzegovina is simply a historical region
consisting of roughly the southern eighth of Bosnia-Herzegovina; it has no political
autonomy. Bosnia itself is also a historical region going back to the middle ages that
generally refers to all of Bosnia-Herzegovina besides Herzegovina (i.e. BosniaHerzegovina can roughly be divided into Bosnia and Herzegovina), but it is sometimes
also used as short-hand for the country as a whole (for instance, Sarajevo is the capital
of Bosnia). The country is bordered by Croatia to the north and west, Serbia to the east
and Montenegro to the southeast. Croatia and Serbia are, respectively, the nation-states of
the Croat and Serb people. These four current states, along with Slovenia and Macedonia
(as well as Kosovo), together formed Yugoslavia.
4
Bosnia probably first emerged as a political entity in the centuries that followed
the Slavic migrations of the 6th and 7th centuries, as older tribal forms of government gave
way to feudalism. By the 14th century, this entity had grown from a small principality to a
kingdom that contained much of the present-day state and a sizeable portion of the
Dalmatian coast. In 1463, however, the country was conquered by the Ottoman Empire.
Bosnia soon became an Ottoman province, and over the next few centuries saw a sizable
portion of its population gradually convert to Islam. This phenomenon is best explained
by the historical absence of strong church institutions and the corresponding weakness of
Christian practice among Bosnian peasants; given the social advantages of adopting the
conquerors faith, conversion was probably an acceptable and appealing choice for many.
Throughout the Ottoman period, Bosnian society was primarily divided along the
religious lines of the general Ottoman millet system; each confessional community (i.e.
Muslims, Orthodox and Jews) conducted its own religious affairs, with the ruling Muslim
millet generally privileged over the various other tolerated people of the book. 4 Under
these conditions, Bosnian Muslims and particularly societal elites strongly identified
themselves as subjects of the Ottoman Empire and members of the larger Islamic
community (a sense of identity typical across the contemporary Ottoman world).
Simultaneously, however, they recognized themselves as distinct from ethnic Turks and
other non-Slavic Muslims, typically identifying as Bosnians in an ethno-geographic
sense. Underneath this, conceptions of identity were further complicated by socio-
Bosnia's Catholics did not receive millet status, for unlike the other three faiths in the empirewide
religious communities, thetrue head of the Catholic Church, the Pope, resided outside of theOttoman
Empire. As a result, the Catholics of Bosnia were placed by a charter under the Bosnian Franciscan
mission,whichauthorizedthefriarstoberesponsibleforitsCatholicflockinBosnia.
economic factors that often cut across or overlapped with religious lines (e.g. city
dwellers vs. villagers, Muslim landowners vs. serfs, etc.).
Despite a strong sense of regional identity, the rise of nationalism in Southeast
Europe did not see the development of an autochthonous Bosnian nationalism. To begin
with, apart from a few Franciscans priests, Bosnias Christian society did not have the
intellectual intermediaries to spearhead a nationalist movement as did so many other
Balkan territories (e.g. Greek Phanariotes, Preani Serbs, etc.). Furthermore, Bosnia's
Muslim elite was generally part of the Ottoman elite (locally and also in the central
administration) until a determined reformist sultan in Istanbul clashed with the Bosnian
nobles who sought to preserve their traditional privileged status. By the mid 19th century,
Serb and Croat nationalism had spread to Bosnia through such channels as merchants,
religious functionaries and school teachers, often nationalistically inclined. Although the
process took decades to complete and despite attempts to suppress it by Ottoman and,
later, Hapsburg authorities Bosnias Catholic and Orthodox population gradually
adopted Croat and Serb national identity respectively. Muslims, however had no reason
to share in these developments.
At a time when none of Bosnias three ethno-religious groups formed a majority
of the population, Croat and Serb nationalists saw an advantage to incorporating Bosnian
Muslims into their respective national corpuses. Under Austro-Hungarian administration
(1878-1918), authorities tried to counter these irredentist currents by promoting a
Bosnian nationality that would encompass all three groups, but to little success; Croat
and Serb national consciousness was already too widely developed among the two
Christian groups, while Bosnian Muslim elites embraced the measures somewhat
6
halfheartedly, many still seeing themselves as a religious community. By the time the
Austro-Hungarian state dropped the project, Bosnian Muslims continued to exercise their
political energy through the inter-confessional framework that had dated from the
Ottoman millet system the focus remained on the specific concerns of the Muslim
community, rather than on some attempt to foster a secular Bosnian nationality across
religious lines. Serb and Croat nationalists continued to call for Bosnian Muslims to
orient themselves toward one or the other, but such orientation was usually limited to
various intellectuals and a few community leaders; Serb and Croat national identity had
developed with firmly Christian connotations, and the Bosnian Muslim masses remained
essentially a-national, not siding with either.
This lack of an established national identity did not also mean that the Bosnian
Muslims saw themselves exclusively in broader Islamic terms. Over the latter half of the
19th century, Bosnian Muslims developed their own political organizations, established
Islamic institutions focused specifically on Bosnia and published newspapers and other
publications in their native language. In short, by the turn of the 20th century, Bosnian
Muslims had started to see themselves not merely as Bosnians and not merely as
Muslims, but effectively as members of a particular, Bosnian Muslim ethnic community
with its own unique concerns and demands. The crucial difference between the Bosnian
Muslims and their Serb and Croat neighbors was not that the former were stuck in some
entirely pre-nationalist mode of religious identification; in fact, the Catholic and
Orthodox religious identification of the millet system provided the foundation for
Bosnian Croat and Serb national identity as well. Rather, the difference was that the
Bosnian Muslims never successfully articulated a separate national identity with a secular
name within which the religious nature of their community could be submerged.
1. Communists, Muslims and the National Question, 1919-1940
In the study of Yugoslavia, historians often portray the Muslim Question as an

issue of the 1960s one of several nationalist fissures preoccupying the countrys leaders
during that chaotic decade. The Communist Party of Yugoslavias (KPJ) views of
Bosnian Muslim national identity, however, always developed within the context of its
broader national policy; understanding the origins of the Muslim Question therefore
requires looking at the early development of KPJ thought on this matter. This chapter
attempts to do just that, paying specific attention to the ways in which Bosnian Muslims
come up in KPJ politics and ideology, from the Partys foundation in 1919 to the eve of
World War II. Before focusing on the Communists, however, it is worth reviewing the
political position of Muslims in the newly created Yugoslav state.
1.1 Bosnian Muslims in interwar Yugoslavia
The end of Austria-Hungarian rule and establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs,

Croats and Slovenes was marked by, among other things, outbursts of peasant violence in
the countryside. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, this unrest took on an ethno-religious character,
with Serbs directing their ire at rural Muslims; Demaludin auevi, the chief Bosnian
Muslim religious authority at this time, claimed to the Parisian Le Temps that 270
villages had been pillaged and some 1,000 Muslims killed. 1 This violence provided an
added impetus for Bosnian Muslims to politically organize, and they formed a number of
small regional factions over the course of 1919. 2 That February, however, Muslim elites
gathered in Sarajevo and formed a more inclusive Party, named the Yugoslav Muslim
Organization (Jugoslavenska muslimanska organizacija or JMO), aiming to represent the
interests of the entire Bosnian Muslim community. 3 In the November, 1920 elections for
a Yugoslav constitutional assembly, the JMO gained an impressive 24 seats, winning
virtually the entire Bosnian Muslim vote. 4
At the constitutional assembly the next summer, the JMO would play a decisive
role. Namely, there was a great gap between the views of the Serb parties, which favored
a strong, centralized state, and the Slovene and (particularly) Croat parties, which
preferred some sort of confederation. As the Serb parties enjoyed a large majority of
delegates, they decided not to try and reach a compromise with the confederalist parties;
instead, they appealed to the JMO and a smaller Muslim party from Kosovo and
Macedonia, offering concessions in exchange for their bloc of votes. The JMO accepted,
voting for the centralist constitution in exchange for guarantees of religious freedom and
a never-actually-granted autonomy, some concessions ahead of the inevitable land reform
and a promise to maintain Bosnia-Herzegovinas territorial integrity. 5 Its support proved
crucial and the now infamous Constitution went into effect on St. Vitus Day, June 28,
1921.
1
Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 162.
2
Ibid., p. 163.
3
Francine Friedman. The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996),
p. 97.
4
Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 164.
5
Banac, From Religious, p. 134.
10
Less than a year later, Serb politicians reneged on the promise regarding Bosnian
autonomy. On June 26, 1922, the government in Belgrade redrew administrative
boundaries and split Bosnia-Herzegovina into six districts. 6 Although they were based on
Bosnia-Herzegovinas traditional internal boundaries and, taken together, still formed an
outline of the old Habsburg province, Muslims were a minority in all six. This caused a
split in the JMOs ranks between a pro-Serb faction gathered around Ibrahim Maglajli
and a so-called leftist faction led by the young Mehmed Spaho. Spahos faction won
out within the Party, prompting Maglajli and his followers to splinter off and form a new
party named the Yugoslav Muslim Peoples Party (Jugoslavenska muslimanska narodna
organizacija, or JMNO). Spahos JMO trounced the JMNO in the following 1923
elections, winning 112,228 votes to the JMNOs 6,074. 7 In the following years, under
Spahos leadership, the JMO effectively formed part of the regionalist opposition,
together with the major Croat and Slovene parties of the time.
Besides the preservation and restoration of Bosnia-Herzegovinas autonomy and
historical boundaries, the most important issue on the JMOs agenda at this time was that
of land reform. At the same time, this was also one of the top issues for the central
government in Belgrade, which faced what was by European standards an incredibly
unproductive and backward agricultural sector. 8 This was particularly the case in BosniaHerzegovina, where semi-feudal institutions dating back to the Ottoman period persisted
between the predominantly Serb serfs and the largely Muslim land-owners. Not
surprisingly then, the Yugoslav government issued decrees abolishing serfdom and
6
Ibid., p. 135.
7
Friedman, Bosnian Muslims, p. 97.
8
Ibid.
11
promising a re-distribution of land as early as 1919. 9 Although the JMO lobbied hard to
mitigate potential negative consequences, when the government implemented the reform,
compensation for the Muslim land-owners was not only far below the market value but
came in the form of long-term government bonds. 10 This was sufficient for the wealthiest
land owners, but most of the Muslims affected by the land reform were hardly living in
luxury to begin with, even with their advantages over the serfs. Consequently, the land
reform reduced a number of prominent Bosnian Muslim families to poverty. 11
Another issue particularly affecting the Bosnian Muslim community at this time
was the intensifying intellectual polemic over their national identity. Now that the South
Slavs had a state that ostensibly represented their own collective national interests, the
question arose over what to do with, as many contemporary articles termed, our
Muslims. 12 Although the consensus held that Muslims should adopt a national identity
(one particularly enthusiastic 1924 article in Sarajevos Serb nationalist press featured the
title Lets Nationalize the Muslims!), the specifics of this proposal often varied. 13 Croat
ideologues held that Bosnian Muslims were nationally Croats, Serb commentators that
they were nationally Serb and yet others that the Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, along with
the Muslims, were all simply tribes of a Yugoslav nation that included all Slavicspeakers in Yugoslavia.
9
10
11
Sair Filandra. Bonjaka politika u XX. Stoljeu (Sarajevo: Sejtarija, 1998), p. 65.
12
Milan urin, Nai Muslimani [1923], in O Nacionaliziranju Muslimana, ed. Alija
Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 54-56; edomil Mitrinovi, Nai Muslimani [1926], in O
Nacionaliziranju Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 65-71.
13
Krsta Mari, Nacionalizujmo muslimane! [1924], in O Nacionaliziranju Muslimana, ed.
Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 62-64.
12
For their part, Bosnian Muslim intellectuals were themselves divided on the
matter. Some, such as one Edhem Bulbulovi writing in 1933, considered it obvious that
the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina are, by their temperament and mentality, Serbs. 14
On the other hand, Salko Nazei, writing in the same year, harshly criticized a Serbian
academic who had claimed that Muslims were nationally undetermined. Above all, there
is no national question among us Nazei maintained, arguing that Our Muslim
masses are perhaps not formally identified with any particular tribe, but we have a deep
sense of national identity and love towards our country. 15 Nazeis mention of
particular tribes was a reference to the idea of a pan-Yugoslav nation touched upon in
the previous paragraph, and this was also the official position of the JMO. In its 1919
platform, the Party declared itself in favor of Yugoslavism and against the political
nationalization of Muslims. 16 This is not to say, however, that the leaders of the JMO
did not nationalize individually; of the 24 JMO delegates at the constitutional assembly,
fifteen officially declared themselves as Croats, two as Serbs and two, including Spaho,
as Yugoslavs. 17 Still, these were personal choices with little bearing on the stance of the
JMO as a whole. A 1920 editorial in the Party journal, for instance, even encouraged
Muslims to declare as belonging to the nation that would give them the greatest economic
advantage. 18
14
Edhem Bulbulovi, Nacionalizam i muslimani [1933], in O Nacionaliziranju Muslimana,
ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), p. 89.
15
Salko Nazei, O nacionalizmu naih muslimana [1933], in O Nacionaliziranju
Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), p. 77.
16
Wolfgang Hpken, Yugoslavia's Communists and the Bosnian Muslims, in Muslim
Communities Reemerge, ed. Edward Allworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 221.
17
Friedman, Bosnian Muslims, pp. 93-94. The source does not cite the nationality of the
remaining delegates.
18
13
As Yugoslavia sank deeper into political turmoil, paralyzed by disagreements

over the centralized constitutional government, the JMOs unity and political platform
suffered as well. On January 6, 1929, King Aleksander I effectively disbanded the
parliament and established his personal dictatorship over the country. That October, he
once again redrew Yugoslavias internal boundaries, this time replacing the various
districts with nine banates (banovine) that avoided traditional regional borders. BosniaHerzegovinas six districts were replaced by four banates that completely cut across the
provinces historical boundaries. 19 Effectively then, these banates erased BosniaHerzegovina from the map. As could be expected, the JMO protested, calling for new
administrative divisions based on the countrys historical regions (i.e. including Bosnia),
but their pleas fell on deaf ears. In fact, the new boundaries were implemented in large
measure precisely to curb the JMOs influence. Milan Srki, the Bosnian Serb who
pushed through the new boundaries, had an antipathy for the JMO that bordered on antiMuslim prejudice. 20 Srki regarded the Bosnian Muslim party as fundementally
illegitimate, for it organized along religious lines in what was otherwise an ethnicallydefined political arena. 21 The resulting banates left Muslims and the JMO at a distinct
political disadvantage, and they were consequently underrepresented at virtually all levels
of government. 22
Aleksanders assassination on October 9, 1934 ultimately changed little in terms
of the JMOs declining influence. The Prime Minister at the time, Milan Stojadinovi,
convinced the JMO to enter a ruling coalition with the major Serb parties, but not in
19
20
He once admitted that he was pained by the sight of minarets in Bosnia. Ibid., p. 138
21
Marko Attila Hoare, The History of Bosnia (London: Saqi Books, 2007), pp. 195-6.
22
14
return for any guarantees concerning Bosnia-Herzegovinas status. Consequently, when

Stojadinovis successor, Dragia Cvetkovi, began negotiating with the leading Croat
politician Vladko Maek over dividing the banates and establishing a Croatian
administrative unit, the JMOs views were never taken into account. 23 The resulting
Cvetkovi-Maek agreement, settled on August 23, 1939, established a Croatian banate,
including the older Croatian-majority banates as well as large swathes of what had been
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In reaching this agreement, Cvetkovi and Maek had completely
disregarded the Bosnian Muslims, and quite literally at that; in deciding whether a
particular municipality would go to the Croats or the Serbs, they assumed that its Muslim
population simply did not exist. 24 The JMO could only stand by and watch, its
powerlessness only magnified by Spahos death in the middle of the negotiations.
Simultaneously, however, a vastly different political actor the underground Communist
movement would take advantage of the situation, labeling the JMO traitors to the idea
of Bosnian autonomy and getting to work on winning over the Partys Muslim base.
1.2 Yugoslav Communists and the Social Democrat Legacy
One of the great ironies in the history of Yugoslavia is that the Communists the
party that would eventually formulate the most successful and inclusive national program
of all its peers spent much of the interwar period with no clear answer to the national
question. In fact, the factionalism that bedeviled the party over this issue would grow so
23
24
Ibid., p. 140.
15
intense that contemporary Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti accused the
Yugoslavs of being unable to take a united position on the national question, or on
any other issue, because of their disputatious Balkan temperament. 25 A fairer
interpretation, however, would be that the Yugoslavs simply did not care at least not
initially. The KPJs Unification Congress in April, 1919 only mentioned that it favored
A single national state with the widest self-government in the regions, districts and
communes, and it passed no resolutions on the national question at either the First or
Second Party Congress. 26 For Balkan leftists, the intricacies of leading a proletarian
revolution seemed a more pressing concern, and the Party therefore focused most of its
attention on militant trade-union activism.
Insofar as the KPJ did have a stance toward the national question, it was largely
inherited from the prewar Social Democrats, who, like some of the bourgeoisie
intellectuals mentioned above, believed that the various South Slavs formed a single
nation. 27 Consequently, existing national names were considered interchangeable, or as
monikers of a tribal identity. As the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina
asserted upon its foundation in 1908, for instance, all citizens of Bosnia are part of a
people that call themselves Serbs or Croats. 28 With the establishment of the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, proponents of this idea, Social Democrat or not, articulated it
with the phrase one nation with three names (troimeni narod). The KPJ briefly alluded
25
Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1968), p. 13.
26
Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp.
332-3.
27
Shoup, Communism, p. 19.
28
Hpken, Communists and Muslims, p. 218.
16
to this view at its Vukovar Congress in June, 1920, where it expressed a determination to
remain on the bulwark of the idea of national oneness. 29
Not surprisingly, this idea of national oneness found little room for the ethnoreligious identity of the Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnian Social Democrats addressed this
issue directly at their Second Party Congress in 1910, where they asserted that Our
Muslims are without a national consciousness [as a] consequence of the economic
conditions in which they live and from which their cultural backwardness originates. 30
By approaching the subject from a Marxist perspective, the Social Democrats typically
recognized Bosnian Muslim communal identity as a sign of backwardness stemming
from unfavorable material circumstances. The logical conclusion of this approach was
that by entering modernity and attaining the requisite level of economic development, the
Bosnian Muslims would naturally orient themselves toward the correct form of national
identity (in this case unitary Yugoslavism). The post-war Communists maintained this
reasoning, which would reappear in numerous later attempts to find a Marxist solution to
the Muslim question. Simply put, Yugoslav Communists did not consider the religiouslyrooted identity of Bosnian Muslims as validating a separate national consciousness.
Interestingly enough, however, the Communists were not above occasionally
implying or even explicitly asserting that the Bosnian Muslims saw themselves as a
separate national group. Party Secretary Sima Markovi, writing in 1923, complained of
a national alienation, stemming from the time when it was possible to say cuius
religio eius natio, as is still the case with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim masses.
29
Banac, National Question, p. 333.
30
17
They consider themselves Turks even though they do not know a word of Turkish or
have any other relation to the Turks besides faith.31 Similarly, the October 24, 1920
issue of the Radnike novine (Worker News), a Communist Party newspaper, argued that
in Bosnia-Herzegovina Religious division served as means of accomplishing [the
creation of three peoples]. So it was that the Orthodox inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina
formed as one nation, the Catholic inhabitants as a second nation and the Muslims as a
third nation. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox are taken as Serbs, Catholics as Croats
and Muslims as Turks. 32
Although their primary purpose was to criticize the phenomenon, both Markovi
and Radnike novine suggest that the Bosnian Muslims saw themselves as a separate
national group. They base this assessment, however, on the erroneous claim that Bosnian
Muslims identified as ethnic Turks a common misconception with a long history.
Bosnian Muslims did indeed traditionally refer to themselves as Turks (Turci), but this
was merely a synonym for the word Muslim and expressed only a religious identification;
Bosnian Catholics comparably identified sometimes themselves as Latins (Latini), while
ethnic Turks from Anatolia were referred to with a separate term, Turkue. 33
In commenting on the quotation from Markovi, German historian Wolfgang
Hpken took it as evidence that the Communists did not see Bosnian Muslims as an
emerging confessional nation. 34 While this is of course true, it is somewhat beside the
point. The crux of Markovis argument was not that Bosnian Muslims were not a nation,
31
Kasim Suljevi, Nacionalnost Muslimana (Rijeka: Otokar Kerovani, 1981), p. 180.
32
Ibid., p. 179.
33
Banac, National Question, p. 41.
34
18
but that they incorrectly identified themselves with the wrong one. What Markovi was
implying was that, because of their religion, Bosnian Muslims nationally identified with
the alien Turks rather than with their fellow South Slavs. That Party officials relied on
such outdated stereotypes to formulate their views on Bosnian Muslim national identity is
a testament to both their ignorance about the group in question and the relative
unimportance they gave to the issue. So long as the Party took the ideal of a single
Yugoslav nation as the cornerstone of its confused and embryonic nationality policy,
Bosnian Muslim communal identity would necessarily be assessed in the context of this
ultimate goal and through a combination of Marxist thought and traditional
misunderstandings.
By the early 1920s, a number of factors prompted the KPJ to radically reconsider
its views on the national question. Internally, the Yugoslav government temporarily
prohibited all Communist activity following a bloody miners strike outside Tuzla in
December, 1920; when a violent splinter group of KPJ activists responded by
assassinating the interior minister Milorad Drakovi in July, 1921, the new constituent
assembly banned the Party indefinitely. The ban threw the KPJ into disarray just as it was
coming under increasing external pressure from the Communist International. In contrast
to the Yugoslavs, the Comintern held no particular attachment to the Yugoslav state as
such, and pressured the Yugoslav Party to exploit growing nationalist rivalries as a means
of achieving revolution. 35 For many Yugoslav Communists, however, the idea of
embracing nationalist sentiment as part of the class struggle seemed to be a contradiction
in terms. The KPJ subsequently split between supporters of Markovi, who remained
35
19
firmly against any concessions to federalism or collaboration with nationalist groups, and
a left faction that stood behind the Comintern. 36
The increasingly bitter debate between the two sides saw the KPJs first attempts
to face the national question head on, and a number of proposals for federalism (as well
as arguments against it) appeared in the party press. Ultimately, however, the outcome
was decided by the Comintern, which took an increasingly active role in KPJ affairs. By
1928, it called for the immediate dismemberment of Yugoslavia and installed its own
Soviet-trained cadres in the KPJ leadership, handing them the task of initiating revolution
through an alliance with the peasantry but without collaborating with bourgeoisie
elements. 37 Between this thoroughly unrealistic goal and the advent of King Aleksanders
dictatorship in 1929, the KPJ virtually ceased to function.
Although there is little reason to believe that the KPJs attitudes toward the
Bosnian Muslims changed during this time, its stance on Bosnia-Herzegovina has been
subject to academic debate. In discussing this period, Hpken contends that the
Communists completely ignored the role of Bosnia as a historically grown and
individualistic region of Yugoslavia, and notes that even in the late 1920s and early
1930s, Bosnia surfaces only sporadically in the vague plans of dissolving Yugoslavia into
newly-to-be-formed individual states. 38 In contrast to this, Marko Attila Hoare
emphasizes that, although Bosnia-Herzegovina played a very marginal role in the
36
Ibid., p. 23.
37
Ibid., p. 35.
38
20
interwar period, the Partys position was remarkably consistent whenever mentioned,
Bosnia-Herzegovina was always treated as a legitimate entity in its own right. 39
On the whole, Hoares interpretation seems closer to the truth. Although the
central KPJ leadership certainly did ignore Bosnia-Herzegovina during this period, this
seems to have been largely due to the isolation and insignificance of its Bosnian branch,
and not to any ideological repudiation of Bosnias historical integrity. In fact, even the
calls for national rights and federalism in the 1920s seem to have been based on
Yugoslavias historical provinces and regions, as opposed to any ethnically-defined
boundaries that would have cut across them. Contrary to Hpkens assertion above,
Hoare cites many such proposals for Yugoslav federalism that included BosniaHerzegovina. 40 While individual Communists may have considered the partition of
Bosnia-Herzegovina as a viable option, this was never the official or even dominant
position of the KPJ as a whole; the scant evidence brought up in favor of such allegations
remains largely unconvincing. 41
1.3 The Popular Front and the Muslim Question
Whatever the case, by the mid 1930s the KPJ was once again poised for a
dramatic shift in its nationality policy. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rise to power in
Germany in 1933 triggered an about-turn in Comintern policy, giving rise to the Popular
39
Hoare, Bosnia, pp. 195-6.
40
Ibid., pp. 167-8.
41
Ibid., pp. 171-4.
21
Front and its call for Communist parties to forge anti-fascist alliances with progressive
bourgeoisie elements. In Yugoslavia, this was first manifested at the Fourth National
Conference in 1934, where the KPJ dropped its earlier calls for immediate secession and
self-determination of its various peoples. 42 In their place, it developed a new stance on
the nationality question, recognizing existing national divisions but appealing to an
inclusive Yugoslav identity as well. Administratively, the KPJ now championed a federal
but unified Yugoslavia, which consistently included Bosnia-Herzegovina as a separate
province. To that end, the Party finally took an active role in rebuilding the moribund
Bosnian Party structure, sending in Bosnian students from Belgrade University to oversee
the task in 1936. 43
The KPJs decision to commit itself to a unified Yugoslavia forced the Party to
formulate its own internal solution to the national question, prompting a growing interest
in the status of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the national identity of Bosnian Muslims. This is
particularly illustrated by a brief set of notes from a lecture given in 1936 by Communist
activists to inmates at the Sremska Mitrovica penitentiary the so-called Red
University simply titled The National Question in Bosnia. The lecture apparently
offered a Marxist analysis of the political situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, outlining the
alignment of the various nationalist bourgeoisies and the prospect for creating an
autonomous Bosnia-Herzegovina (King Aleksander had already divided the country into
banates some seven years earlier). Critically, the lecture notes assert that the specific
traditions of Muslims ensure and will continue to assure that the greatest part of the
Bosnian Muslims remains a unique ethnic community, a people with particular interests
42
43
Hoare, Bosnia, p. 178.
22
and wishes. 44 In this view, Muslims are still considered nationally unoriented a
consequence of their late and incomplete transition to capitalism but they are also
acknowledged as some sort of people. In the ongoing friction between the Muslim
masses and its bourgeoisie leadership in the JMO, the lecturer saw an opportunity to win
their support behind the Communist initiative for Bosnian autonomy. The notes reiterated
all this in their conclusion, stating that the greatest part of the Bosnian Muslims will
continue to remain a separate ethnic group, which represents the foundation of the
autonomously-inclined masses in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 45
While few conclusions can be drawn about KPJ policy from an obscure lecture to
Communist prisoners, the notes nonetheless demonstrate some emerging currents in
Yugoslav Communist thought on the question of Bosnian Muslim national identity. No
longer expected to align themselves with a new Yugoslav nation or mistakenly be
identified as Turks, Bosnian Muslims could now increasingly be seen by at least some
Communists as an ambiguous ethnic group. Two years after the Sremska Mitrovica
paper, Edvard Kardelj, a leading KPJ functionary, would express similar views in his
Razvoj slovenskega narodnega vpraanja (Development of the Slovene National
Question). We cannot say, for example, that the Muslims in Yugoslavia are a nation, he
notes, although they dont consider themselves either Serbs or Croats and although they,
in that sense, certainly compose a separate ethnic group. 46
44
Suljevi, Nacionalnost, p. 192.
45
Ibid., p. 194.
46
Edvard Kardelj, Razvoj slovenskega narodnega vpraanja. (Ljubljana: Naa Zaloba, 1939), p.
347.
23
At around this time, voices from the Bosnian Muslim student left, centered in
Belgrade and Zagreb, increasingly became involved in the discussion. In terms of the
Yugoslav capital, the two key figures were Avdo Humo and Osman Karabegovi, KPJ
members and students at Belgrade University. In December, 1937, huddled together in
an apartment without heating, trembling from the cold in our winter coats, Humo and
Karabegovi wrote a petition entitled Proglas studenata Bosne I Hercegovine o njenoj
autonomiji (Declaration of Bosnia-Herzegovinas Students on her Autonomy). 47 The
petition was signed by over 300 Bosnian students at the Belgrade and Zagreb universities,
leading to two more petitions in March, 1938 and December of 1941. Together, the
student petitions echoed the emerging party line, expressing support for a federal political
structure in which Bosnia-Herzegovina would be an equal and multinational constituent
province. In the words of the third petition, Bosnia-Herzegovina is covered by Serb,
Croat and Muslim inhabitants living intermingled, and it is not possible to draw a frontier
between the Serbs and Croats without it being a grievous injustice to the Serbs, Croats or
Muslims. 48 In terms of the national question, the petitions were explicit in their view
that Bosnia-Herzegovina was home to several peoples, including the Muslims who
always comprised a unified and particular whole. 49
Beyond treating Bosnian Muslims as a narod (people) equal to Serbs and Croats,
the petitions also praised the political tradition of fighting for Bosnian autonomy, even
while remaining cool toward the JMO leadership that had carried it out. 50 This stood in
47
Avdo Humo, Moja generacija (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1984), pp. 434-36.
48
49
Atif Purivatra, Savez Komunista Jugoslavije prema nacionalnom pitanju Muslimana [1968],
in Nacionalni i politiki razvitak Muslimana (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1970), p. 53.
50
24
contrast to the sentiments expressed in the Sremska Mitrovica lecture, where Muslim
support for Bosnian autonomy was essentially reduced to the JMO tricking the
impoverished Muslim masses into supporting the class interests of their feudal notables.
It did, however, fit into ongoing KPJ efforts to establish its influence among Bosnian
Muslims disillusioned with the JMOs political calculations following the CvetkoviMaek agreement. Not surprisingly, Humo himself was an active participant in these
efforts. In a lecture he gave to an audience of Tuzla Muslims in the fall of 1940, he
spoke of the history of the idea of Bosnian-Herzegovinian autonomy, [and] criticized the
Yugoslav Muslim Organization for betraying this idea, as well as the other nationalist
bourgeoisie parties, which threw this idea aside as unacceptable to them from a national
and political standpoint. 51 In Tuzla, as in many other Bosnian towns at this time, the
KPJ was hard at work trying to infiltrate and spread its message among various Muslim
cultural organizations, ranging from reading rooms to sports clubs. 52
At around the same time, a circle of Bosnian Muslim leftists had gathered in
Zagreb around the magazine Putokaz (Guide). Like their counterparts in Belgrade, the
students and young academics behind this project were disillusioned with the politics of
the JMO. Specifically, they were aghast at the material circumstances of the Bosnian
Muslim masses, with whom they closely identified. As philosopher Safet Krupi stated
on the front page of the opening issue, All of us, more or less, were born in those houses
built from dirt, mud and slime, where the cold and the wind feel the same as on the
street. 53 They blamed these conditions on the sharp break with the Ottoman feudal
51
Humo, Moja generacija, p. 502.
52
Hoare, Bosnia, pp. 180-81.
53
Filandra, Bonjaka politika, p. 143.
25
system, and on the corrupted and incapable leadership of the JMO, whom they identified
with this feudal legacy. In their place, the members of Putokaz aspired to be the
spokesmen of the Bosnian Muslim intelligentsia, serving as the intellectual voice of the
people and helping them transcend their sorry post-feudal state. To that end, in its brief
run of seven issues between 1937 and 1939, this Paper for Social and Literary Matters
touched upon a diverse range of topics, making it unique among interwar Bosnian
Muslim publications.
Among these topics was the issue of national identity. The writers at Putokaz may
have spelled Muslims with a lower-case m, signifying a religious group as opposed to a
capitalized nationality, but their conception of Bosnian Muslim identity transcended that
of a mere religious community. Bosnian Muslims were instead identified as a people
and an ethnic community, and the identification of some Muslim public figures as
Serbs and Croats was roundly criticized. 54 As Skender Kulenovi argued, Among these
intellectuals there were even those who changed these national orientations like shirts
out of clearly commercial and career-minded reasons. 55 Putokaz instead advocated a
Bosnian Muslim identity that, if not explicitly, was de facto national, comprising a
consciously unoriented ethnic whole, separate from Serbs and Croats and entitled to its
own intelligentsia. This is reflected in its unfinished Putokaz Calendar, a collection of
proposed essays intended for the broader public, which planned to be a sort of small, but
solid, encyclopedia of all our relevant questions. 56 Among them was The Question of
the Nationality of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose purpose was defined as
54
55
Ibid., p. 199.
56
26
To determine whether there exists a sense of national feeling in any direction among the
wider masses of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims, and to scientifically demonstrate that
the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina form a separate Slavic, not merely religious but
cultural, individual entity. 57
Politically, the KPJs increasing concern with the Muslim question came to a head
in November, 1940, at the Partys Fifth National Conference in Zagreb. A mere four
months earlier in July, at its Fifth Provincial Congress, the Bosnian branch of the KPJ
had come out firmly in favor of Bosnian autonomy. Among other things, its declaration
from the Congress stated that the Muslim working masses have followed their
leadership only because they feel that they, as an ethnic group, are under threat from the
Serbian and Croatian bourgeoisie. 58 At the subsequent National Conference, however,
the Muslims emerging status as an ethnic group was challenged. Moe Pijade, a highranking KPJ official and Serbian Jew, was originally charged with outlining the Partys
stance on the national question, but his draft was rejected after objections from Tito and
Central Committee members Kardelj and Milovan ilas. The objections centered on
Pijades description of the Macedonians and Montenegrins as nations not yet fully
formed, but may have also included trepidations about his critical assessment of Bosnian
Muslims. 59 According to Pijade, the Muslims had resisted nationalizing as Serbs or
57
Ibid., p. 151.
58
Purivatra, Savez Komunista, p. 55.
59
Enver Redi, Jugoslavenski radniki pokret i nacionalno pitanje u Bosni i Hercegovini (19181941) (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1983), p. 413.
27
Croats due to their material backwardness, remaining confessionally rather than

nationally oriented. 60
Although there are no copies of ilas replacement speech, it seems that he also
described Bosnian Muslim identity as confessional rather than national. To this came the
now oft-cited response from Mustafa Pai, a Muslim member of the Bosnian delegation,
who challenged this stance as [assisting] the Croatian or the Serbian bourgeoisie, and
declared that The Muslims are not a formed nation, but they are an ethnic group. 61
Pai, secretary of the KPJs regional committee for Herzegovina, probably based this
view on an academic study on Bosnian statehood and the Muslim question
commissioned earlier by the Party organization in Mostar. 62 Considering the wording of
the earlier declaration from the Fifth Provincial Conference and the fact that Mostar was
at this time the center of KPJ activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the existence of such a
document further implies that the provincial Party cadres were by and large comfortable
with recognizing the Bosnian Muslims as an ethnic group. Serbian and Montenegrin
delegates, however, including Pijade and ilas, evidently were not; in response to Pais
statement, ilas simply responded The Bosnian Muslims are not an ethnic group. 63
This tension between Bosnian and Serbo-Montenegrin Party members in regards to the
Muslim question would frequently come up in subsequent Party debates on the issue.
Titos statement that Bosnia is one because of its [inhabitants] centuries of coexistence,
regardless of religion upheld Bosnia-Herzegovinas historical integrity, but did little to
60
61
Redi, Jugoslavenski, p. 414.
62
Hoare, Bosnia, p. 187-8.
63
Ibid., p. 188.
28
resolve the debate over Muslim national identity. 64 As a result, the documents of the Fifth
National Conference did not include Bosnian Muslims when listing the ethnic groups of
Yugoslavia. 65 The fact that ilas did not even mention the incident in his memoirs
highlights the relative lack of importance he assigned to the matter.66
1.4 Conclusions
In the years leading up to World War II, therefore, the KPJ stance on the Muslim
question changed as part of broader shifts in its views on the nationality question. In the
early years of the new Yugoslav state, the KPJ inherited its position on the issue from the
pre-war Social Democrats, who expected the Bosnian Muslims to be assimilated into a
broader Yugoslav nation. By the time of the Popular Front, however, the KPJ was
compelled to articulate its own nationality policy. Advocating a loose federalism with
Bosnia-Herzegovina as an integral province, the Yugoslav Communists came to
reconsider the status of Bosnian Muslims, with some now identifying them as an
ambiguous ethnic group. At the same time, a number of Bosnian Muslim Party members
and associated leftist intellectuals took up the task of outlining in Marxist terms the
national status of their ethnic community. As the Fifth National Conference
demonstrates, none of this amounted to a coherent or even prevailing Party line. It did,
64
Ibid., p. 188.
65
66
Ibid., p. 243.
29
however, in all its ambiguity, mean that the KPJ entered the war advancing the most
open-minded political option about the issue of Bosnian Muslim national identity.
30
2. Muslims and Partisans, 1941-45
In trumpeting its support for the autonomy of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the KPJ had
high hopes for the latent revolutionary potential of the wider Bosnian Muslim masses.
Economically pauperized following the 1919-21 agrarian reform and disenchanted with
their leadership in light of Cvetkovi-Maek, to many Communists the Bosnian Muslims
appeared to be an ideal target constituency. When the revolution actually came following
Nazi Germanys invasion of Yugoslavia in April, 1941, however, the Bosnian Muslim
response was varied or, from a Communist perspective, underwhelming. 1 In the postwar period, this attached to the Bosnian Muslims a stigma of collaboration with the
fascist occupiers, even while historical research into the subject remained taboo.2 In order
to better contextualize the KPJs wartime handling of the Muslim question, this section
will begin by briefly outlining the Bosnian Muslim experience in World War II. It will
then look at the issue of Muslim national identity as it comes up in the KPJs wartime
propaganda, ideological writing and administrative decisions.
2.1 Bosnian Muslims and World War II
Following their takeover of the country, the Axis powers dismantled Yugoslavia
by appropriating parts of its territory to themselves and leaving the rest in the hands of
1
2
31
several fascist puppet regimes. The most significant of these was the Independent State of
Croatia (Nezavisna Drava Hrvatska or NDH), which the Axis entrusted to a small group
of Croat fascists known as the Ustae. Under the leadership of Ante Paveli a man later
rumored to have kept a wastebasket of human eyeballs next to his work desk the Ustae
were left in charge of a Croatia that conspicuously lacked Dalmatia (annexed by Italy)
but included the entirety of the former Bosnia-Herzegovina. 3 Their vision for this
territory as a Croat nation state, however, was challenged by the fact that at least a quarter
of inhabitants were Serbs. 4 The Ustaa response to this predicament entailed two major
components. First, Serbs were designated as ethnic undesirables who, in the infamous
words of education minister Mile Budak, were to be 1/3 killed, 1/3 expelled and 1/3
converted to Catholicism (which amounted to a state-sponsored genocide of the NDHs
Serb population). 5 Second, the Ustae adopted an altogether different stance toward the
Bosnian Muslims, identifying them as Islamicized Croats and actively courting their
support for the NDH. In the words of Paveli, There is no Muslim question, for that is a
Croat question. 6
The Muslim response to the establishment of the NDH was varied. Pavelis
promises of equality and religious autonomy earned him the support of some prominent
religious figures and politicians, but the decision over whether or not to actively work
within the NDH state ultimately reflected existing divisions among the Muslim elite and
individual choices. The case of Dafer Kulenovi is particularly instructive here. The
3
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), p. 130.
4
Hrvoje Matkovi, Povijest nezavisne drave Hrvatske (Zagreb: Naklada P.I.P. Pavii, 1994), p.
82.
5
Judah, The Serbs, p. 126.
6
32
former JMO leader entered Pavelis government as vice president a post that made
him its highest ranking Muslim member out of a desire to counter a Muslim rival,
Hakija Hadi, who had already gone over to the Ustae and was using his newfound
influence to meddle in the affairs of the Islamic Community (Islamska zajednica or IZ). 7
Even taking such practical motivations into account, the decision to collaborate with the
Ustae was not exactly embraced by the pre-war Muslim elite; at the summer of 1941
meeting of ex-JMO members where Kulenovi announced his decision, a majority of
those present were against this move. Beyond Pavelis rhetoric and the involvement of
some prominent Muslim notables such as Kulenovi, the NDH administration remained
an essentially Catholic Croat enterprise, with Muslims vastly underrepresented at all
levels of the military-political leadership. 8
Despite the mixed response from the Muslim elite, the Bosnian Serb peasants who
bore the brunt of the NDHs genocidal policies strongly identified Bosnian Muslims with
the hated Ustae. With very little historical scholarship on the issue, it is difficult to
gauge to what extent this was due to active Muslim participation in Ustaa atrocities and
to what extent it was driven by existing anti-Muslim prejudices and circulating stories
among rural Serbs. 9 Whatever the case, however, as the NDHs Serb population rose up
in a spontaneous armed revolt against the Ustae, one consequence was a wide-spread
anti-Muslim pogrom. Some 75,000 Bosnian Muslims died in the war in Yugoslavia,
7
8
Ibid., p. 243.
9
Many of those killed were Muslims in the Sandak region of Serbia and Montenegro, which lay
outside the NDH. See Mustafa Memi, Bonjaci-Muslimani Sandaka i Crne Gore (Sarajevo:
Oko, 1996), pp. 317-22.
33
amounting to approximately 8.1% of their total population. 10 Many of these died at the
hands of Dragoljub Draa Mihailovis Chetniks (etnici), the Serb nationalist
resistance movement whose plans for a renewed Serb monarchy had little room for
Bosnian Muslims; the organizations leading generals and intellectuals repeatedly called
for the cleansing of the land of all non-Serb elements. 11
For Bosnian Muslims, the Chetnik massacres and the perceived inability of Ustaa
authorities to stop them made the war a struggle for ethnic survival. Increasingly wary of
the NDH, by the end of 1941 the Muslim elite of nearly all major Bosnian cities publicly
criticized the Ustae in a series of petitions and resolutions, condemning the genocide
against Serbs and highlighting its repercussions for the Muslim population. The Sarajevo
resolution from the latter half of 1941, signed by many of the citys most prominent
Muslim cultural organizations, was exemplary in demanding that all religious
intolerance be prevented, and those who in this regard have created any kind of
disturbance be most strictly punished. 12 Many of the figures behind these resolutions
also organized humanitarian relief for refugees fleeing Chetnik-held territories and
appealed for help to international Islamic governments and organizations from Cairo to
Jakarta. 13
Politically, Bosnian Muslims increasingly pushed for some form of Bosnian
administrative and military autonomy, and to this end we see various initiatives for selfrule and the spontaneous organization of Muslim militias throughout the country.
10
11
Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 178-9.
12
13
Filandra, Bonjaka politika, pp. 165-72.
34
Among the most ambitious of these initiatives was a letter sent by several Sarajevo
notables to Adolf Hitler himself, in which the authors argued that Bosnian Muslims were
actually descended from Goths and asked for a County of Bosnia with a Muslim
majority to be separated from the NDH and placed under direct German administration. 14
But while the Nazis eventually granted some concessions to such sentiment with the
creation of a Bosnian Muslim SS division, under the war-time circumstances Muslim
autonomist aspirations never coalesced into an organized political program. Even if
disorganized, however, the presence of large bands of armed Muslims scattered across
the country, suspicious of the NDH and hostile to the Chetniks, ensured that the Muslims
became an important factor in Partisan strategy.
2.2 Bosnian Muslims in Partisan Propaganda
The Partisans had entered the war in June of 1941, in response to Hitlers invasion
of the Soviet Union and some two months after the capitulation of Yugoslavia. 15 They
quickly made up for any lost ground, however, establishing themselves as the second
major antifascist resistance movement on NDH territory (Mihailovi had by that time
already founded his Chetniks). Like their nationalist counterparts, the Partisans early
success was built on Serb grassroots resistance to the NDH genocide; as Serb peasants
spontaneously rose up in response to Ustaa atrocities, they variously joined the two
movements promising an organized military struggle against the fascist occupiers.
14
Ibid., pp. 174-5.
15
35
Consequently, as with the Chetniks, in the early years of the war Serbs made up an
overwhelming majority of Partisan ranks. 16 This was intensely problematic to the
Partisan leadership, however, due to the immense ideological differences between the
two organizations. Whereas the Chetniks were Serb nationalists who sought to restore
Yugoslavia as a monarchy under the Serb royal family and were by and large content to
only include token non-Serbs throughout the war, the Communists sought to build an
inclusive and genuinely multinational popular liberation struggle. The large numbers of
Serb Partisans seemed to belie the KPJs multiethnic ideology and discouraged Muslims
and Croats from joining.
The problems posed to the Communists by the Serb nature of the uprising under
their command are highlighted in the initially tense relations between the Partisan
movement and Bosnian Muslims. In the early phase of the war, the same factors that led
to Chetnik violence against Muslims in the countryside also appeared among the
Communist resistance; so it was that the Partisan entry into Bora, a Muslim village in
eastern Herzegovina, resulted in the wholesale destruction of the place and the killing of
its inhabitants. 17 Admittedly, in contrast to the Chetniks, Tito and the Partisan leadership
were aghast at such incidents, and worked to minimize them. This was small comfort,
however, to Bosnian Muslim peasants, who at this time appeared to have largely
perceived the Partisans as a fundamentally Serb movement. When in December, 1941 the
Partisans launched an attack on Sjenica in the Sandak, local Muslims actually rose up
and brought about a notable Partisan defeat. 18 Even within the Partisans, Muslim
16
Ibid., pp. 68-69.
17
18
36
members sometimes had to deal with intense hostility from their comrades, often
compelling them to hide their identities. Osman Karabegovi, one of the authors of the
previously discussed student petitions in Belgrade, would later recount a telling incident
from early in 1942, when he and a friend stayed with an elderly Serb woman in a remote
Bosnian village: As she covered us with woolen coverings, the old women spoke: Rest,
children, sleep peacefully. And may God save you from accursed Turks. She could not
expect that my name was Osman and my Comrades Mujo. 19
In an attempt to bring this situation on the ground closer to the party line on
brotherhood and unity (bratstvo i jedinstvo), the Partisans made a concentrated effort to
recruit more non-Serbs into their ranks. Concretely, this included various forms of
propaganda directed specifically at Bosnian Muslims, ranging from pamphlets distributed
among peasants to pointed articles in the illegal Party press. In November, 1941, for
example, the KPJs provincial committee for Bosnia-Herzegovina issued a proclamation
to All honorable and patriotic Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 20 Such appeals to
Muslims were often issued alongside appeals directed at Serbs and Croats. In making
them, the Partisans acknowledged the Muslims as a separate community in their own
right, parallel to the Serb and Croat nations and with their own distinct concerns and
issues a stance essentially carried over from the pre-war period. This made the Partisans
unique among the warring parties, as they were the only side both inclusive of Muslims
and considering them as a separate category; in contrast, the Ustae only recognized
19
20
Atif Purivatra, Stav Komunistike Partije Jugoslavije prema nacionalnom pitanju Muslimana
u toku narodnooslobodilakog rata [1968], in Nacionalni i politiki razvitak Muslimana
(Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1970), p. 76.
37
Muslims as an element of the Croat nation, and their propaganda appeals pointedly
insisted on this national designation, sometimes even avoiding explicit mention of Islam.
Inevitably, the Communist appeals also touched upon the issue of Muslim
national identity, although the impression that they give in this regard is mixed.
Logically, by listing Muslims alongside the Serb and Croat nations, many Partisan
documents not only acknowledged the distinctiveness of Bosnian Muslim self-identity,
but assigned it an implicitly national value as well. Titos famous article on The
National Liberation Struggle and the National Question in Yugoslavia in the December
16, 1942 issue of Proleter (the Proletarian), a war-time party newspaper, is exemplary. In
outlining the Partisan resistance movements significance for the various nationalities of
Yugoslavia, Tito claimed that the very word national liberation struggle would be a
mere phrase, and even if a lie, if it didnt, beside the wider Yugoslav meaning, also have
a national meaning for every nation individually, i.e. if it did not beside the liberation of
Yugoslavia simultaneously mean the liberation of Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians,
Albanians, Muslims, etc. 21
Occasionally, this implicit national recognition would even translate into more
explicit terms. A pamphlet from May, 1943, crafted by 16 Muslim partisans and directed
to the Muslims of Eastern Bosnia, for instance, identified the authors as belonging to a
Muslim nation that had been subject to lies and exploitation that have gone too far. 22
The authors then encouraged Muslims to join the Partisans, noting that they themselves
had done so out of conviction that only by fighting could they earn a worthy place in the
21
Josip Tito Broz, NOB i nacionalno pitanje u Jugoslaviji [1942], in O Nacionaliziranju
Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 130-131.
22
Purivatra, Stav Komunistike, p. 105.
38
future union of Yugoslav nations. Similarly, a proclamation by the commander and

political commissar of a Partisan detachment in northwest Bosnia appealed for Muslims
to join the struggle against the Krauts, Ustae and Chetniks and for the freedom of the
Muslim nation. Interestingly, in both of these cases the authors were Muslims. This
suggests that some Muslims joining the Partisan ranks and encountering the movements
rhetoric of national liberation consequently identified their own community as national.
On the other hand, some non-Muslim sources use similar language; a general Communist
appeal issued in January, 1942, called on Muslims to Rise up in rebellion if you wish to
secure your homes, your families and your national survival. 23
A number of factors, however, cast doubts on the notion that the KPJ firmly
considered Muslims a separate nationality. In his article, Hpken points out several of
them, including the existence of numerous Partisan documents that do not mention
Muslims as one of Yugoslavias peoples, as well as the fact that many documents that do
so spell the word with a lower-case m. 24 Indeed, a good many of the documents cited by
later Muslim historians such as Atif Purivatra as demonstrating war-time national
recognition remain entirely consistent when read under the assumption that Muslims
constituted merely a religious community or some other non-national category. The
instructions issued on March 31, 1944 by the League of Yugoslav Communist Youth to
its provincial branches, for example, called for taking into account the specific
development of Muslims and forming an organization for Muslim antifascist youth, but
23
Ibid., p. 73.
24
39
says nothing as to whether this specific development made Muslims a separate nation.
In other instances, Muslims are listed alongside the plainly non-national Jews. 25
Partisan war-time propaganda touching on Muslim national identity is therefore
both contradictory and ambiguous, to the point that it is difficult to assign the movement
a firm stance one way or the other. The most likely reason for this is the extremely
diverse authorship of the documents in question; the KPJ propaganda materials and
related documents that Purivatra and others collected were the work of everyone from
local apparatchiks to Tito, and in that sense it is not surprising that they espoused a wide
array of views. In general, however, careful analysis of the sources suggests that the
Partisan movement as a whole neither explicitly recognized Bosnian Muslims as a
separate nationality nor dismissed them as merely a confessional community. While wartime circumstances and strategic considerations meant that they increasingly treated
Muslims as a group equal to Serbs, Croats and other nationalities, the Communist stance
on the nature of Bosnian Muslim communal identity remained divided along much the
same lines it had been before the war. Two war-time articles on the Muslim question by
two of the leading Partisan theoreticians better illuminate these ideological differences in
the Party leadership.
2.3 Partisan Intellectuals and Muslim Nationhood
25
40
The first is an article written by Veselin Maslea, simply entitled the Muslim
Question. 26 In contrast to some of the anonymous or relatively unknown authors of
previously cited documents, Maslea was one of the KPJs major pre-war intellectual
figures in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Widely respected for his Marxist writings on the political
situation in the first Yugoslavia, one particularly enthusiastic post-war biography
described him as the author of two brilliant studies on Young Bosnia and Svetozar
Markovi, a tireless contributor to our prewar press, an extraordinary commentator and
publicist, a renowned economist and talented historian and sociologist, a passionate
investigator and analyzer of socio-political and economic events among us, a very
educated Marxist of his time and a distinguished revolutionary. 27 Maslea, born to a
Serb family in Banja Luka in 1906, wrote this particular article in 1942 for the seventh
issue of Vojno-politiki pregled (the Military-Political Review), about a year before his
death at the Battle of the Sutjeska in the summer of 1943. 28
Masleas the Muslim Question is a Marxist analysis of pre-war Bosnian
Muslim politics and society, including a negative assessment of their possible
identification as an ethnic group. He makes this clear from the outset, stating in only the
second sentence that in [this] analysis of the origin and development of the Muslim
question, we begin from the assumption that Muslims are not a separate ethnic group. 29
He soon after elaborates that therefore the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina are not a
nation. Maslea justifies this by referring to Joseph Stalins Marxism and the National
26
Veselin Maslea, Muslimansko pitanje [1942], in O Nacionaliziranju Muslimana, ed. Alija
Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 122-129.
27
Milorad Gaji, Veselin Maslea (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1970), p. 88.
28
Ibid., p. 90.
29
Maslea, Muslim Question, p. 123.
41
Question, citing each of Stalins criteria for nationhood (e.g. a common language,
territorial unity, etc.) and arguing one by one that Bosnian Muslims lacked all of them.
From there he proceeds to the heart of his analysis, in which he identifies the JMO as a
failed little feudal group which essentially tricked the wider Muslim masses into
supporting them while pushing their own feudal class interests. 30 He finally concludes
that Muslims too must join the national liberation struggle, but that for them it would
mean that the masses had thrown away their feudal representatives and learned to think
for themselves the adjective narodno, typically translated as national, would here be
better rendered as popular. 31
In addressing the implications of this article, the previously mentioned post-war
biography written at a time when Muslims were already recognized as a separate nation
by the Yugoslav state tried valiantly to smooth out the obvious discrepancies between
Masleas argument and contemporary socialist practice. Understandably, writing this
article under difficult wartime circumstances, having neither the possibility nor
conditions to more studiously deal with this matter and present a more definitive, wellrounded and better documented picture Maslea wrote in response to those daily,
imperative tasks imposed by the revolution, reasoned its author Milorad Gaji, adding
that Surely Maslea himself would today change some of his views, for they could not
be borne out by reality. 32 But therein lies the point: Masleas text demonstrates that, for
the KPJ during World War II, the Muslim Question was not so much the question of
Bosnian Muslim national identity as it was the more immediate concern of how to
30
Ibid., p. 125.
31
Ibid., p. 129.
32
Gaji, Veselin Maslea, p. 91.
42
involve the Bosnian Muslim masses in the Partisan resistance. As Masleas himself
writes, An ethnological discussion about that today, when compared to the fundamental
political problem of resolving the Muslim Question and freeing the latent strength of
the Muslim masses, is superfluous and irrelevant. Truly, there are questions which in
certain historical situations belong in the closet. 33 Masleas article, therefore, focuses
on the Muslims socio-political legacy from the previous several decades (i.e. the role of
the JMO, the agrarian reform, the actions of the Serb bourgeoisie, etc.), and the
implications this held for the Partisan war effort.
More narrowly, however, Masleas The Muslim Question represents the
current of Party thought that held deep ideological reservations about the idea of a
Muslim nationality. Granted, it is difficult to ascertain just how widely held these views
were in the upper echelons of the KPJ, but the entrenched opposition of key figures such
as Pijade and ilas as well as subsequent developments in Party policy show that they
certainly were significant. Given his stature within the Communist resistance and the
orthodox Marxist nature of his argument, Masleas article can be taken as exemplary of
this line of thinking. As such, it highlights two significant ideological roadblocks to
contemporary Yugoslav Marxists considering the idea of a Muslim nation.
First, the difficulty of reconciling this idea with the traditional Marxist-Leninist
view of nationalism. Stalin had been quite explicit in outlining the necessary prerequisites
for national identity, and some of them, such as a separate language, were very difficult
to ascribe to the Bosnian Muslims. As the Yugoslav Communists were arguably the most
orthodox Marxists of all the eastern European communist parties at this time, it is not
33
Maslea, Muslimansko pitanje, p. 123.
43
surprising that Maslea took Stalins criteria (without explicitly crediting their author) as
conclusively demonstrating the impossibility of Muslim nationhood. In Masleas own
words, since Muslims did not have their own language, specific economic ties, territorial
continuity or unique psychological and cultural characteristics, they lacked the objective
ingredients of nationhood. 34
Second, prevailing misconceptions about Bosnian Muslim history made the idea
all the more problematic. Maslea effectively summarized perhaps the most notable of
these when he wrote that Bosnian-Herzegovinian feudalism has proven inflexible. It has
lost the faith of its fathers, but maintained the land and privileges of its grandfathers. The
fusion of feudal privileges and Islam that is the historical root of the Muslim
Question. 35 This claim, that the medieval Bosnian nobility had converted to Islam to
preserve its feudal privileges, was certainly not new: Bosnian Franciscan Ivan Franjo
Juki had already popularized it in the mid-nineteenth century, and research by Yugoslav
historians refuted it in the 1930s, although their views did not immediately gain wider
acceptance. 36 What is interesting here, however, is how this popular historical myth lends
itself to a Marxist reading of Bosnian Muslim history and society. From Masleas point
of view, Bosnian Muslims do not have a bourgeoisie but a feudal class exploiting the
religious sentiment of the masses for its own interest a feudal class directly descended
from the medieval European nobility of Marxist lore. Not surprisingly, the word feudal
and its variations appear incessantly throughout his article. With this erroneous reading of
history fanning the flames of Marxist rhetoric, it makes Masleas conclusions that much
34
Ibid., p. 123.
35
Gaji, Veselin Maslea, p. 90.
36
44
easier to reach. The matter of compensation for feudal nobility, he writes, is not and
cannot be a constituent element of a nation. 37
But while Masleas work highlights Marxist skepticism, Rodoljub olakovis
Our Muslims and the National Liberation Army reveals a somewhat different
perspective. In contrast to Maslea, olakovi identified Muslims as a separate ethnic
whole [who] no one will force to be that which they are not, i.e. Serbs and Croats. 38
This is a continuation of the same line of thinking expressed by Edvard Kardelj five years
earlier: that Muslims, identifying themselves as separate from both Serbs and Croats,
form an ethnic group. Written as a brochure shortly after Masleas in April, 1943,
olakovis words carry particular weight as he was the Partisan political commissar for
Bosnia-Herzegovina; his insistence on Muslim individuality no doubt partly explains the
numerous appeals to Muslim equality with Serbs and Croats in the wartime propaganda
discussed earlier. Nonetheless, olakovi recognition of this individuality did not
translate into the recognition of a Muslim nation. In fact, at several points during the war
he was explicit in describing the Muslims as nationally undefined or still needing to
eventually nationally orient themselves. 39 Furthermore, like Maslea, he was careful to
distinguish the Partisan call for Bosnian autonomy with that of the Bosnian beys. 40
olakovis insistence on this distinction identifies him as a subscriber to the
same Marxist narrative of Bosnian Muslim history as Maslea. But whereas Maslea was
unable to reconcile the feudal elements of Bosnian Muslim society with the Marxist view
37
Maslea, Muslimansko pitanje, p. 123.
38
39
Ibid., p. 123.
40
Ibid., p. 121.
45
of ethnicity and the nation, olakovi was. His views demonstrate that the roadblocks
facing Maslea and like-minded intellectuals did not necessarily extend to the entire
Bosnian Partisan leadership. This ideological dichotomy helps contextualize the eventual
position of the Bosnian Muslims in Partisan efforts to establish the civil institutions of a
future Yugoslav state.
2.4 Muslims in the Emerging Yugoslav State Structure
By the second half of 1943, the Allies had firmly gained the initiative in World
War II. With its victory at Stalingrad in February, the ensuing recapture of further
occupied territory and the decisive battle of Kursk, the Red Army had broken its
deadlock with the Wehrmacht. Meanwhile, in July, Britain and the United States
launched their invasion of Italy. In Yugoslavia too, conditions were markedly different
from the outset of the war. The Partisans had established themselves as the dominant
antifascist resistance movement in the country, held large swathes of territory and were
on the verge of allied recognition and support. Under these circumstances, Tito and his
followers increasingly turned their attention to laying the foundations of a civil
government separate from their movements military wing. What was to be the form of
the post-war Yugoslav state and how would it resolve the pressing national question? To
deal with such issues, the Partisans had already held an Antifascist Council for the
National Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifaistiko vijee narodnog osloboenja
Jugoslavije, or AVNOJ) in November, 1942. This meeting had outlined some of the
46
movements political goals (e.g. support for democracy), but the Partisan position had
since changed significantly. 41 Therefore, in order to reiterate their platform under rapidly
changing circumstances, the Partisans began preparations for a second AVNOJ in 1943.
In the build-up to this second session, the KPJ leadership expected its members to
organize separate antifascist councils for their respective Yugoslav regions. So it was that
the Croatian communists held an Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of
Croatia (Zemaljsko antifaistiko vijee narodnog osloboenja Hrvatske, or ZAVNOH)
in June, while their Slovene counterparts convened their own assembly in October. As for
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tito expected its communists to hold their own antifascist council
as well, specifically requesting this in July, 1943. 42 Bosnia-Herzegovinas presence and
integrity within the future Yugoslav state was therefore once again ensured; its precise
status relative to the other regions, however, was subject to debate. This debate took
place quite literally in November, when Avdo Humo and Rodoljub olakovi, the two
highest-ranking Bosnian communist officials, met up with Tito and the rest of the
Partisan high command in Jajce. 43 olakovi and Humo argued that Bosnia-Herzegovina
should be constituted as a federal republic, while Milovan ilas, Moa Pijade and Sreten
ujovi argued for some lesser form of autonomy. Kardelj then reported the differing
views to Tito, who ultimately sided with the Bosnians. With Titos blessings, Humo and
olakovi then set about organizing the first Antifascist Council for the National
Liberation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Zemaljsko antifaistiko vijee narodnog osloboenja
Bosne i Hercegovine, or ZAVNOBiH), to be held only a few days later in the same town.
41
Shoup, Communism, pp. 71-72.
42
43
Ibid., p. 284.
47
Several points can be raised about this momentous episode in modern Bosnian
history. First, it is interesting that the participants in this debate on Bosnia-Herzegovinas
political status seem to have been correspondingly split on the issue of Bosnian Muslim
national identity. As discussed earlier, both olakovi and Humo had previously
identified Muslims as a unique ethnic group. Kardelj, who appears to have sided with the
Bosnians on this matter as well, was in fact the first notable KPJ member to explicitly
make this claim in the 1930s. In contrast, ilas and Pijade had already made clear at the
KPJs Fifth Country Conference in 1940 that they did not consider Muslims an ethnicity,
and it is probably not too great a leap of faith to suppose that ujovi felt similarly. This
all testifies to the fact that the Bosnian Question i.e. the question of Bosnias political
status and the issue of Bosnian Muslim identity were closely intertwined.
There is further evidence in the arguments the two sides put forth. olakovi and
Humo appealed to the tradition of Bosnian regional patriotism and multiethnic
individuality; in the words of Humo, later recounting the arguments he had put forth that
day, We emphasized that the complete freedom, sovereignty and equality of our nations,
as well as their individual and common socio-political development, could most
effectively be expressed only in a shared but also independent state arrangement of a
multinational republican community. 44 ilas, Pijade and ujovi, however, insisted that
Yugoslavias federal units should coincide with its constituent nations; as there was no
Bosnian nation, there could not be a Bosnian federal republic. This line of argument was
based on the same Stalinist theory that Maslea had used in his article the previous year.
Once again, therefore, it appears that Marxist ideological constraints played a decisive
44
Ibid., p. 285.
48
role in shaping the views of some KPJ members on issues related to Muslim national
identity. There is also, however, a geographic distinction to be made; whereas olakovi
and Humo were both Bosnians (olakovi a Bosnian Serb and Humo a Bosnian Muslim),
ilas, Pijade and ujovi were all from either Serbia or Montenegro. In that sense, while
certainly not intentionally nationalist, their suggestion that Bosnia-Herzegovina be
constituted as merely an autonomous province of Serbia can be linked to a long-standing
tradition of Serbian centralism, if not even nationalism.
Titos eventual acceptance of the Bosnian argument is not overly surprising, as he
had previously expressed similar sentiments about Bosnia-Herzegovinas unique regional
identity. Nonetheless, it is important to look at the wider strategic considerations in this
decision. Joining Bosnia-Herzegovina to Croatia as an autonomous province would have
been problematic, as not only did Croats form only about a fifth of its population, but the
resulting republic would have economically dominated the federation. 45 Joining BosniaHerzegovina to Serbia, however, was equally unthinkable, as one of Titos chief concerns
in solving the national question was limiting the possibility of Serbian hegemony.
Establishing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a separate federal republic was therefore an
appealing alternative, meeting both the demands of the Bosnian communists themselves
and achieving a compromise between the competing demands of Croatian and Serbian
nationalism.
Held on November 25 and 26, ZAVNOBiH celebrated the vision of men such as
Humo and olakovi of a sovereign and multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the words
45
Sabrina Petra Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 177.
49
of Karabegovi, This is the greatest and happiest day in the history of all the people of
this country. Never have the Bosnians and Herzegovinians, never have the Serbs, Croats
and Muslims assembled with so pure a heart and so noble a striving as today at this great
national task. 46 Within the new Bosnian state formed that day in Jajce, Muslims were
treated as a separate people fully equal with the Serbs and Croats. The resolution passed
by the council exemplified this sentiment, stating that Today the peoples of BosniaHerzegovina, through their single political representative body want their country,
which is neither Serb nor Croat nor Muslim but Serb and Croat and Muslim, to be a free
and fraternal Bosnia-Herzegovina in which will be guaranteed full equality of all Serbs,
Muslims and Croats. The peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina will participate on an equal
basis with our other peoples in the building of the Peoples Democratic Federative
Yugoslavia. 47 ZAVNOBiH thus marked the culmination of the Bosnian communist
tradition described so far in this thesis; the growing tendency of Bosnian KPJ members to
consider Bosnian Muslims as a de facto nation had now been stated explicitly at the
foundational assembly of the modern Bosnian republic.
This explicit equality between the Muslims and the other nations in BosniaHerzegovina, however, was not carried over into the language of the subsequent second
AVNOJ. At the all-Yugoslav antifascist council, the draft for the declaration dealing with
the federative structure of the country only mentioned Serbs, Croats, Slovenes,
Montenegrins and Macedonians, leaving Muslims out entirely. Sulejman Filipovi, a
leading Muslim delegate at the assembly, then successfully suggested that they amend the
critical sentence to include and of the peoples of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia,
46
47
Ibid., p. 288.
50
Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina respectively. 48 Filipovis proposal ensured a de

facto recognition of the Muslims, but does not change the fact that AVNOJ took a
markedly different stance from ZAVNOBiH in regard to their status. The explanation for
this discrepancy presumably rests in the different compositions of the two councils; while
ZAVNOBiH was limited to Bosnian communists, of whom many had long been
favorable to the idea of a Muslim ethnicity, AVNOJ included more hostile elements from
the Central Committee such as ilas and Pijade. It seems likely then that the men drafting
the documents for the different assemblies operated under different assumptions. As the
chief concern at both was Yugoslavias federative structure, Filipovis proposal appears
to be as much of a challenge as the Bosnians were willing to make to the assumptions of
the latter. In that sense, perhaps the preceding debate in Jajce should be seen not as an
outright triumph for olakovi and Humo but as a more limited victory: Bosnian
communists were given their own republic to mold as they saw fit, but on the federal
level more conservative elements still held sway.
This perspective would help explain why the Bosnians, despite the different tone
adopted at AVNOJ, made no changes to their position in its aftermath. In fact, documents
at the subsequent second session of ZAVNOBiH only tacitly acknowledge the
compromise suggested by Filipovi before reverting to the language of the first
ZAVNOBiH. The people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, freely and by their own will, associate
with the peoples of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia in a common
state, reads one resolution, adopting the wording from AVNOJ before soon after
clarifying that in Bosnia-Herzegovina Serbs, Muslims and Croats will live completely
48
Ibid., p. 290.
51
equally and freely. 49 The Declaration of Rights of the Citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina

from this same session further distinguishes this equality of the Serbs, Muslims and
Croats from the equality of all religions, implying that Muslims were not being
referred to as a religious community but an ethno-national group. 50 This is also evident in
the comments made at the assembly by the Bosnian Partisan leader uro Pucar, a
Bosnian Serb, who explicitly talked of three nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Pucar argued that Muslims, by way of their socio-historical position and political
upbringing during the time of Yugoslavia developed certain characteristics which
incredibly solidified among them the feeling of the uniqueness of Muslims as a whole,
and even suggested forming some sort of Muslim political board which would have
authority among Muslims and which would, as such, be able to influence a greater flow
of Muslims into our ranks. 51 Entering the final phase of the war then, the most senior
Bosnian Communist leaders Muslims and non-Muslims alike treated the Muslims as a
separate ethno-national group equal to the Serbs and Croats. Their insistence on this led
to a degree of ambiguity on the federal level, where even Pijade, writing in March, 1944,
could briefly list Muslims as one of the three nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 52
2.5 Conclusions
49
Ibid., p. 296.
50
Ibid., p. 297.
51
Purivatra, Stav Komunistike, pp. 123-25.
52
52
Given that the war was centered in and most intensely fought on the territory of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslims represented a significant factor in terms of
population size, geographic position and military potential, it made them all the more
important in KPJ considerations. As a result, in trying to gain the military initiative, the
Partisans consistently appealed to Bosnian Muslims as a group in their own right,
alongside and equal to Serbs and Croats. Since the Partisans also strove to present their
resistance effort as a war of national liberation and brotherhood and unity, many
Muslim members saw this as an implicit recognition of Muslim national individuality.
For some non-Muslim Communists such as olakovi and Pucar, this is essentially what
it was. But for others, particularly the Serbians in the Partisan high command, ideological
barriers ruled out any such national recognition. Consequently, the language in the
founding documents of the Yugoslav state and Bosnian republic was contradictory,
although both, in one way or another, implied Muslim equality with the more widelyrecognized Yugoslav nations. This would be exactly the expectation with which Bosnian
Muslim Communists and the community they represented would enter the immediate
post-war period.
53
3. The Muslim Question in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1946-71
By 1945 Tito and the Partisans were nearing the end of their national liberation
struggle, taking control of those urban centers still under fascist rule and sending the
Axis forces reeling westward. Under these conditions, the Communists intensified their
efforts to set up civilian institutions for the post-war state and implement their vision of a
socialist society. This state and society, however, held surprisingly little room for
Bosnian Muslims as a unique ethnic community. Whereas the Partys wartime
pronouncements and propaganda implied a quasi-national status for Muslims, Party
policy after the war strictly treated them as a religious community. Some fifteen years
later, however, the Party redefined its stance once again, designating Muslims as an
ethnic group equal to Serbs and Croats before ultimately elevating them to the status of a
constituent nation. This chapter will try to explain how and why the status of Muslims
changed in the first twenty-five years of communist rule, from the immediate aftermath
of World War II to the 1971 Yugoslav census.
3.1 The Return to Yugoslavism
To understand this significant shift in KPJ policy, it is important to begin by

considering the initial change following World War II and how the Party came to define
Bosnian Muslims as strictly a religious group. As the previous chapter showed, the KPJs
54
wartime policy was ambiguous on the matter; while many within the Party had a deep
ideological conviction that Muslims could not be a nation, in practice the KPJ treated
Muslims as an ethnic group on an equal and implicitly national footing with Serbs, Croats
and other Yugoslav nations. As the war drew to a close, there were even some indications
that the new Yugoslav state would continue to recognize Muslims as a de facto nation. In
May, 1945, for example, a General Council of Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina was
formed as a Bosnian Muslim representative body. 1 Later that year, in September, this
council merged the two existing (respectively pro-Serb and pro-Croat) Muslim cultural
societies to form a single one named Preporod (Rebirth). 2
Perhaps the first signs of a reversal in this policy of de facto recognition appeared
in the efforts to determine the symbols of the new Bosnian republic. Elsewhere in
Yugoslavia, the republics adopted seals combining communist imagery, such as bales of
wheat and factory chimneys, with traditional national symbols. Croatias, for instance,
adopted its historical checkerboard heraldry, while Serbias included a modification of
19th century royal insignia. Since Bosnia-Herzegovinas status as a sort of national
conglomerate republic made this approach more difficult, the debates surrounding the
selection of Bosnian republic symbols highlighted lingering disagreements over the
national question. Initially, during the drafting of a republic constitution, Bosnian
Communists adopted a provisional seal that featured three hands together holding a torch.
Since each hand represented one of Bosnia-Herzegovinas three nations, the seal
continued the war-time KPJ practice of treating Croats, Muslims and Serbs as equal
1
Hoare, Bosnia, p. 319
2
Ibid.
55
partners in the foundation of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina. 3 Later on in the drafting,

however, this seal was rejected. In its place the Communists opted for twin industrial
chimneys enclosed by bales of wheat and a laurel wreath a barren testament to the
increasingly favored aesthetic of industrialization.
Taken in the context of wider Yugoslav debates from this period, it seems likely
that the rejection of the explicitly tri-national coat of arms was motivated in large part by
changing perceptions of Bosnian Muslim identity. Indeed, on the federal level, a similar
debate ended with a more explicit rejection of a national status for Muslims. Namely, in
the drafting of the federal Yugoslav constitution in late 1945, the proposed seal for the
new state included five torches representing the five formally-recognized Yugoslav
nations: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians. Husaga ii, a
Bosnian Muslim delegate from Mostar, took offense with this proposal, calling instead
for a sixth torch to be added to represent Bosnians. 4 To that end, he wrote two letters to
the Constitution-drafting Commission, arguing that Bosnia-Herzegovina had the right to
its own national name as an equal Yugoslav federal unit and on account of the human
sacrifice it had made in World War II. For a Bosnian-Herzegovinian federal unit
founded on the so-called equality of Serbs and Croats, he wrote, has no guarantees for
its survival, nor can it have the prospect of a peaceful social and state life. 5 This
proposal apparently caused some deliberation, provoking an all-night meeting between
Tito and Milovan ilas. 6 When the dust settled, however, pressure was applied on the
Muslim bloc of constitutional delegates and the proposed seal was officially adopted with
3
4
5
Ibid., p. 202.
6
Ibid., p. 204.
56
five torches for five Yugoslav nations. ii expressed his disproval of this decision by
being the only delegate to vote against the measure. 7
ii was hardly the only Muslim unhappy with this newly-adopted coat of arms;
another voice of dissent came from a young Sarajevo scholar named Muhamed
Hadijahi. Hadijahi, who later became a major contributor to the leftist Muslim
intelligentsias calls for national recognition, wrote a letter addressed to Avdo Humo,
Osman Karabegovi and the General Council of Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Like
ii, Hadijahi also wanted a sixth torch to be added to the coat-of-arms, but in his
view this was a torch that would represent a Muslim nation. The Muslim masses are not
satisfied by the state coat of arms showing only five torches as the symbols of five
nations, he claimed, calling for a sixth torch that would formally show that Muslims are
a subject equal to their brothers Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and
Montenegrins. 8 In this case ilas was more dismissive, referring to the letter as a
characteristic proposal from a certain Muslim that a sixth torch should be added to our
state coat-of-arms. 9 Parliament cant contemplate the question of whether Muslims are
a national group or are not, he continued, [for] that is a theoretical question over which
people can argue one way or the other, but which in any case cant be solved by a
decree. By purposely omitting Muslims from an official representation of Yugoslav
nations, however, the KPJ made its stance clear.
Although ii and Hadijahi argued for different national names to be
recognized, both were expressing their concern that the new Communist order was
7
Ibid., p. 205.
8
9
57
reneging on earlier promises and leaving Bosnian Muslims without their own, officiallyrecognized identity. Hadijahis concern that recent developments were making the
General Council of Muslims irrelevant proved particularly prophetic, as the authorities
shut it down only a few years later. 10 Around this time, the Yugoslav state also undertook
a far-reaching campaign against the Islamic Community and Muslim religious worship.
In 1950, for example, the wearing of a veil, hijab or burqa, as well as the teaching of
children in mosques, became a criminal offence. 11 Although the suppression of Muslim
religious institutions is obviously not in and of itself a rejection of Muslim ethnic
individuality, there is little doubt that the two phenomena were closely intertwined; as
Hoare perceptively points out, the people responsible for implementing these measures
probably saw little difference between the two. 12
The KPJs increased disfavor of notions of Muslim individuality was part of a
broader shift to centralization and authoritarianism in the post-war period. The 1953
revisions to the federal constitution, which were so extensive that they effectively
amounted to an entirely new document, significantly curtailed the rights of the republics
and emphasized instead the role of the central government in Belgrade. 13 During this
time, effective control of the country lay in the hands of only a small group of men, led
by Tito and consisting largely of a dozen or so of his closest confidants. 14 Within BosniaHerzegovina, this Yugoslav centralism was also evidenced by a period of Serb hegemony
in Republic institutions. On all major levels, Serbs were overrepresented in relation to
10
11
Ibid., p. 323.
12
Ibid., p. 324.
13
Shoup, Communism, pp. 191.
14
Ramet, Three Yugoslavias, p. 207.
58
Croats and Muslims, dominating in the political sphere, the military and the office of
state security, as well as in the bureaucratic positions created by an expanding state
apparatus. 15 Under these political circumstances, Muslim SKJ members, 16 who were
increasingly pressured by the Party apparatus to identify themselves as either Serbs or
Croats, in large measure opted to officially declare as Serbs.17
This pressure to conform and nationally orient oneself was not limited to Muslim
Communists, but extended to the Bosnian Muslim population as a whole. The clearest
expression of this revised policy regarding Bosnian Muslim identity were the first two
post-war censuses, conducted in 1948 and 1953. The 1948 census offered Muslims three
options under the nationality rubric; Croat Muslim, Serb Muslim and nationally
unoriented Muslim. The implications of this approach were that, 1.) Muslim communal
identity was not in and of itself national, and 2.) Muslims were expected to gradually
adopt a national identity as Serbs or Croats, a stance recalling the earlier SKJ position
from the time of Sima Markovi. Given this choice, however, the great majority of
Muslims (778,403 or 88.9%) declared themselves nationally unoriented, with 71,991
(8.2%) declaring as Serb Muslims and only 25,295 (2.8%) as Croat Muslims. 18 On the
whole then, in the 1948 census, Muslims largely rejected state pressure to adopt a Serb or
Croat national identity over 30% of Bosnia-Herzegovinas population was officially
anational. 19
15
Hoare, Bosnia, p. 324-325.
16
In 1952, the Party changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia or SKJ.
17
18
Atif Purivatra, Etnika posebnost Muslimana rezultat istorijskih procesa i priznavanja
postojee stvarnosti u demokratskim uslovima [1969], in Nacionalni i politiki razvitak
Muslimana (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1970), p. 33.
19
59
These results ultimately did little to change state policy ahead of the next census
in 1953. In the lead-up to it, Moa Pijade tried to address any misconceptions about the
nationality rubric by clarifying that It is obvious, without any discussion, that the term
Muslim signifies belonging to a specific Muslim religious identity, and has nothing to
do with the question of nationality. 20 As a result, the option nationally unoriented
Muslim was taken off the census entirely, with citizens left to declare their Muslim
identity under a religious rubric. A significant addition, however, was the option to
nationally declare as Yugoslav unoriented. This option came about as part of the
previously-mentioned developments in Yugoslav nationality policy during the first half
of the 1950s, and specifically the encouragement of a secular pan-Yugoslav sense of
identity. In Pijades words, the designation was for persons of south Slavic descent, who
are not particularly nationally oriented. In the 1953 census, 891,800 people in BosniaHerzegovina declared themselves Yugoslav, amounting to 31.3% of the republics
population. 21
Although there is no precise data for the number of Muslims declaring as
Yugoslavs, the similar number of 48 Muslims and 53 Yugoslavs, as well as the fact that
Bosnians amounted to 89.3% of all Yugoslavs in Yugoslavia, strongly suggests that those
who declared themselves as Muslims nationally unoriented in 1948 overwhelmingly
opted for the Yugoslav designation in 1953. 22 Despite these ambiguous census results,
however, the Yugoslav academic and political establishment seems to have remained
convinced that Muslims would gradually nationally orient themselves to one of the two
20
Moa Pijade, O popisu stanovnitva [1953], in O Nacionaliziranju Muslimana, ed. Alija
Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 147-148.
21
22
Purivatra, Etnika posebnost, p. 33.
60
neighboring nations. A 1959 article on Serbo-Croat Mohammedans by Belgrade

ethnologist Milenko Filipovi is illustrative of these expectations, claiming that
Although the majority of Serbo-Croat Mohammedans are still nationally undeclared, a
significant part of Mohammedans recognizes itself as Serb or Croat, and this process is
still occurring and progressing well. 23
Between 1945 and the late 1950s, therefore, the SKJ went full circle from an
implicit recognition of Muslim communal individuality to the assimilationist stance of
the pre-Tito period. Taken together, several closely-related factors help explain this
significant post-war shift in Yugoslav nationality policy. Although later Muslim
historians tended to portray this period as a misguided deviation from the more
enlightened policy of the war years, the SKJ did not so much renege on a promise as
simply opt for the most conservative line that its ambiguous wartime stance allowed.
After all, even during the war, ideologues like Maslea had advocated essentially the
same approach. Now, with no immediate need to mobilize the Muslim population behind
its cause, the SKJ had no particular reason to treat them as a separate quasi-national
community. The early disavowal of multiparty democracy and the consequent lack of an
organized voice from the pre-war Muslim elite, as well as the falling out between the SKJ
and the various members of this elite who had joined it during the course of the war,
probably also contributed. At its heart, however, the Muslim Question remained
ideological. The primary concern of Yugoslav Communists in the post-war period was
not nationalism but building socialism. In a Marxist society where religious differences
were supposed to wither away, institutionalizing a new Muslim nationality would have
23
Atif Purivatra, Nacionalni i politiki razvitak Muslimana [1969], in O Nacionaliziranju
Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), p. 208.
61
appeared counter-productive. In fact, under these new socialist conditions, it followed

that the long awaited national orientation of the Bosnian Muslim masses might finally
occur.
3.2 The Turn to Acceptance
By the late 1950s, the pendulum of the Yugoslav Communists treatment of

Bosnian Muslim communal identity slowly began to swing the other way. Once again,
the catalyst for this was a broader shift in Yugoslav nationality policy. The 1958 SKJ
program, which had talked of a socialist, Yugoslav consciousness, [arising] in the
conditions of a socialist community of peoples, represented the high-water mark for the
regimes flirtations with pan-Yugoslav identity. 24 Shortly thereafter, emphasis switched
to decentralization and an increased role for the individual republics. The motivation
behind this was a growing awareness of the deficiencies of the Titoist system; by the end
of the decade, the SKJ not only had to deal with the harsh Marxist critiques of comradeturned-dissident ilas (his widely-acclaimed 1957 New Class accused the Yugoslav
Communist establishment of entrenching itself as a new elite), but to the accumulated
problems in the Yugoslav economy as well. An emerging liberal current in the SKJ
responded to the impending crisis by prescribing market reform and democratization, and
their views gained increasing favor with Tito in the years that followed. 25 The idea of
Yugoslavism, which the liberals associated with authoritarianism and heavy-handed
24
25
V.P. Gagnon Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53-60.
62
centralized control, consequently fell out of favor and disappeared; a draft constitution in
1961 even went as far as stating that Yugoslav would no longer be considered an
acceptable national identity, although this position was later toned down. 26
The move away from Yugoslavism allowed the SKJ to reconsider, among other
things, its stance on the Muslim Question. Although Yugoslav identity was no longer in
vogue, the matter of what to do with the nearly 900,000 predominantly Muslim
Yugoslavs in Bosnia-Herzegovina remained. It is at this time that a circle of prominent
Bosnian Communists, including Avdo Humo and uro Pucar, began to agitate for
recognizing Bosnian Muslims as Muslims essentially a reversal to the stance that these
men had advocated during the war. 27 Although it would take a few years before such
views gained wider currency, by 1959 there were already strong signs that the SKJ
establishment was rejecting the assimilationist policy from earlier in the decade. At the
Third Congress of the SKJ in 1959, for instance, delegate Andrija Krei, while claiming
that there [is no] social-historical reason for the Muslims to feel as a nation, noted that
pressures on Muslims to nationally orient themselves as Serbs and Croats have so far
had widely differing results in different regions. Only those who are more dependent on
the political realities of the present have gone along with identification, and frequently
only for pragmatic reasons, while the great mass of people remained undecided. 28
In a speech from that November before the Central Committee of the SKJ, Tito
himself seemed tired of the polemics surrounding the Muslim question. Those things
regarding the nationality of Muslims have to be gradually liquidated, he said. People
26
27
Mehmedalija Boji, Historija Bosne i Bonjaka (Sarajevo: ahinpai, 2001), p. 236.
28
63
need to be left alone and allowed to be nationally unoriented citizens of Yugoslavia if

they want. Let that man be a Bosnian, a Herzegovinian. Outside [Bosnia-Herzegovina]
they do not call you by any other name than Bosnian anyway, whether it is a Muslim, a
Serb or a Croat. 29 In another speech a few years later, in 1963, Tito would express
similar sentiments. Although it is clear [that being Yugoslav means being a citizen of
socialist Yugoslavia], we even have fruitless discussions here on whether, for example,
Muslims need to orient themselves toward some nationality. That is nonsense, he said,
arguing that Everyone can be that which they feel they are, and no one has the right to
force some national identity on them if they only feel like citizens of Yugoslavia. 30
Taken together, these two speeches indicate that Tito may have been personally
sympathetic to the Muslim rejection of Serb and Croat identity because he saw it as a
repudiation of the divisive nationalism that interfered with his vision for Yugoslavia.
The first concrete manifestation of the changing Party policy, regarding both the
Muslim Question and Yugoslavism, was the 1961 census. For the first time, the state
recognized Muslims as a separate ethnos, offering the choice of Muslims (ethnic
belonging). The census form tried to clarify the distinction between Muslims in a
religious and an ethnic sense, detailing that the new option was:
only for those persons of Yugoslav ancestry who consider themselves
Muslims in the sense of ethnic belonging. Members of non-Yugoslav nations,
such as Albanians and Turks, as well as Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins,
Macedonians and others, who consider themselves members of the Islamic
religious community, do not need to register as Muslims. For these persons, the
answer to the question of their nationality entails their national identity, i.e.
29
30
Josip Tito Broz, Nacionalno pitanje i revolucija [1963], in O Nacionaliziranju
Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), pp. 158-159.
64
Albanian, Turk, Serb, Croat, Montenegrin, Macedonian, etc., regardless of their

religious identity. 31
In contrast to the 1948 census, therefore, there were no longer separate options for
Serb or Croat Muslims; the SKJ no longer expected Muslims to gradually turn to a
national category, as it now treated Muslim communal identity as de facto national. The
Yugoslav option, however, remained on the census despite the SKJs distancing from it.
The result was that the Bosnian Muslim population was once again split. 842,248 people
opted for the new Muslim (ethnic belonging) designation, but a significant portion still
declared as Yugoslav, making up a good portion of the republics 275,883 remaining
Yugoslavs. 32 Hpken has perceptively pointed out that, on the municipality level, in 24
population centers with high Muslim concentrations, the percentage of Yugoslavs lay
far below the average for the republic [while] the percentage was above average in
communities where Muslims lived together with dominant Serbian majorities. 33
According to Hpken, this indicates that acceptance of the new census category was an
elite-driven process, and that Serb political influence was a retarding factor.
Two years later, in 1963, the Partys renewed implicit recognition of a separate
Muslim individuality was formalized on both the federal and republic level. Federally,
the new Yugoslav constitution amended the state coat of arms to include six torches
instead of five. The new torch was not, however, meant to represent a new Muslim
nation, but rather the six torches collectively were recast as representing the six republic
31
Husnija Kamberovi, Bonjaci 1968: Politiki kontekst priznanja nacionalnog identiteta," in
Rasrpave o nacionalnom identiteta Bonjaka (Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2009), p. 59.
32
33
65
of Yugoslavia. 34 During the original post-war debate over a potential sixth torch, ilas
had said that the idea might make some sense if the torches represented the separate
republics instead of the separate nations. 35 Now that the Bosnian Muslims were once
again considered a quasi-national group, the Communists decided for this interpretation
after all, offering a tacit recognition of the Muslims new status. Meanwhile, on the
republic level, that same year saw the specific mention of Muslims in the new Bosnian
constitution. The preamble of this document stated that the Serbs, Muslims and Croats,
overcoming the efforts of foreign powers and domestic reactionary forces, have found
themselves for the first time free, equal and as close as brothers in their Republic.36
Much like the war-time Partisan sources discussed earlier, the constitution avoided
explicitly describing the Muslims as a nation, but made clear that they were equal
partners with the two established nationalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
By the mid 1960s then, the Muslim Question seemed to have returned to the
wartime status quo, whereby Muslims were not explicitly labeled a nationality but were
treated as a distinct ethnic community separate from Croats and Serbs. The Fourth
Congress of the SKBiH in 1965 is particularly illustrative of this, containing the official
position that from a formal standpoint, the national affiliation of the Muslims has been
decided and will be taken off the agenda, since we have made the Muslims a people or
an ethnic group with the same rights as other peoples. 37 The question of the precise
nature of Bosnian Muslim identity, however, remained. A young American, Paul Shoup,
writing his landmark Communism and the Yugoslav National Question only a year later,
34
Hoare, Bosnia, p. 326
35
Filandra, Bonjaka politika,p. 202.
36
37
66
noted that One of the most interesting cases [of mid-1960s nationalism among smaller
national groups and minorities] was that of the Slav Moslems of Bosnia-Hercegovina. 38
Shoup noted that the SKJ had initially treated Muslims as a religious community, but
now favored the idea that Muslims were a distinct ethnic group. It only remained, he
wrote, to argue that the Muslims were a distinct nationality.
3.3 Constructing a Muslim Nation
This task fell to a circle of secular, Party-affiliated Muslim intellectuals, who

began their work in earnest around the same time that Shoups book went to press in the
United States. According to Muhamed Filipovi, a prominent Muslim academic from this
time, the debate was essentially transferred from the political to the academic sphere, in
the hope that Muslim national identity would be scientifically legitimized before attaining
formal state recognition. 39 Filipovi, together with other like-minded Muslim
intellectuals within the Party like Atif Purivatra, perceived the Yugoslav establishment as
prejudiced against Muslim culture and history. For Muslim national affirmation to occur,
it first had to be wrested, in the words of Filipovi, from the hands of the political sphere
and the various and numerous pseudo-politicians and ideologues who ruled it at that
time. In the second half of the 1960s, this intellectual effort would be based around the
Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo (known popularly as the
38
39
Husnija Kamberovi, Stav politike elite o nacionalnom identitetu Muslimana u Bosni i
Hercegovini sredinom 1960-ih godina, Prilozi No. 38 (2009): p. 166.
67
Politika kola), where academics like Purivatra, Mustafa Imamovi, Hamdija emerli
and the previously-mentioned Muhamed Hadijahi collaborated in investigating Muslim
national identity. 40 They did this with the backing of Hamdija Pozderac, a member of the
CKSKBiH, and some of them would eventually gain considerable clout within the
Bosnian Party structure themselves. Purivatra, for instance, became the chairman of the
Commission for Nationality questions in the mass organization of the Socialist
Federation, while emerli would be Rector of the University of Sarajevo from 1969 to
1972. 41
None of this is to imply, however, that the academics around the Faculty of
Political Sciences were simply historians for hire, creating a nation in response to Party
decree. To the contrary, they seem to have had a long-standing interest in the issue of
Muslim national identity. Hadijahi, for instance, had advocated for Muslim national
recognition as early as 1946, while Purivatras earliest articles all dealt with the national
question in Yugoslavia and the place of Bosnias Muslims within it. Furthermore, the
arguments of both men relied heavily on earlier research from the 1950s by the
predominantly Muslim (and, in contrast to Hadijahi and Purivatra, not necessarily
secular) scholars at Sarajevos Oriental Institute, who had made notable advances
concerning the social and economic history of Ottoman Bosnia. 42 In that sense, the
politically motivated writings of the 1960s were also partially building on an existing
Bosnian Muslim historiographic tradition. The undertaking at the Faculty of Political
40
41
Hpken, Communists and Muslims, p. 233; Enver Redi, Sto godina Muslimanske politike
(Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2000), pp. 89-90.
42
Armina Omerika, The Role of Islam in the National Identity of Muslims in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, 1950-1980, Islam and Muslim Societies: A Social Science Journal Vol. 2, No. 2
(2006): pp. 355-357.
68
Sciences is thus better seen as a symbiosis, whereby liberal currents within the Bosnian
Communist elite gave an emerging Muslim Communist intelligentsia free reign to pursue
its favored issues and, in return, relied upon its findings and the arguments it put forth to
legitimize their shared idea of a Muslim nation.
This Muslim nation, as articulated by Hadijahi and Purivatra and subsequently
championed by Bosnian Communists, was built on several key historical and ideological
arguments. To begin with, Hadijahi and Purivatra took Muslim (Musliman, pl.
Muslimani) to be the national name, arguing that this religious term had acquired a
national character over time due to the Bosnian Muslims unique position in a multiconfessional post-Ottoman society. Along with the uncontested religious meaning of the
term Muslim, wrote Hadijahi, here the term Muslim in an ethnic sense had also
crystallized. 43 Significantly, this was a rejection of the views of men such ii, who
had argued that Bosnian Muslims already had a national identity as Bosnians (Bosanci)
or Bosniaks (the synonymous but more archaic Bonjaci). In fact, in his calls for a sixth
torch to be added to the post-war Yugoslav seal, ii had bitterly railed against the
Communist preference for the term Muslim rather than Bosnian. They do not allow
our man to register as either Bosnian or Yugoslav, he lamented, But when, stranded, he
says that he is a Muslim, then that fits, presumably because that is a collective term for
300,000,000 people scattered across five continents and belonging to all the possible
races of humankind. 44 According to Hadijahi, however, Muslims had already rejected
Austria-Hungarys attempts to foster a Bosnian national identity (Bonjatvo), because it
threatened their unique national character as Muslims. In the new (post-Ottoman)
43
Redi, Sto godina, p. 95.
44
69
constellation, Hadijahi argued, Bonjatvo did not offer adequate expression to the
particular interests and desires of Muslims, who felt themselves threatened.
The secular Muslim intelligentsia of this period was far from monolithic, and the
idea of a Muslim nation was not without its opponents. Particularly serious
disagreements developed between Purivatra, Hadijahi and the other academics gathered
at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Enver Redi, one-time director of the Institute
for History of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Academy of Arts and Sciences in Sarajevo.45 Like
Hadijahi and Purivatra, Redi believed that Bosnian Muslims possessed ethnic
individuality. In a 1961 article titled Socio-historical Aspects of the National
Orientation of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Redi wrote that Based on
contemporary ethnographic research, as well as on the basis of historical development, I
think that we can accept the thesis that the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina represent a
specific ethnic whole. 46 Writing in 1964, Purivatra even praised this article as
comprehensively reasoned and documented. 47 But unlike Purivatra, Redi also
believed that Muslim ethnic individuality was expressed nationality through the term
Bosnian or Bosniak. As Hadijahi and Purivatra came out in favor of a Muslim
nation and against the idea of a Bosnian identity, Redi strongly disagreed,
considering a Muslim nation to be an artificial construct that neglected the historical
tradition of Bonjatvo. 48
45
46
Enver Redi, Prilozi o nacionalnom pitanju (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1963), p. 118.
47
Atif Purivatra, O nekim koncepcijama o nacionalnom opredjeljivanju Muslimana [1964], in
Nacionalni i politiki razvitak Muslimana (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1970), p. 25.
48
70
Redi was not the only contemporary Bosnian Muslim intellectual to favor a
Bosnian solution to the question of Muslim nationality. In the early 1960s in Vienna,
for example, a group of Bosnian Muslim political migrs headed by former Partisan
Adil Zulfikarpai published the magazine Bosanski pogledi (Bosnian perspectives),
which continuously advocated a Bosniak national identity for Bosnian Muslims. 49 I
do not agree, Zulfikarpai would later write, with the Communists when it comes to
the recognition of a Muslim nation:
I think that Muslims should have been allowed to choose their
national name themselves. In 1963 I criticized the regime for determining
the name of a nation by an act at some session. How absurd, giving a
religious name, which in reality brings us to a comical position and allows
opponents of that national politics to make the argument: what kind of
nation is that? That is a religious group imagined in a test tube during
some session or at some Party conference I believe that writers like Atif
Purivatra and Alija Isakovi, who were writing against Bonjatvo, were
animated and employed by the Communist Party. I am convinced that in
arguing that Muslims with a capital M are national Muslims, and with a
lower-case m form a religious identity, there was a fear of the reaction of
Croat and Serb nationalism. Out of fear of them, above all of Serb
nationalism, the Party offered an unprincipled and inadequate solution,
needlessly tangling itself up and imagining a national name for
Bosniaks. 50
It is telling, however, that this strongest expression of the Bosniak current in
Bosnian Muslim national thought took place outside of Yugoslavia. Within the country,
Redi, probably the most prominent advocate of some sort of Bosnian national identity
for Bosnian Muslims, was ostracized by the Muslim academic establishment; a 1971
article by Mustafa Imamovi, for instance, harshly criticized him for spelling Muslim
with a lower-case m and, therefore, implying a non-national status. Redi does not have
49
Sair Filandra and Enes Kari, Bonjaka ideja (Zagreb: Globus, 2002), pp. 121-137.
50
Milovan ilas and Nadeda Gae, Bonjak Adil Zulfikarpai (Zrich: Bonjaki Institut), pp.
104-105.
71
the least right, Imamovi wrote, to deny and insult and degrade a million-person
nation. 51
The reason for this state of affairs, it seems, was that any notion of Bosnian
national identity went against the interests of the SKBiH, which was trying to formalize a
Muslim nation without provoking the national feelings of Bosnian Serbs and Croats.
Once again, this is not to say, as Zulfikarpai does, that academics like Hadijahi and
Purivatra held the views they did out of political opportunism; the evidence, including
Purivatras expressed views later during the fall of Communism, strongly suggests that
they sincerely believed their Muslim interpretation of Bosnian Muslim national
identity. 52 Nevertheless, as the debates surrounding the subsequent formal recognition of
Muslim nationhood made expressly clear, the Bosnian Communist elite strongly
preferred the idea of a Muslim national identity to that of a Bosnian one.
Despite these battle lines drawn between the dominant Muslim camp and
advocates of some sort of Bosnian identity, the leading Bosnian Muslim intellectuals of
this period had much in common as well. To begin with, Hadijahi, Redi and even the
exiled Zulfikarpai all drew their roots from the pre-war Muslim left. Furthermore,
virtually all were convinced of Muslim national individuality whether as Muslims or
Bosniaks in relation to Serbs and Croats. All of them expressed this national
individuality in secular terms; the religious establishment would only gain an influence in
Muslim nation-building later on. Finally, in reaching their conclusions, they relied on
51
Mustafa Imamovi. Ne radi se o sluajnosti [1970], in Knjige i zbivanja (Sarajevo: Magistrat,
2008), p. 77.
52
In the 1990s, when most Bosnian Muslim intellectuals decided to adopt the national name
Bosniak, Purivatra initially continued to insist on the term Muslim.
72
many of the same historical arguments. Islam in Bosnia, for instance, was dated back to
an alleged mass conversion by members of the supposedly Bogumil Bosnian church. 53 In
this way, the modern advocates of Muslim nationhood extended Bosnian Muslim
communal identity to the middle ages, and, crucially, kept it separate from Catholicism
(associated with Croats) and Serb Orthodoxy. Also, drawing from the previouslymentioned historiography of the 1950s, Bosnian Muslims were presented as holding a
unique position within the Ottoman Empire, both in relation to the surrounding Christian
peoples and to fellow Ottoman Muslims. 54 And lastly, the pressure on Bosnian Muslims
to nationally orient themselves was linked, in Marxist terms, to the imperialist
ambitions of the Serb and Croat bourgeoisie, while the Communists were praised for
allegedly recognizing Bosnian Muslim individuality during World War II. 55 Although the
numerous scholars associated with the academic debates on the Muslim Question brought
forth various other arguments as well, these were, in a nutshell, the legitimizing pillars of
Bosnian Muslim national individuality as put forth in the 1960s.
3.4 Federal Recognition
1966 was a pivotal year in the rise of Yugoslav liberalism and the Muslim nation
that emerged with it. That July, at a session of the CKSKJ, Tito accused Aleksandar
Rankovi, head of the State Security Administration (Uprava dravne bezbjednosti or
53
Omerika, The Role of Islam, Islam and Muslim Societies: A Social Science Journal Vol. 2,
No. 2 (2006): pp. 355.
54
Muhamed Hadijahi, Od tradicije do identiteta (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1974), pp. 95-103.
55
Purivatra, Stav Komunistike, p. 65-131.
73
UDBA), of widely abusing his responsibilities, deviating from Party policy and creating a
personal power-base within the SKJ. 56 Rankovi was the senior-most Serb in the Party
and a long-time friend and confidant of Tito; during the war, he had been a member of
the Partisan high command and fought with a distinguished record. In the ensuing trial,
however, he was even accused of bugging Titos bedroom and summarily expelled from
the Party. Beyond such questionable allegations, however, Rankovis expulsion had
wider political implications. Since the end of the war, Rankovi was arguably the most
stead-fast advocate of centralized, top-down Party control in Yugoslavia. By 1964,
perhaps emboldened by their early victories, liberal currents within the SKJ, headed by
Edvard Kardelj, convinced Tito that Rankovi was a serious impediment to reform and
had to be removed. His expulsion from the Party and the consequent taming of the secret
police apparatus ensured that liberalization kicked into overdrive. 57
A number of historians, most notably Sabrina Ramet, have portrayed Rankovis
expulsion as directly leading to Muslim national recognition. 58 In her most recent book,
2006s The Three Yugoslavias, Ramet claimed that The fall of Rankovi was not merely
a victory for the Croats or the decentralists, nor even merely for the forces of reform: it
was a victory for Yugoslavias Muslims. As Hpken points out however, the evidence
cited for this claim usually comes from the same trial transcripts that contained numerous
other questionable allegations. 59 Given this unreliable foundation, there appears to be no
evidence to justify drawing an explicit link between Rankovis fall from grace and the
recognition of Muslim nationhood. A relationship between the two certainly exists, but it
56
57
Kamberovi, Bonjaci 1968, p. 62
58
59
Hpken, Communists and Muslims, p. 233
74
is more indirect than scholars like Ramet imply. Namely, Rankovis expulsion, in
removing perhaps the greatest proponent of 1950s-style Yugoslavism and centralized
control, allowed the SKJ to reappraise its record on the National question. Whereas the
Party had previously maintained the dogma that the war-time Partisan experience had
finally solved the National Question, the SKJs new critical light revealed that
nationalist grievances existed even in a socialist Yugoslavia.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the first manifestation of this new awareness of a
lingering National Question was the Mostar Conference held in September, 1966. The
conference, planning for which was initiated in late 1965, was meant to address concerns
about the political situation in Western Herzegovina, a region primarily inhabited by
Croats. Even more so than the officially a-national Muslims, Croats were significantly
underrepresented in the Bosnian Party structure of this time. This was especially true in
Western Herzegovina, which had a reputation as a hotbed for far-right Croat nationalism.
It was precisely the arrest and trial of some such West Herzegovinian Croat nationalists
in 1965 that prompted the SKBiH to reconsider its policies in the area. 60
The resulting conference in Mostar, beyond simply considering the status of the
local Croat population, opened the door for discussion on various other national issues
that had previously been taboo. I am convinced, noted CKSKBiH Political Secretary
Cvijetin Mijatovi at the beginning of the conference, that we need to, before ourselves
and before the public, openly, self-critically and bravely say that we inconsistently
carried out our politics regarding the national question in a whole series of cases in our
60
75
Republic. 61 From there, it was not difficult to argue that SKJ policy toward the Bosnian
Muslims should also be reevaluated. In fact, at the conference itself, Demal Bijedi, a
rising Muslim Communist from Mostar, complained that the preparatory material
completely neglected the role of Herzegovinas Muslims. Although that should not have
been allowed to happen considering that Muslims represent nearly a third of the
population of Herzegovina, he remarked, This analysis does not give the impression
that this element is either endangered or that this element endangers others. 62
This re-examination of SKJ nationality policy was partly tied to the ascendance of
a new generation of liberal-minded Bosnian Communists. In the 1960s, men like Bijedi,
Branko Mikuli and Hamdija Pozderac began their climb to the top of the republic and
federal Party hierarchy. In the 1970s, Bijedi would even serve as Prime Minister of
Yugoslavia, while both Mikuli and Pozderac would attain high positions within the
CKSKJ. Their rise was largely built on their firm loyalty to Tito and a commitment to
strengthening Bosnia-Herzegovinas position as a federal republic. They were joined in
this endeavor by some more senior figures, like Humo, Karabegovi and Mijatovi, as
well as the Partys Muslim intellectuals mentioned earlier. Together, in the new postRankovi political climate, these Bosnian Communists were able to articulate their own
solution to the national question in the republic: the SKBiH would formally elevate
Muslims to the status of a constituent nation, lobby on the federal level for their equality
with the other nations in Yugoslavia and then emphasize Bosnia-Herzegovinas
autonomy as a tri-national republic within the Yugoslav federation.
61
Ibid., p. 65.
62
Kamberovi, Stav politike elite, Prilozi No. 38 (2009): p. 182.
76
The Bosnian Communists took the first major step in this endeavor at the 17th
session of the CKSKBiH, where they extensively discussed national relations in BosniaHerzegovina. Preparations for this session began as early as mid-1967, but it was delayed
for various technical reasons until January, 1968. When it finally took place, the
discussion took for granted that Muslims were a separate ethnic group equal to Serbs and
Croats, maintaining the position from the 1961 census and the preamble to the 1963
Bosnian constitution. The Committee Members did not, however, delve deeply into
questions about the specific nature of or the ideological basis for Muslim communal
identity; only Joco Marjanovi touched on such issues, stating that Muslims among us,
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, are in the process of constituting themselves not only, as we are
currently saying, as a unique ethnicity or as a people and so on, but as a unique nation. 63
Instead, the bulk of the discussion focused on the role of Serb, Croat and Muslim national
identity in the three groups common Bosnian homeland. Bijedi, for instance, claimed
that the national sentiments of all three of these people, Croats, Serbs and Muslims, are
too well-developed to allow any of them to accept a one-sided solution [to the national
question]. 64 He then argued, however, that All three peoples in Bosnia-Herzegovina are
inseparably connected, they have always lived together, they have to live together, in the
revolution they fought together and together they found the best solutions. This line of
thought, emphasizing both the separate identities of Serbs, Croats and Muslims as well as
their common enterprise in the socialist Bosnian republic, was typical of the session.
63
Iva Lui, Stavovi Centralnog Komiteta Saveza Komunista Jugoslavije o nacionalnom
identiteta bosanskih Muslimana/Bonjaka," in Rasrpave o nacionalnom identiteta Bonjaka
(Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2009), pp. 100-105.
64
Ibid., p. 101.
77
The debate at the 17th session of the CKSKBiH reached its conclusion a few
months later at the 20th. While the 17th had been entirely devoted to a discussion of the
national question in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it was only at the 20th that Muslim nationhood
was explicitly affirmed. Namely, in the sessions conclusions, the CKSKBiH proclaimed
that Practice has shown the harm of various forms of the pressure and insistence in the
earlier period that Muslims orient themselves in national terms as Serbs or Croats, for it
was evident earlier, and present-day socialist practice confirms, that Muslims are a
separate nation. 65 With this statement, Muslims were formally elevated to the status of a
nation in Bosnian Communist institutions. Shortly afterwards, at a special session in
Mostar, CKSKBiH member Ugljea Danilovi further re-iterated this point and criticized
the Partys earlier conduct. It was evidently a mistake of us Communists in BosniaHerzegovina to allow the purely bourgeoisie stance that Muslims must necessarily orient
themselves as Serbs or as Croats to enter our practice unnoticed he said. This meant
forcing one nation to declare itself according to a bourgeoisie recipe. 66
Although the Bosnian Communists decided to recognize a Muslim nation for a
number of reasons, their decision was primarily a result of the political project of
Yugoslav liberalization and the aspirations these Communists held for BosniaHerzegovina within it. In the 1960s, Yugoslav liberals sought to respond to economic
stagnation and charges of authoritarianism by attempting grassroots democratization,
instituting decentralization and emphasizing republic economic autonomy. As pursued by
Tito, this project particularly focused on bolstering the national periphery and
65
Ibid., p. 106.
66
Ugljea Danilovi, Savez Komunista moe svetla obraza da poloi raun o svom delovanju
[1968], in O Nacionaliziranju Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi (Zagreb: Globus, 1990), p. 178.
78
strengthening the institutions of Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo and BosniaHerzegovina. The last in particular was critical in balancing competing political,
economic and national interests in Yugoslavia, both because of its multiethnic population
and because it had up until that point essentially functioned as a Serbian satellite; its
Communist leadership was overwhelmingly Serb, and the republic typically followed the
political lead of the Serbian Party. In addressing concerns over Croat marginalization and
recognizing Muslims as a third nation, the emerging Bosnian Communist leadership
broke this earlier Serb conservative hegemony and re-positioned Bosnia-Herzegovina as
a more autonomous factor within the Yugoslav federation. This rejuvenated Bosnian
republic fit nicely into Titos agenda as well, not simply because it furthered efforts at
decentralization, but because of the personal loyalty its new Communist cadres had for
him as well; a few years later, when Tito terminated the liberalizing project and sided
with Party conservatives, Bosnia-Herzegovina once again backed him, this time serving
as a bulwark against Croatian nationalism. 67
Another factor in the Bosnian Communists policy was a growing concern with
the potential threat posed by certain elements in the IZ. Husnija Kamberovi, the current
director of the Institute for History in Sarajevo, is perhaps the most prominent proponent
of this theory, although Sabrina Ramet briefly expressed similar arguments as well. 68
Essentially, although the Communists kept a close watch on the activities of Muslim
religious institutions, there were growing concerns in the Party at this time about a new
generation of Bosnian Muslim Islamists. For obvious reasons, Bosnian Communists were
67
68
Kamberovi, Bonjaci 1968, p. 73; Sabrina Ramet, Primordial Ethnicity or Modern
Nationalism: The Case of Yugoslavias Muslims, Reconsidered, in Muslim Communities
Reemerge, ed. Edward Allworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 111-134.
79
worried that these Islamist activists, disillusioned with the establishment stance of the
senior-most IZ officials, could challenge the SKBiHs influence in Muslim communal
affairs. The preparatory material for a 1969 session of the CKSKBiH is exemplary of
these concerns, remarking that in recent times, one can notice the aspiration of Muslim
clericals to reform the Muslim church (probably based on the model of the Catholic
church) and to bring it out of a purely theological framework and involve it in all aspects
of modern life. 69 For obvious reasons, Bosnian Communists saw such a more active
Islamic Community as a threat to their political project as the above-cited preparatory
material pointedly remarked, All of this can only lead to the spread of chauvinism and
the creation of distrust. As the date of this session of the CKSKBiH indicates, however,
such concerns seem to have largely come up only after the Party had already recognized
Muslims as a separate nation. While this was therefore an important factor in SKBiH
policy in the period following national recognition, it does not necessarily explain why
the Communists favored recognizing Muslims as a separate nation in the first place.
One more factor worth considering is the role that Bosnian Muslims played in
Yugoslav foreign policy. Following the Tito-Stalin split and Yugoslavias expulsion from
the Cominform, Tito joined with Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and Indian
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in advocating an international coalition of states not
officially allied with either the United States or the Soviet Union. The resulting NonAligned Movement, formed in Belgrade in 1961, gained Yugoslavia international
prestige in the decolonizing third world. Since many of these emerging nations were
predominantly Muslim, it suddenly became politically advantageous to portray
69
80
Yugoslavia as the second-strongest Muslim country in Europe, after Turkey 70

Yugoslav policy makers therefore made sure to provide visiting Muslim dignitaries with
tours of Sarajevos Ottoman quarter, while in turn appointing Bosnian Muslims as
ambassadors to the various capitals of the Islamic world. 71 Given these foreign policy
interests, it also became advantageous to grant Bosnian Muslims greater institutional
prominence than in earlier times. Tito was personally aware of this; when Mikuli
mentioned to him in 1969 that the Bosnian Communists had solved the Muslim Question,
he responded that this [has] come at a very good time for us, because we have relations
with Arab countries. 72 While further research would shed more light on the influence of
such thinking, Titos statement shows that he himself certainly had this factor in mind.
To better understand the phenomenon of Muslim national recognition, however, it
is not enough to explain why this recognition came when it did; it is equally important to
consider why it took the form that it did. Namely, why did Bosnian Communists insist on
the national name Muslim, as opposed to Bosnian, Bosniak or even Yugoslav? To begin
with, the SKJ was not inventing a tradition in making the term Muslim a national
category, but merely giving it a new significance. Since the beginning of the 20th century,
Muslim, rather than the more offensive Turk or Mohammedan, was the official
term used by Austria-Hungarian authorities to refer to the Bosnian Muslim population. 73
Muslim was also the primary identity used by these people to distinguish themselves
70
Friedman, Bosnian Muslims, pp. 167.
71
Ibid.
72
73
Mustafa Imamovi. Istorijske opservacije [1969], in Knjige i zbivanja (Sarajevo: Magistrat,
2008), p. 47.
81
from other ethno-religious groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and intellectuals like

Hadijahi had advocated a Muslim nationhood much earlier than the 1960s.
Nonetheless, in the various sessions, speeches and articles through which the
Bosnian Communists propagated the idea of a Muslim nation in the late 1960s, they not
only affirmed the term Muslim but also rejected the terms Bosnian, Bosniak, and
Yugoslav as acceptable markers of national identity. I have already discussed the ways
in which Yugoslav national identity fell out of favor, and the terms Bosnian and
Bosniak posed similar problems to the SKBiH. Elevating a hitherto regional term such
as Bosnian to the status of a national identity would have implied that Bosnian Serbs
and Croats were now Bosnians of a second class, or worse, should be assimilated into the
new Bosnian nation. In fact, the term Bosniak, while technically synonymous with
Bosnian, was interpreted as even worse, because in the Austria-Hungarian period it was
associated with exactly such a policy. The Bosnian Communists were interested in
according the Muslims nationhood, but not at the expense of propagating any new
unitary national identity. Bosnian and Yugoslav were thus salvaged as markers of
regional and socialist patriotic identity respectively, but by no means a possible source of
nationalist sentiment.
3.5 National Affirmation
Having formally recognized Muslim nationhood, the Bosnian Communist

political leadership and intellectual circles undertook a campaign to further affirm the
82
new policy. It was then, in that wake of the 17th and 20th sessions of the CKSKBiH, that
many of the Muslim intellectuals within the SKBiH published the fruits of their previous
years of academic labor. In the years 1968 and 1969, for instance, Purivatra published
several different articles on the history of the JMO, the Partys stance on the Muslim
question during World War II and arguments for the ethnic nature of Bosnian Muslim
identity. These articles, together with his earlier work, were then published in 1970 under
the title Nacionalni i politiki razvitak Muslimana (The National and Political
Development of Muslims). Meanwhile, Purivatras collaboration with Hadijahi at the
Faculty of Political Sciences, launched in 1967, was entering high gear, and Hadijahi
was authoring a number of articles on Bosnian Muslim history that he would eventually
publish in 1974 as the seminal Od tradicije do identiteta (From Tradition to Identity). 74
Similarly, in 1969, Salim eri, another Muslim intellectual within the SKJ, published
Muslimani srpskohrvatskog jezika (Serbo-Croat speaking Muslims), which Imamovi
praised in his review as a work which further study of the history of Serbo-Croatspeaking Muslims will have to take into account. 75
But the post-recognition intellectual affirmation of Muslim nationhood was not
just carried out by the coterie of political scientists who had written on the subject earlier.
Rather, historians also began to discuss the Muslim Question at a number of notable
historical conferences in these years. In November, 1968, for example, shortly after the
CKSKBiHs political recognition, the Institute for History in Sarajevo helped organize a
conference on The Historical Foundations of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 76
74
75
Imamovi, Istorijske opservacije, p. 55.
76
83
Some 80 intellectuals attended, and the 30 of them who lectured touched frequently on
the question of Muslim national identity; Avdo Sueska, an academic associated with the
previously-mentioned Oriental Institute, was one of them, arguing that Bosnian Muslims
gradually formed a separate society in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the long period of
Ottoman rule. 77 Sueska would advance similar views at the Fifth Congress of Yugoslav
Historians in Ohrid, Macedonia, in 1969. Dedicated to Ethnic and National Processes in
our Country, this conference attracted roughly 1,000 delegates and guests. 78 Although it
had a wider pan-Yugoslav focus and included many papers on Macedonian national
identity, 79 Imamovi, writing down his impressions in Osloboenje at the end of the
month, remarked that The national question of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims was at
the center of the Congressional delegates attention, so that there practically was not a
single speaker who avoided mentioning this subject. 80 Sueskas article on the
Historical Foundations of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim Individuality garnered
particular attention, and helped pave the way for further study of Bosnian Muslim
national identity in Yugoslav historiography. 81
By the turn of the decade, however, the arena for discussing questions of national
identity expanded beyond Party assemblies, historical conferences and the academic
press. The reason for this development was the upcoming 1971 population census;
whereas Yugoslav Communists, operating in a one-party political system, had hitherto
77
Ibid., p. 171.
78
Mustafa Imamovi. Panja prema istoriji naroda I narodnosti [1969], in Knjige i zbivanja
(Sarajevo: Magistrat, 2008), p. 59.
79
Along with the Muslim Question, Macedonian national identity and institutions were also
part of the SKJs campaign to strengthen the national periphery.
80
Imamovi, Panja, p. 61.
81
84
been able to settle questions of nationality behind closed doors, the census essentially put
their nationality policy to a popular referendum. Husnija Kamberovi, writing on the
political context of the recognition of Muslim nationhood in the 1960s, argued that
Yugoslav Communists did not invent a new identity but rather recognized one that was
already there, and that this is what explains Why there were no great public promotions
of Muslim national identity at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. The
individual actions of intellectuals were limited to the period ahead of the 1971 population
census. 82 But to the contrary, the reason why any sort of mass propagation of the
Muslim nationality was limited to the build-up to the 1971 census is precisely because
this was the only time that the opinion of the masses mattered. The intended audience of
the Bosnian Communist leadership and intellectual circles mentioned earlier had not been
the mass of people who would constitute the new Muslim nation, but other Party
members and academics; even the most accessible books, such as eris Muslimani
srpskohrvatskog jezika, were probably limited to the bookshelves of educated Muslim
families in the cities. The 1971 census was the first time since the fall of Rankovi that
the SKJs refashioned nationality policy, including the new category of national
Muslims, was put before the entire Muslim population in Yugoslavia. Furthermore, since
the census allowed respondents to register as members of whatever nation they wished,
the SKJ ran the risk of Bosnian Muslims registering as Yugoslavs, Turkish minorities in
Macedonia and Kosovo registering as nationally Muslim and various other undesirable
outcomes. Given this very real possibility, the Bosnian Communists who had agitated
within the Party for Muslim national recognition now faced pressure for the census
results to legitimize their nationality policy.
82
85
To better understand the context of the 1971 census, it is also important to briefly
look at Yugoslav society in the early 1970s from below. The reason that this thesis
focuses so extensively on societal elites, such as Party members and various academics,
is because the National Question in late 1960s Bosnia-Herzegovina was largely their
preoccupation; the bulk of the population, ranging from peasants to blue-collar workers
in the cities and towns, had a fundamentally different experience in this period. Namely,
between 1948 and 1971, the urban population of Bosnia-Herzegovina had more than
tripled. 83 The main source of this growth was the migration of people from the
countryside to the cities, where they settled in large, newly-built tower-block apartment
complexes. These new residential buildings obliterated the ethnic divisions of the
countryside, and, along with city schools and the urban work environment, brought large
groups of people with diverse ethnic and geographic origins into close contact with each
other. 84 Not surprisingly, one consequence of this was an increased rate of interethnic
marriage, which became common in multiethnic cities such as Sarajevo and Mostar. At
the same time, between 1956 and 1972, the Yugoslav standard of living increased nearly
three-and-a-half-fold, as general economic development, urbanization and the inflow of
cash from guest-worker relatives in more developed countries like West Germany all
came together to create an emerging consumer culture. 85 This consumer culture also
bypassed traditional ethnic boundaries, because the new consumer ideal was marketed as
pan-Yugoslav and available to all citizens regardless of nationality. 86 Taken together,
83
84
Hannes Grandits, Ambivalentnosti u socijalistikoj nacionalnoj politici Bosne i Hercegovine u
kasnim 1960-im i u 1970-im," in Rasrpave o nacionalnom identiteta Bonjaka (Sarajevo: Institut
za istoriju, 2009), p. 27.
85
Ibid., p. 21.
86
Ibid., p. 22.
86
these processes of urbanization and consumerism helped foster a supra-ethnic sense of

Bosnian and pan-Yugoslav identity; many young people, in particular, found the idea of
declaring their nationality as Yugoslav appealing.
Given these conditions, it is understandable that the Bosnian Communist political
elite made a concerted effort to encourage Bosnians to adopt certain favored forms of
identity and reject others that contradicted SKJ nationality policy. Additional pressure
also came from elements in the SKJ, particularly Serbian conservative circles, who
opposed Muslim national recognition in principle and would have in fact preferred the
promotion of some sort of Yugoslav identity. In a May, 1968 session of the Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia (Centralni komitet saveza komunista
Srbije or CKSKS), author Dobrica osi and historian Jovan Marjanovi expressed
dismay at the senseless announcement of a new Muslim nation in Yugoslavia, which
they identified as the abandonment of Yugoslav identity by emphasizing those elements
by which we are different and which divide us nationally instead of those that draw us
closer together. 87 In response to such opinion, Bosnian Communist lobbied with both
federal policy makers and the populace at large. In terms of the former, for example,
Mikuli countered the arguments of men like osi and Marjanovi in a March, 1970
conversation with Tito. We know of those reservations, Mikuli told Tito, but argued
that calls for Muslims to identify as Yugoslavs or Bosnians instead were essentially just
denials of [the Muslims] individuality and uniqueness. 88 Meanwhile, within the
SKBiH, heretics who also sympathized with notions of Yugoslav and Bosnian identity
87
Hpken, Communists and Muslims, p. 235; Lui, Stavovi, p. 109.
88
Kamberovi, Stav politike elite, Prilozi No. 38 (2009): p. 176-177.
87
were summarily chastised. This was the fate of Enver Redi, who specifically suggested
that citizens maintain the right to identify with these two categories:
A session of the Presidency of the Republic conference of the
SSRNBiH was called to evaluate and assess my views First the vice
president of the CKSKBiH, Hasan Grabanovi, spoke in the name of the
Secretariat of the CKSKBiH and the president of the CKSKBiH Branko
Mikuli. He said that Redis stance contained massive political
implications. Atif Purivatra claimed that Redis stance did not contribute
to the advancement of inter-national relations and that it was not clear
what Redis goal was with this intervention. Mustafa Vilovi stated that
Redis stance was discriminatory, anti-historical and unscientific; Ivan
Brigi added that Redis approach to Yugoslavism did not accept class
or revolutionary principles. Ahmet ati expressed the belief that Redi,
through his stance, provoked confusion among the citizens of BosniaHerzegovina the session of the Presidency of the Republic conference
of the SSRNBiH ran as a show of single-minded support for the promotion
of the Muslim nation and the rejection of the possibility that citizens in
the population census could declare themselves as Yugoslavs or
Bosnians. 89
In terms of the Bosnian population at large, Communists like Pozderac expressed
concern about the appeal that Yugoslav identity held for the younger generation, and
called for greater Party efforts to educate them about the errors of such views.
Yugoslavism as a national or supra-national category negates national equality and
harms the positive development of national interests, he wrote in a Party newspaper on
the eve of the census in 1971, adding that There is some orientation toward
Yugoslavism, especially among younger people, as a way of reacting to and resisting
various forms of nationalism. This precisely shows the need for strengthening our
activities in the fight against nationalism and explaining the stance of the League of
Communists on the National Question. 90
89
Grandits, Ambivalentnosti, pp. 18-19.
90
Ibid., p. 33.
88
On the ground, the ideologues who had fashioned the Party-approved concept of
Muslim nationhood took up this responsibility to explain the SKBiHs views to the
people. In a dialogue set up by Osloboenje between its readers and Party intellectuals,
Purivatra defended the choice of Muslim as a national name, arguing that the terms
Bosnian or Bosniak would have represented an attempt to revive unitary
Yugoslavism through the specific national relations in this republic. This would have
equally negated the national individuality of Serbs, Croats and Muslims, as well as
members of other nations and nationalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 91 But Purivatras
activities extended far beyond answering readers letters in Bosnia-Herzegovinas largest
daily newspaper. A brochure he authored with Kasim Suljevi, a like-minded intellectual,
was published in mass quantities and spread among Bosnian Muslims to convince them
to declare themselves as nationally Muslim. 92 Furthermore, Purivatra took full advantage
of television and radio, not only appearing on them himself, but encouraging them to
feature programs that would educate the population about the forthcoming census. Milan
Uzelac, the director of Radio Television Sarajevo, recalled one day when Purivatra came
to his office door and with the tone of someone who had finally gotten his five minutes,
still in the doorway, asked Shall we? He then began to speak passionately about the
coverage of national issues, meaning Muslim ones. In his mind, all regular programming
should be repressed and replaced with national issues that would never be removed from
the air. 93
91
92
93
89
One further interesting aspect of Purivatras agitation ahead of the 1971 census is
his collaboration with the IZ and Muslim religious authorities. Purivatra worked
particularly closely with the Islamic scholar Husein ozo, an Al-Azhar graduate and
founder of Preporod (Renaissance), a prominent Bosnian Muslim religious newspaper.
Specifically, ozo gave Purivatra and other Bosnian Communists, including nonMuslims, a platform to write in Preporod and educate Muslims about the national aspect
of their identity. 94 Furthermore, he even organized seminars at which Communist
officials and intellectuals gave speeches on Muslim national identity to Bosnian Imams,
who were then sent back to their Demats (local congregations) with copies of Purivatra
and Suljevis above-mentioned brochure and instructions to prepare local Muslim
believers ahead of the census. 95 Purivatra does not appear to have altered his message in
any way to match this new religious medium; the Muslim nation he was advocating
remained defined in secular terms. Nonetheless, his work with ozo illustrates the
growing relationship between secular intellectuals and the religious establishment in
propagating Muslim nationhood. This link would prove critical in later years, when the
regime cracked down on both camps renegade Muslim Communists and Islamic
activists with the accusation of Muslim extremism.
Although it is difficult to gauge exactly what influence the Bosnian Communists
agitation for Muslim nationhood had on the final results, the 1971 census almost certainly
met their expectations. A total of 1,482,430 people declared as Muslims in the sense of
nationality, representing 39.6% of the total population of Bosnia-Herzegovina and more
94
Omerika, The Role of Islam, Islam and Muslim Societies: A Social Science Journal Vol. 2,
No. 2 (2006): pp. 365.
95
Ibid., p. 366.
90
than a three-quarter increase from the total number in 1961.96 The number of citizens still
declaring as Yugoslavs experienced a sharp decline, dropping from 275,883 to 43,796
and representing only 1.2% of the republic population. With these results, Muslims
overtook Serbs as the largest ethno-confessional community in Bosnia-Herzegovina for
the first time since the 19th century, becoming the new plurality in the republic. As part of
this massive population increase, Muslims also went from forming a majority in 25 of
Bosnia-Herzegovinas 100 municipalities to predominating in 42. 97 The 1971 census, in
large part owing to the efforts of the SKBiH leadership, thus represents a landmark event
in the demographic history of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
3.6 Conclusions
The first twenty-five years of socialist Yugoslavia saw a dramatic change in the
institutional status of Bosnian Muslims. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the
SKJ essentially reverted to its policy from the early years of the first Yugoslavia,
designating Muslims a religious community and expecting them to orient themselves
toward Serb or Croat national identity. For their own part, however, the Muslim masses
consistently rejected such pressures in the post-war censuses, overwhelmingly identifying
as Muslims nationally unoriented or, later on, as Yugoslavs. When the latter term fell
out favor as part of the late 1950s move to liberalization, the long-dormant Muslim
Question was re-opened. By the mid-1960s, under the broader umbrella of
96
Friedman, Bosnian Muslims, pp. 155-156.
97
Hopken, Communists and Muslims, pp. 235-236.
91
decentralization and strengthening the national periphery, the Bosnian Communist

leadership and secular Muslim intellectuals began pushing for the recognition of a
separate Muslim nation. They achieved this on the republic level in 1968 and, thanks in
part to their efforts aimed at the wider population, reinforced their position with the
results of the 1971 census. Thanks to their efforts in these years, Bosnian Muslims would
go on to gain significantly increased political significance on both the republic and
federal levels, as illustrated by their inclusion as one of the six Yugoslav nations
mentioned in the 1974 federal constitution.
92
Conclusion
The three chapters I included in this thesis deal with three distinct periods in
Bosnian and Yugoslav history: the constitutional deadlock and underground leftist
movement of the interwar era, the Partisan resistance to the Nazi occupation during
World War II and the Yugoslav Communists struggles with the persistent National
Question in the first few post-war decades. All together, it is a wide span of time,
encompassing 52 years and six revisions to the Yugoslav constitution, four changes in
Bosnia-Herzegovinas borders, a multitude of census categories and an array of
intellectual and political figures ranging from Demaludin auevi to Dobrica osi.
Although I could probably have devoted this thesis to any one of these three periods
specifically, I think this approach has its benefits as well, offering a broader perspective
and highlighting some long-term trends in the development of the Muslim Question.
Phrased differently, the Muslim Question essentially translated to What to do
with our Muslims? In the early years of the Yugoslav state, the consensus answer was
nationalization. Politicians across the political spectrum, from Marxists like Sima
Markovi to fascists like Ante Paveli, expected Muslims to nationally orient
themselves towards a more modern, national sense of identity, whether Serb, Croat or
even Yugoslav. Among the Muslims themselves, elites within the JMO individually
identified as Serbs or Croats, but the vast majority of Bosnian Muslims remained
essentially a-national, identifying exclusively as Muslims in an ethno-religious sense.
These Muslim masses, politically underrepresented and economically marginalized, made
93
an appealing potential constituency for the underground Communist movement. With the
beginning of Titos reign as Party secretary and the era of the Popular Front, the KPJ
appealed to them by advocating Bosnian autonomy. As part of this appeal, Party
members like Edvard Kardelj began to reconsider the nature of the Muslims communal
identity, increasingly categorizing them as an ethnic group. This was particularly true
among Muslim Communists, such as Avdo Humo, Osman Karabegovi and other sons of
prominent Muslim families harshly affected by the botched land reform.
Entering World War II, the KPJs Partisan resistance movement adopted the
parole of Brotherhood and Unity and strove to lead a national liberation struggle that
included all of the Yugoslav nations. The movement was ambiguous, however, as to
whether this included the Bosnian Muslims as well. KPJ propaganda frequently listed
Muslims alongside Serbs and Croats in its appeals for them to join the Partisan ranks,
treating them as a de facto nation but without necessarily making this status explicit. Part
of the reason for this hesitance was that some within the Partisan leadership, like Veselin
Maslea and Milovan ilas, were ideologically opposed to making a nation out of what
they saw as strictly a religious group; from a Marxist perspective, this appeared counterproductive. Nonetheless, when the time came to set up the embryonic institutions of a
post-war Yugoslav state, the Communists formally recognized Muslims as a group equal
to the Serbs and Croats in the founding documents of the new Bosnian republic. The
Partisans' handling of the Muslim Question during World War II was therefore
ambiguous and occasionally contradictory, but ultimately such that, following the war,
many Bosnian Muslims expected some sort of status equal to the other Yugoslav nations.
94
Their hopes were frustrated only shortly into the life of socialist Yugoslavia, as
the Communists once again relegated the Muslims to the status of a mere religious
community. In a sense then, by 1948, the KPJ had gone back full circle to its views at the
time of Sima Markovi, once again expecting Muslims to nationally orient themselves.
When the Party entered a phase of liberalization in the late 1950s, however, the Muslim
Question was taken in the entirely opposite direction, and further than the Communists
had ever taken it before. In the 1960s, driven by a desire to strengthen the position of
Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Yugoslav federation, liberal-minded elements in the Bosnian
Communist leadership began advocating for the recognition of Muslims as a separate
nation. They conducted this endeavor as part of the Yugoslav liberals wider effort to
decentralize the country, and legitimized it through recent research by secular Muslim
intellectuals within the SKBiH. The Bosnians achieved this in their own republic in 1968,
before entrenching the Muslims new status in the 1971 federal census. Three years later,
in 1974, Muslims were formally recognized as a constituent nation in a new federal
constitution.
This broader account of the Yugoslav Communists role in the development of
Bosnian Muslim national identity highlights several distinct themes and invites some
tentative conclusions, a few of which deserve particular mention here in this closing
section of my thesis. First, Yugoslav Communists played a decisive role in the
development of a separate Bosnian Muslim national identity. In fact, at the outset of
World War II, Bosnian Muslims were in an extremely unfavorable geo-political position
for their continued survival as a distinct ethnic group. Following Cvetkovi-Maek, the
consensus of nearly all relevant political actors was that Bosnia-Herzegovina was dead
95
and buried. Whether in banates within Yugoslavia or in a separate greater-Serb or

greater-Croat state, Bosnian Muslims would have been split between Serb and Croat
national territories whose respective national leaderships would have favored either their
immediate assimilation into the larger national body or else would not have particularly
cared if they were massacred or expelled.
The Bosnian Muslims status as a relevant ethno-religious community, much less
their eventual nationhood, therefore, depended in large part on the existence of an
autonomous and multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina. The KPJ was the only group that both
favored this solution and had the means to implement it, for as an independent political or
military actor, Bosnian Muslims were largely irrelevant and would probably not have
been able to do so alone. Furthermore, the KPJ was the only significant political actor
that even remotely considered the possibility that Muslims could form a separate ethnonational group. It did so because it was the only significant non-nationalist political party
in interwar Yugoslavia, and because its practical considerations during the war prompted
it to treat Bosnian Muslims as a distinct category in its calls for national liberation.
It is also interesting to note that the Communists views of Muslim identity
changed according to the fate of Yugoslav as a national category. In the first few years
of the Yugoslav state, the KPJ under Markovi was one of several parties that believed in
a single Yugoslav nation consisting of three tribes. According to Markovi himself,
Muslim nationalization in this view amounted to their identifying as Yugoslavs instead of
Turks. When the Party shifted to viewing Yugoslavia as a patriotic union of several
distinct nations during the Popular Front and World War II, however, Muslims were
increasingly accepted, particularly within Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a separate ethnic
96
group. Similarly, in the first decade following the war, the Communists once again
experimented with Yugoslav as a quasi-national category and Muslims were
correspondingly demoted to a nationally undetermined religious group. When this unitary
Yugoslavism fell out of favor following the 1958 Party Program, the Party quickly reelevated Muslims to the status of a de facto separate people, before eventually
recognizing them as a separate nation in the late 1960s. As long as the Party considered
the idea of some sort of quasi-national pan-Yugoslav identity therefore, it saw no real
point to reconsidering the Bosnian Muslims identity as anything more than a religious
label that would eventually wither away. When Yugoslavism was rejected in favor of
emphasizing the individuality of the Yugoslav nations, however, elements within the
Party would sooner consider the Muslims as a group in their own right than encourage
their assimilation into the bourgeoisie nationalism of the Serbs or Croats.
Lastly, it is important to re-iterate that Yugoslav Communists, in recognizing a
separate Muslim nation, were not simply imposing a nation from above, but also
responding to signals from below. From 1919 to 1971, despite decades of societal
pressure to register as such, the overwhelming majority of Muslims continued to see
themselves as separate from Serbs and Croats. Furthermore, Bosnian Muslim calls for
their own separate nationality existed long before the SKBiH decided to force the issue in
the late 1960s, and it is no coincidence that many of the Party members most responsible
for the eventual recognition had names such as Osman, Muhamed and Mustafa. This is
not to say that the development of a Muslim nation was inevitable few things in history
are but it was certainly a process where the communitys own political and intellectual
elite, as in many other cases of nationalism, played a significant role.
97
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Belated Nation

Yugoslav Communists and the Muslim Question, 1919-1971

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

Advised by Professor John Fine

Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia

Central Committee of the League of Communists of BosniaHerzegovina

Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia

Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia

Yugoslav Muslim Organization

Yugoslav Muslim Peoples Party

Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Independent State of Croatia

League of Communists of Yugoslavia

League of Communists of Yugoslavia

State Security Administration

Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of BosniaHerzegovina

Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia

Bosnia-Herzegovina is now a state in southeast Europe and home to three closely

1. Communists, Muslims and the National Question, 1919-1940

In the study of Yugoslavia, historians often portray the Muslim Question as an

1.1 Bosnian Muslims in interwar Yugoslavia

The end of Austria-Hungarian rule and establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs,

As Yugoslavia sank deeper into political turmoil, paralyzed by disagreements

return for any guarantees concerning Bosnia-Herzegovinas status. Consequently, when

1.2 Yugoslav Communists and the Social Democrat Legacy

1.3 The Popular Front and the Muslim Question

Croats due to their material backwardness, remaining confessionally rather than

2. Muslims and Partisans, 1941-45

2.1 Bosnian Muslims and World War II

2.2 Bosnian Muslims in Partisan Propaganda

future union of Yugoslav nations. Similarly, a proclamation by the commander and

2.3 Partisan Intellectuals and Muslim Nationhood

2.4 Muslims in the Emerging Yugoslav State Structure

Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina respectively. 48 Filipovis proposal ensured a de

equally and freely. 49 The Declaration of Rights of the Citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina

3. The Muslim Question in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1946-71

3.1 The Return to Yugoslavism

To understand this significant shift in KPJ policy, it is important to begin by

partners in the foundation of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina. 3 Later on in the drafting,

neighboring nations. A 1959 article on Serbo-Croat Mohammedans by Belgrade

appeared counter-productive. In fact, under these new socialist conditions, it followed

3.2 The Turn to Acceptance

By the late 1950s, the pendulum of the Yugoslav Communists treatment of

need to be left alone and allowed to be nationally unoriented citizens of Yugoslavia if

Albanian, Turk, Serb, Croat, Montenegrin, Macedonian, etc., regardless of their

3.3 Constructing a Muslim Nation

This task fell to a circle of secular, Party-affiliated Muslim intellectuals, who

3.4 Federal Recognition

Yugoslavia as the second-strongest Muslim country in Europe, after Turkey 70

from other ethno-religious groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and intellectuals like

3.5 National Affirmation

Having formally recognized Muslim nationhood, the Bosnian Communist

these processes of urbanization and consumerism helped foster a supra-ethnic sense of

decentralization and strengthening the national periphery, the Bosnian Communist

and buried. Whether in banates within Yugoslavia or in a separate greater-Serb or

Sair Filandra; Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina; March 5, 2010

Bulbulovi, Edhem. Nacionalizam i muslimani [1933]. In O Nacionaliziranju

Muslimana, ed. Alija Isakovi. Zagreb: Globus, 1990.