Forward by Roy P. Mottahedeh. Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 28. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1993. xiii, 187. Bibliographies, index. ISBN: 0-932885-09-8 $14.95
Reviewed by Toby Baldwin, University of Chicago <t-baldwin@uchicago.edu>.
Contents: Forward, by Roy P. Mottahedeh, pp. vii-viii Introduction, by Mark Pinson, pp. ix-xiii The Medieval and Ottoman Roots of Modern Bosnian Society, by John V.A. Fine, pp. 1-21 Bosnia under Ottoman Rule, 1463-1800, by Colin Heywood, pp. 22-53 Ottoman Bosnia, 1800-1878, by Justin McCarthy, pp. 54-83 The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian Rule, 1878-1918, by Mark Pinson, pp. 84-128 Bosnian Muslims: From Religious Community to Socialist Nationhood and Post-Communist Statehood, 1918-1992, by Ivo Banac, pp. 129-153 Appendix: Information Resources and List of Maps of Bosnia, by Mark Pinson, pp. 155-170
The organizers of the conference sought not to address the situation in the former Yugoslavia directly, but rather to offer "the intelligent lay reader a continuous history of the Muslims of this region by highly qualified specialists" (p. viii). They therefore asked the participants to provide syntheses of successive periods of Bosnian history and, dispensing with the usual scholarly apparatus, to write "for a general public of non-specialists, non-historians" (p. xiii). By making such authoritative accounts accessible, they hoped to counter the ignorance and willful distortions of the history of the Muslim communities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who have so often been perceived as "spiritual and 'ethnic' outsiders" in Europe (p. viii).
The resulting collection of essays makes a case for the territorial integrity of Bosnia and for the integral place of the Muslims in Bosnian society. Moreover, because most other histories of Yugoslavia tend to emphasize the Serb-Croat conflict or the role that various great powers have had in the region, this collection offers a much-needed change of perspective by placing the Bosnian Muslims at the center of the story. For readers who wish to follow up on certain topics, most of the essays include at least some footnotes (despite the organizers' injunction to dispense with scholarly apparatus) and a longer or shorter bibliography. The editor, Mark Pinson, has also included a useful appendix of bibliographical resources for Yugoslavia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe more generally, as well as two listings of maps of the region (older maps from the Harvard Library, and more recent maps from the RLIN on-line database).
The format of stand-alone essays for each chronological period makes this collection an attractive choice for a variety of courses, since individual essays could be assigned as complements to other texts. But the book is better read as a whole because each essay provides a different context for its history: reading them together not only fills in otherwise missing information but also highlights the significance of certain themes. Justin McCarthy, for example, provides the only maps in the volume and a valuable geographic overview of the territory and economy of Bosnia. Mark Pinson is able to compare Bosnia with other provinces of the Ottoman Empire, other countries of the Balkans, and the territories of other regional powers. Together these essays trace the origins of the Muslim community of Bosnia-Herzegovina, its persistence and survival, and the development of its complex national identity .
John Fine and Colin Heywood focus on the religious history of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the origins of the Muslim community. Fine recounts his argument (familiar from his book, _The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation_ (Boulder, Colo., 1975)) that the medieval Bosnian church was not in fact heretical, but merely physically and intellectually isolated from the Catholic mainstream, and hence schismatic in its eccesiastical organization. Using the Ottoman tax registers, he shows that after the conquest there was no sudden, mass conversion of the Bosnian church to Islam, but rather a multiple process of population movements and conversions in the 15th and 16th centuries, in which all the confessions made gains against the Bosnian Church, and Islam and Orthodoxy in particular gained at the expense of Catholicism. Ivo Banac's sketch of the same period in the final essay (pp. 130-131), however, shows that Fine's arguments have only modified, and not displaced, older formulations. (...) Justin McCarthy documents a loss of one third of the Muslim population of Bosnia by death or emigration between the insurrection of 1875 and the Austrian occupation in 1878, and Mark Pinson records subsequent waves of Muslim emigration after Austria instituted compulsory conscription in 1881, cracked down on the local Muslim political movement in 1900, and then annexed the province in 1908. Ivo Banac (pp. 132-34) finally draws the explicit conclusion that the relatively tolerant Austrian administration allowed the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina to survive and to adjust to life under Western political institutions and a Christian majority. But in a grim foreshadowing of recent events, Banac also records the claims of both Serbs and Croats to parts or the whole of Bosnia and the attempts to break up its regional unity under the Yugoslav government, until Tito restored its historic boundaries. (...) There is much more of interest between the covers of this slim volume, yet several factors might limit its usefulness as a history of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina "for a general public of non-specialists." There is no map showing physical features and regions and place names to orient readers unfamiliar with Balkan geography. English-speakers will have difficulty, too, consulting the 40 Serbo-Croatian references (out of a total of 44) in Ivo Banac's bibliography. Finally, to appreciate these essays properly, the reader must already possess a basic knowledge of the general history of the Balkans. But within these limits, this collection accomplishes what it sets out to do--to offer a brief history of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is a story which has not been told before, and one to which specialists and non-specialists alike may now be willing to lend a sympathetic ear.
Toby Baldwin University of Chicago t-baldwin@uchicago.edu
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