Imperial inventories, “illegal mosques” and institutionalized Islam: Coloniality and the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Looking at the architectures of governance that have characterized the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay explores the ways in which imperial inventories of colonial institutions come to influence and arbitrate contemporary debates over what constitutes legitimate practices of Islam in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Austria. Examining the larger political context in which these debates emerge, including the criminalization of Muslim communities that refuse to submit to the authority of state-sanctioned Islamic religious institutions, I detail the ways in which colonial histories are recruited to curate a homogenized, continuous representational mandate for Muslim communities and practices in Austria and BiH. Attending to nostalgic invocations of the late Habsburg governance of Islam and Muslims, I argue that these discourses serve to legitimate specific Muslim institutions and actors in Austria and BiH that privilege the Habsburg legacy through the exclusion of outlawed/illegal Muslim communities and practices in both countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Coloniality
• Balkans
• Islam
• Bosnia
• Austria

Acknowledgement

I’m deeply indebted to Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi, Jeremy F. Walton, Tjasa Kancler, Ajkuna Tafa and David Henig for their support with this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei; ÖVP) is conservative centre-right political party in Austria currently (as of December 2017) in a coalition government with the right-wing populist and nationalist-conservative Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), with Kurz serving as Chancellor.

2. Dzenovska (2013) provides a brilliant account of these processes in the Latvian context.

3. While the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not the only European empire that sought to engineer representation mandates for its colonialized Muslim subjects – the British, French (Burke 2014) and Dutch empires explicitly recognized sharia law from the late Eighteenth century onwards – the reanimation of Habsburg colonial regulation of Islam has taken on unique features in both Austria and BiH. For more on this subject, see Maussen, Bader, and Moors (2011).

4. FRONTEX is the European Union’s Border and Coast Guard Agency. For more, see Neal (2009).

5. For a perspective on how post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo has accentuated both intercommunal relations in the present and images of the city’s past, see Gruia Bădescu’s contribution to this volume.

6. Strikingly, this premium on monopolizing Islam is evident throughout the region. Religious authorities in Turkey (Walton 2017, 53 ff.), Macedonia (Rexhepi 2018), Greece (Demetriou 2013) and Bulgaria (Nikolova 2016) also use their monopoly power to discourage most non-Sunni forms and practices of Islam.