In the service of the nation: intellectuals' articulation of the Muslim national identity

Abstract

This article explores the emerging national narratives about Muslim national identity in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. After the national recognition of a Bosnian Muslim nation, which was proposed by the members of the Central Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the intellectuals' task to endow the national category with cultural repertoire. Hereby affirmative as well as negating discursive practices on the national status of Muslims entered the debates, which geographically expanded the republican scope of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The author examines internal discussions of the LCY on that issue as well as the intellectuals' engagement in the public spheres in Socialist Yugoslavia. By integrating the nation-building activities of intellectuals outside Yugoslavia, the author postulates for a trans-national dimension of nation-building processes.

Keywords:

• socialist Yugoslavia
• Muslims/Bosniaks
• intellectuals
• nation-building

Notes

The first draft of this article is a chapter of my M.A. thesis “From Religion to Nation. Ambiguous Nation-building Process of Bosnian Muslims 1967–1972”, which I successfully defended at the Department of History at Uppsala University in Sept. 2008. In addition, it served as a working paper in the project “New and Ambiguous Nation-building Process in South-eastern Europe: Collective Identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Moldova and Montenegro in Comparison (1944–2005), which was financed by the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Austrian Science Fund FWF as well as the project “Nacionalni identitet Bosnjaka 1945–2008”, which was financed by the Ministry of Kanton Sarajevo.

After the official recognition of its Muslim population in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Central Committee introduced the new writing of the name “Muslim” with a capital M, which was the only symbolic resource to announce the new political status as a nation.

This material has been presented also by Šaćir Filandra (see Filandra 316–20). In the following section, however, I quote the original archival material.