Where Cultures Meet

The Slav Muslims of Yugoslavia

In a small red-tiled-roof house clinging precariously to the hillside above the city, six-year-old Mustafa lies in bed, his blue eyes reddened by tears. Beside him sits his grandmother, her gay, braided hair hidden by a white scarf pulled low over her forehead and knotted tightly just under her lower lip. Her voluminous cotton-print pantaloons billow out around her in splash of bright color, entirely obscuring the low stool on which she is perched.

The cramped room is festively decorated with balloons and streamers of red, white, blue, and green crepe paper. Woven Oriental rugs called cilimi cover the rough wooden planks of the floor, and a garish machine-made tapestry depicting the minaret-studded skyline of some imaginary Islamic city hangs above the bed. Earlier, Mustafa, dressed elegantly in a special white suit and cap, had--with much fanfare--been paraded proudly about the neighborhood. And then, upon his return home and in the presence of male family members who--with considerable good humor--energetically encouraged the youngster to bear his pain heroically, Mustafa was circumcised by a ritual specialist.

Through this age-old custom (common to Muslims and Jews alike), the boy's masculinity was symbolically and publicly reaffirmed. Now, bandaged and relieved that his ordeal is finally over, Mustafa listens to the lively sounds of the celebration being held in his honor outside. Below his window, on a small terrace overlooking the maze of narrow, meandering alley-ways that descend steeply into the hear of the city, family, relatives, friends, and neighbors are gathered around a long makeshift table. A seemingly endless variety of Middle Eastern sweets and a host of other delicacies--round flat pies of sheep cheese baked between oiled leaves of phyllo dough) cabbage rolls in a pungent red-pepper sauce (sarma); spit-barbecued lamb laced with garlic; spiced ground meat baked between layers of eggplant, onion, and potato (musaka); roasted peppers marinated in garlic and oil; and several kinds of baklava--are heaped on the table,

Contrary to the custom of more conservative Muslim families, plum brandy and wine are offered the guests in great quantities, in addition to the traditional little cups of thick Turkish coffee. Also in contrast to prevailing custom in many parts of the Islamic world, women have joined the men rather than holding their own separate celebration our of public view.

In the distance, the setting sun silhouettes the spires of pencil-sharp minarets in the city skyline against the amber haze of the late-summer sky. The shrill cry of the muezzin announces aksam, the fourth of five obligatory daily Islamic prayers, and the faithful, for the most part older men, gather languidly in the walled courtyard of the Gazi Husrev Bey Mosque (the city's largest mosque, it was built in 1530 by the nephew of Turkish Sultan Bayazit II). The more traditional elders wear maroon fezzes or small white knit skullcaps, while younger men sport dark berets pulled down squarely on their heads to eyebrow level.

Placing their shoes and sandals on wooden racks under the arched portico at the entrance to the mosque, the worshipers performs their ritual ablutions, washing their faces, hands, and feet at the courtyard fonts before entering the cool, high-domed interior to prostrate themselves toward Mecca on the multihued Persian carpets that adorn the floor from wall to wall. On this sultry afternoon, the daily cycle of Islamic life persists as it has for generations.

Historical perspectives

But these events did not take place in a part of the world usually associated with Islam. They occurred in Sarajevo, the capital of the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina near the very geographical heart of this European socialist state. Nor are the participants described here transplanted Turks or Arabs; but they are the Slavic-speaking descendants of native Bosnians who converted to Islam during the more than four hundred years of Ottoman Turkish domination.

Many American and other Western visitors to the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games were surprised to discover that much of the city and the surrounding countryside had a strong Middle Eastern flavor, and that the population, Muslim and Christian alike, although indistinguishable in physical appearance from other southeastern Europeans, was profoundly influenced by Islamic culture. Prior to the Olympics, Sarajevo was principally known as the site of the assassination by a Bosnian Serb nationalist of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian and Hungarian crowns, an even that sparked the beginning of World War I. However, this tragedy was simply the continuation of a long history of political and religious conflict along this volatile frontier between West and East, the region a nineteenth-century British travel writer once labeled, with typical Victorian ethnocentrism, "savage Europe.''

In the seventh century, Slavic tribes arriving from the far reaches of eastern Europe settled in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they conquered and absorbed the native population of Latins, Illyrians, Thracians, and others. This region, lying on the border between Roman and Byzantine civilizations, was fiercely contested by both Western and Eastern Christianity.

This conflict was further aggravated in the tenth century by the spread of the Bogomil heresy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it quickly attracted many converts. The Bogomils believed that the material world was Satan's creation, and they rejected the Old Testament, the incarnation of Christ, the sacraments, the cross and the entire organization of the Christian church. By the twelfth century, Bogomilism had become the religion of the Bosnian elite and many of the common people.

In spite of periods of relative independence, Bosnia continued to be pressured and attacked by its neighbors--by the Catholic Croats, Hungarians, and Venetians to the north and west, and by the Orthodox Serbs to the east and south. Thus, it appears that the Bosnians may have welcomed the Ottoman conquest in 1463, seeing a similarity between their own faith and Islam of the Turks. However, the historical record is not entirely clear in this respect, and it is possible that Bogomilism was already on the wane by that time and the acceptance of Islam simply represented an expedient political and economic decision. In either case, the ruling classes quickly accepted Islam and in so doing were able to retain their privileged position.

Among the peasantry the new belief seems to have taken hold much more gradually over several centuries. What is evident is that Bogomilism quickly disappeared, and today almost all that remains are enigmatically carved stone sarcophagi that, here and there, grace remote areas of the rugged Bosnian and Herzegovinian landscape.

Under Turkish rule, much of what is today central, eastern, and southern Yugoslavia took on a distinctly Islamic character. This was particularly true of urban life in places where native elites had fled, converted to Islam, or otherwise adopted Ottoman customs and life-styles. Moreover, the cities, which were the centers of Turkish administration and commerce, experienced considerable immigration from the vast reaches of the empire. Thus their populations became a kaleidoscopic mixture of Muslim and Christian Slavs, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Sephardic Jews, Gypsies and others, all of whom left their cultural imprint on modern South Slav culture.

In Bosnia, however, it was not an entirely alien aristocracy that dominated the society (as in many other parts of the Balkans) but a native one. These Muslim Slavs constituted an urban elite and a landed, feudal gentry. Below them in the social hierarchy were peasant freeholders, the majority of whom were Slav Muslims. On the bottom rung of the hierarchy were Christian serfs, most of whom were Orthodox Serbs, subjected to heavy taxation and other indignities.

As in other parts of the Turkish Empire, Bosnia was ruled under the millet system, an institution that organized the adherents of the various faiths into separate communities governed internally by their own ecclesiastical leaders. Thus it was religion rather than language or other cultural markers that determined group identity, a phenomenon reflected in contemporary Yugoslavia by the fact that the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, who speak the same language and share many cultural traits, regard themselves as belonging to distinct ethnic groups based on their respective Orthodox, Catholic, and Islamic heritage.

In Bosnia it was the urban and aristocratic classes who accepted Islam in its purest and most conventional form, in contrast to the peasantry, who have retained to this day many pagan and non-Islamic traits, including the veneration of Christian saints and holy places. The Turkish governor or Bosnia, the vali, was often a Slav Muslim, and Bosnians frequently rose to positions of great importance in the Ottoman Empire. For example, Grand Vizier Mehmet-Pasha Sokolovich, who is credited with building the graceful, stone-arched bridge over the Drina river at Visegrad as a tribute to his native Bosnia, was a son of Christian parents taken in his youth as part of the "levy of boys'' (devshirme) to serve in the Turkish bureaucracy. Although members of the Slav Muslim elite retained the Serbo-Croatian language, they nevertheless imitated the customs and dress of the Turkish court and, as is so often the case with converts, displayed great zeal in their new faith.

By the nineteenth century, with the Ottoman Empire in sharp decline, Bosnian Muslims found themselves increasingly isolated and alienated from Istanbul. Reforms introduced by the Turks to pacify the Christian population were fanatically resisted, and a number of uprisings broke out against Sultan Mahmud II, whom the Bosnian aristocrats, the beys, regarded as a heretic and traitor to Islam. Turkish authority was further weakened by numerous revolts throughout the Balkans by the Christian Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks. Finally, under pressure from Germany, Russia, and Austria and besieged by their own subjects, the Ottomans agreed in 1878 to relinquish effective administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary. This heralded a new era of European influence and westernization.

Following World War I, Bosnia and Herzegovina were incorporate into a newly created South Slav state. Under Yugoslav rule, the influence of the Muslim elite declined sharply. For instance, the land reforms of 1919 deprived it of much of its former privilege and wealth. During the interwar period and through the end of World War II, both the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats vied for the ethnic loyalty and political support of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims, who were not yet regarded as a nationality in their own right. During the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina were the site of bitter interethnic strife and open warfare, with the Muslims frequently caught between opposing forces. In 1945, with the establishment of a Marxist regime under the leadership of Tito, Bosnia-Herzegovina became one of Yugoslavia's six constituent republics. This union was due in part to a desire to resolve the conflicting Serbian and Croatian claims to the region, as well as to its ethnically mixed population, of which Muslims form a plurality of about forty percent.

Islam in contemporary Yugoslavia

Out of a total Yugoslav population of approximately twenty-five million, there are slightly more than four million Sunni Muslims, of whom a little more than half are Slavs. Of the non-Slavic Muslims, the vast majority are Albanians living in the Kosovo Autonomous Region of Serbia and in parts of western Macedonia. In addition there are significant Muslim enclaves composed of Turks, Gypsies, and others who trace their origins to various parts of the former Ottoman Empire.

About 90 percent of Slav Muslims live within the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the remainder found largely in Serbia and Montenegro. They have been officially recognized as an ethnic group since the census of 1961, when they were allowed to declare themselves as "Muslims as a nationality.'' Thus they constitute one of the most important ethnic communities among the more than two dozen that make up contemporary Yugoslavia, the most multinational state in Europe with the exception of the Soviet Union. In this respect, Slav Muslims form both a religious and an ethnic category--concept alien to many Americans, who perceive religious affiliation almost exclusively in terms of spiritual commitment. As a Bosnian communist sociologist once remarked to me, "I am culturally a Muslim, not a believer.'' In other words, while there are significant numbers of Slav Muslims who practice their faith to varying degrees, for others, this identity tends to be secular and is based primarily on ancestral traditions and ethnic loyalty.

The Yugoslav Marxist regime, while not prohibiting religious expression, nevertheless placed significant restrictions on Muslims and Christians alike. The doctrine of the separation of church and state was affirmed while at the same time there was considerable interference in the internal affairs of religious bodies. Moreover, membership in the Communist Party, which was a key to occupational mobility in the new society, precluded active religious participation. In the case of Islam, the religious shari'a courts were outlawed, and the wearing the veil and polygyny forbidden. Similarly, compulsory educational laws requiring schooling through the eighth grade significantly affected Muslim women.

Nevertheless, in recent times, there has been a great relaxation of official attitudes toward religion, accompanied by a marked revival of Islam and Christianity in both private and public life. For example, this trend is mirrored by the recent completion of a majestic, arabesque mosque in the Croatian capital of Zagreb. Similarly, what will be the largest Orthodox church in Europe is now under construction in the very heart of Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia. However, these phenomena must not be understood solely in religious terms but should be seen as well as symbols of the resurgence of Islamic and Serbian nationalism.

Sarajevo: the cradle of Slavic Islam

Probably no other place in Yugoslavia so personifies the influence of Islam as Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, an ethnically diverse city where the past coexists in vivid contrast with the present. With its almost 500,000 people, of whom approximately half are Slav Muslims, Sarajevo is by Balkan standards a major urban center.

Approaching the city from the west across the Sarajevo Plain, one is greeted by rows of dreary, nondescript blocks of hastily constructed concrete apartment buildings, factories, and sterile government and commercial complexes that could be found in almost any corner of the developing Third World. These are the fruit of the ambitious and all-too-often uncritical modernization schemes pursued by the socialist government following World War II. Here there is little hint of the architectural and cultural wonders to be found only a few kilometers to the east in the seher, or "old town,'' nestled against the steep hills and precipitous cliffs that ring it on three sides.

Located at sixteen hundred feet in the narrow valley of the Miljacka River and on the rugged hills that parallel its course, Sarajevo has been the site of human settlement from at least Neolithic times. Many peoples have lingered here--Romans, Illyrians, Byzantines, Goths, Slavs, Turks, Sephardic Jews, and Austro-Hungarians. But it is the imprint of the Slavs and Turks that has endowed the city with its distinctive character and mystique.

From the mountain heights above Sarajevo, one views an almost magical panorama of the old town, lying at the foot of a deep gorge and bisected by the silver ribbon of the Miljacka (crossed at regular intervals by low, stone-arched bridges). Dozens of slender minarets thrust skyward above the green copper domes of the multitude of mosques that adorn the city. On the north bank of the river loom the five ornate cupolas of the Serbian Orthodox cathedral, standing in sharp contrast to the almost Teutonic simplicity of a nearby Roman Catholic Campanile. On the very horizon, the twentieth century imposes itself gracelessly in the form of incongruous, boxlike high rises.

Sarajevo, which derives its name from a palace (sarai) built there by the Turks shortly after their conquest of Bosnia, had become the most important urban center in the central Balkans by the mid-sixteenth century. During this period, the city's wealthy and influential patron, the Grand Vizier Husrev Bey, ordered the construction of exquisite examples of Turkish religious and secular architecture. It was at this time that Sarajevo took on the distinctive character it has maintained to the present.

Throughout the Turkish occupation the city grew, with the addition of mosques, religious schools, libraries, monasteries, mausoleums, Turkish baths, fountains, bridges, inns, elegant homes of the elite, and a clock tower (sahat-kula), built in the late sixteenth century, that marks the hours of obligatory Muslim prayer in Arabic numerals on its face. Like other Balkan towns that expanded under Ottoman rule, Sarajevo centers around a central marketplace, the bascarsija. The market is reached through a mazeway of narrow alleys bordered by the small, shuttered shops of traditional craftsmen proffering copper and brassware, pewter, objects of carved wood, silver filigree, woven Oriental rugs, and a variety of other traditional goods now geared in great part to the summer tourist trade. Nearby is the copper-domed bazaar, the brusa bezistan once a warehouse for merchandise along the caravan route from Europe to the Middle East and now a store selling Yugoslav handicrafts.

Sarajevo's Middle Eastern heritage is evident not in its monuments alone but also in the myriad of small details that make up everyday life. Coffeehouses prosper, with their male clientele lingering over small cups of pungent Turkish coffee. Oriental sweetshops abound, offering such temptations as halva, lukum, baklvav, kadaif, and boza (a drink made from fermented corn and often mixed with lemonade), as well as more familiar ice cream and candies. Here and there in the old town are found typical Muslim restaurants called ascinice; food is prepared in full view of the patrons, and one may select directly from the cooking pot. Roast meats are popular, and the pungent odor of kebabs and cevapicici (small, sausage-shaped patties of spiced, ground meats) wafts from the charcoal grill--a ubiquitous feature of Bosnian restaurants--or from a café's open courtyard, where a lamb is turned slowly on a spit over a flickering fire or oak logs.

But even in the realm of cuisine the clash of cultures is evident, the apple strudel and honey-drenched baklava may appear at the same meal. Similarly, women in the latest European styles share the city streets with their more traditional counterparts, who are garbed in voluminous pantaloons of multicolored cotton print (dimije) or equally gaudy ankle-length skirts appropriate to Muslim female modesty. Circumventing the illegality of the veil, occasionally an older woman, upon passing a strange man on the street, will quickly pull her ample headscarf across her face, revealing only the eyes.

Middle Eastern influence is reflected in almost every aspect of life. A guest visiting one of the modest homes in the old residential quarter of Bembasa, after climbing the steep, winding cobblestone streets, most likely will be greeted by the hostess, holding a brass tray bearing a bowl of sweet fruit or rose preserves, a cup of thick Turkish coffee, a small spoon, and a glass of cold water, the traditional sign of hospitality. Some homes, although contemporary in other aspects, set aside one room, referred to as the turksa soba (Turkish room), which is furnished and decorated entirely in Islamic style. Woven Oriental rugs cover the floor, and one sits at low tables, either cross-legged or reclining against the bolsters (minder) that encircle the room's lower walls. Such a room maybe heated by a single small, freestanding brass brazier of Turkish origin called a mangalo, which serves both a practical and decorative function.

Everywhere one encounters evidence of the centuries-long Turkish occupation of Bosnia. The Serbo-Croatian speech of the area is rich in borrowings, not only from Turkish but from Arabic and Persian as well. Muslim Slavs bear Islamic first names such as Muhamet, Omer, Ahmet, Ismet, Azra, Fatima, and Esma, which distinguish them from their Serbian and Croatian compatriots. In most cases, they can also be identified by such surnames as Hasanovic, Bajramovic, and Sulejmanovic, which, although Slavic in grammatical form, are derived from Islamic given names.

The Bosnian musical tradition is particularly rich in Middle Eastern elements. For example, the Turks introduced the sax, tambura, and sargija--plucked stringed instruments probably of Persian origin--and, with them, oriental modes, rhythms, singing styles, and lyrical motifs that were adopted by Christians and Muslims alike. Perhaps the most notable and sophisticated of these traditions is the sevdalinka, a melancholy and sometimes erotic ballad whose name is derived from the Turkish word sevdah (love). Such songs still enjoy wide popularity and are performed on records, at concerts, in restaurants, or in the more authentic atmosphere of the numerous "honky-tonk'' cafes that provide an arena for male conviviality and revelry. In this respect, Bosnians are noted for the extravagant demonstrations of emotion produced by these songs. In such cases, they say that a man has "fallen into sevdah,'' a condition best described as an ecstatic, trance like state with erotic overtones.

Islam as a living South Slav tradition

These few examples of Islam's impact in Yugoslavia only suggest the richness of Middle Eastern influence in the Balkans. What is clear is that the imposition of Islam on native Slavs involved a great deal more than simple religious conversion. Simultaneously, elements of an entire culture and life-style were transplanted and adopted to varying degrees by Bosnian Muslims and Christians alike. At the same time, it should be noted that what anthropologist George Foster has called "conquest culture'' is never identical in its new setting to that of the homeland. Alien traits must adapt to local conditions and, once transplanted, develop and change independently of their source. Thus, Yugoslav Islam is not, and never was, an exact replica of its Turkish model. For example the practice of first-cousin marriage between the children of brothers (bint'amn), so common in much of the Middle East, is extremely rare among Yugoslav Muslims. Rather, Bosnians have been deeply influenced in this respect by the prohibitions of their Christian neighbors.

Today, Yugoslavia's Islamic heritage exists not only on the periphery of the Muslim world but in a largely Christian and partially secular context. In spite of some reverberations of Islamic fundamentalism, South Slav Muslims assume for the most part a relatively unmilitant stance toward their faith. What one encounters in Yugoslavia is a wealth of Muslim and quasi-oriental traditions, and a gentle brand of Islam where the breaking of Koranic law or custom will rarely, if ever, result in dire consequences. Nevertheless, Islam provides a strong symbol of ethnic identity for an important element of Yugoslavia's heterogeneous population.