In analyzing national and ethnic identities in the Balkans, one notices a “delay” in the development of the Muslim national identity. The Bosniaks and Albanians, for example, developed a national consciousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In contrast to the Southeastern European Christians, the Muslim inhabitants followed the official religion of the dominant political class of the Ottoman Empire—Islam—a faith that (theoretically, at least) privileged religious belief over ethnicity or nationalism. These two concepts, alien to Ottoman intellectual tradition, became fully understood by the Ottoman elite only in the early twentieth century. Although the Muslims under Ottoman rule often perceived themselves as different from their co-religionist rulers in Istanbul, as shall be demonstrated in this paper, they nevertheless shared the religion of the rulers of the Empire and practised a religion that suppressed the development of national identity far more explicitly than did Christianity. Thus, it was the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, and the consequent recognition that this state was ceasing to protect the interests and identity of the Muslim population in Southeastern Europe, which led to the development of ethnic and national identity among the Muslims.

Investigating the Muslim population of Ottoman Europe is the stuff of a demographer's nightmare. There is no lack of material to study; thousands of estimates of Balkan population were made throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unfortunately, almost all of them were nonsense, the prejudiced guesses of nationalistic advocates or estimates made by travellers who felt a journey through a land provided enough information for accurate estimates of population numbers.

During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire retreated from the Balkans, and underwent a steady decline culminating in its final demise in the early part of the twentieth century. Sizeable communities of Muslims, derived both from those who had arrived with the Ottomans and from indigenous inhabitants who had converted to Islam, remained in the new successor states of southeast Europe. With the exception of Albania, where the Muslims formed the majority of the population, these communities became established as minorities within the new states. Upheld as ethno-national states each based on one dominant nation, the new states suffered from irredentism on the one hand, and internal tension between majority and minority populations on the other. Tension was particularly evident in the relations between the new Orthodox Christian rulers and their Muslim minority populations, which were seen as undesirable relics from the Ottoman past. In spite of such attitudes and the continuing waves of emigration, however, these Muslim communities remain an integral part of the present-day Balkans.

The Albanians are divided between three religions: the Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Muslims. The religious groups participated in the national development of the Albanians around 1900 each in its own way and in proportion to its own strength. As the majority group, the Muslims (70–80%) played the most important role. Most of the Muslims wanted to remain within the Ottoman Empire as long as their traditional rights were maintained, in spite of a strong desire for local self-government, but, as the Ottoman Empire declined, radical Albanian leaders stressing cultural and linguistic unity rather than religious unity were to gain the upper hand. The Albanian language, culture, and feeling of common blood played the most important roles in Albanian nationalism. The Albanian language in particular gave Albanians the feeling of belonging to the same nation.

The Roma entered the Balkans from India during the Middle Ages. They reached Persia sometime in the ninth century and by the eleventh century had moved into the Byzantine Empire. According to the eleventh-century Georgian Life of Saint George the Athonite, the Emperor Constantine Monomachus asked the Adsincani to get rid of wild animals preying on the animals in his royal hunting preserve. Adsincani is the Georgian form of the Greek word Atsínganoi or Atzínganoi, from which the non-English terms for Roma (cigán, cigány, tsiganes, zigeuner) are derived. Adsincani means “ner-do-well fortune tellers” or “ventriloquists and wizards who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown.” “Gypsy” comes from “Egyptian,” a term often used by early modern chroniclers in the Balkans to refer to the Roma. Because of the stereotypes and prejudice that surround the word “Gypsy,” the Roma prefer a name of their own choosing from their language, Romani. Today, it is preferable to refer to the Gypsies as Rom or “Roma,” a Romani word meaning “man” or “husband.” Byzantine references to “Egyptians” crop up during this period as Byzantine political and territorial fortunes gave way to the region's new power, the Ottomans. There were areas with large Roma populations in Cyprus and Greece which local rulers dubbed “Little Egypt” in the late fourteenth century.

The Koran and the Bible are God's grace Which is what all four holy Books embrace; To scorn and segregate this or that race Would be the darkest stains on one's face.
Aşik Veysel

Nationalist movements everywhere aim to create “territorially bounded political units (states) out of homogeneous cultural communities (nations).” Unfortunately, ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, and personal identities rarely coincide with geographical boundaries that enclose nation states. There are always groups within nation states whose identities are different from the majority. The leaders of nation states often see the presence of multiple ethnic communities within a single nation state as a sign of tension and instability, a threat to the integrity and indeed the very survival of a nation state. Consequently, they seek ways to culturally homogenize the nation so that the state and the nation come to coincide with one another.

The Bosnian Muslims have only fairly recently become internationally identified as a national group. As a matter of fact, Bosnia and Herzegovina itself has had until lately a low recognition value to most people not living in southeastern Europe. Indeed, to many it has become a shock to discover that a fairly large group of Muslims resides in the middle of Europe, not to mention that they have become the object of ethnonationalistic violence at the end of the twentieth century. A further seeming incongruity in the international arena is the claim by many Bosnian Muslims that they should not be confused with Muslims of the Arab-speaking world, since Bosnian Muslims are indigenous Serbo-Croatian-speaking (now Bosnian-speaking) Slavic people, just like the Serbs or Croats who have committed the recent acts of violence against them in the name of ethnic purity. The Bosnian Muslim claim that the designation “Muslim” is more a national than a religious identification is confusing to the world at large. This article will trace the formation of the Bosnian Muslim national identification and set forth the issues faced by the Bosnian Muslims in their attempts to claim and defend it.

We contact the world
only through our boundaries.
Blaga Dimitrova

In a recent issue of the Bulgarian periodical Sega (Now) a reporter related an extraordinary tale of how various name-changing campaigns had marked the experience of a Bulgarian-speaking Muslim—hereafter “Pomak”—in the village of Bachkovo. The story began during the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913 when Hasan, the aforementioned Pomak from the Rhodope mountains of southern Bulgaria, was forced to change his name to Dragan as part of the wartime state campaign for Muslims with “Slavic origins” to “reclaim their Bulgarian names.” A change in politics at the beginning of World War I opened the door for Dragan to change his name back to Hasan; and so he did. In the late 1930s, however, he was again compelled to change his name back to Dragan, in line with the Rodina (Homeland) directed name-changing campaigns, described in depth below. After the Communist takeover in 1944 Dragan was able, again, to change his name back to Hasan as wartime “Fascist” policy was reversed. But with the movement towards “national integration” in the 1960s Hasan was forced, again, to change his name back to Dragan. After the fall of Communism in Bulgaria in November 1989 “Dragan” again was allowed to change his name back to Hasan; and so he did. In his one lifetime this “Bulgarian” of Islamic faith, subject to the whims of the fickle and contested Bulgarian national project, changed his name six times. Admittedly, the Pomak's fate in Balkan history seems to be primarily as pawn in Bulgarian and other Balkan national rivalries and domestic designs. Pomak history is, more often than not, the story of the center looking to the margins and imposing its own designs. Having said that, these designs—generally driven by the dual forces of modernity and nationalism—were always subject to a spectrum of Pomak responses and strategies.

The previous essays have presented a (frequently tragic) history of the Muslims of Southeastern Europe. The development of national identities among the Muslim populations has been an important chapter in this story. A recurring theme in the different case studies presented in this special issue is that the ways in which the Balkan Muslim population perceived itself did not always match the perception of the Christian population, especially the nationalists. Likewise, while the non-Muslim population often considered all Muslims to be an undifferentiated mass (usually referred to as “Turks”), the Muslims themselves often had highly nuanced and complex self-perception. While this self-identification included Islam as an important component, Islam was by no means the only, or even most important, aspect of identity.