Xavier Bougarel, Survivre aux empires. Islam, identité nationale et allégeances politiques en Bosnie-Herzégovine

Since the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the recent global rise of radical Islamist movements, the question of Islam in BiH has frequently attracted interest in the media and in political circles in Europe and beyond. Public discussion, however, of this topic—both within BiH and internationally—is often hampered by simplifications and homogenizations, which reduce the issue to the question of radical Islam, for example, or posit the idea of a long-existing Muslim/ Bosniak national identity. Thus Xavier Bougarel’s book is a more than welcome corrective, as he analyses in a very differentiated manner the political developments of Islam in BiH over the last 150 years, in all their variations and complexities. The book seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the singular path pursued by Bosnian Muslims within the history of European nation-building during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the hesitations and ambiguities which until today characterize self-identificatory discourses within the Muslim/Bosniak community in BiH.

To tackle his subject, Bougarel looks at Muslim/Bosniak political, religious, and intellectual elites in BiH—that is, the discourses, strategies, and debates surrounding their political and religious positions, identities, and affiliations. He adopts a historical-chronological approach in order to better contextualize the evolutions, continuities, and ruptures affecting the Muslim/ Bosniak community in BiH as structured and perceived by their elites. The first half of his book is dedicated to the periods of Austro-Hungarian rule (1878-1918), the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918-1941), the Second World War (1941-1945), and state socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1990); the second half addresses the period of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, BiH’s independence, and the war (1990-1995), as well as the postwar period (1995-2012).

Bougarel prefers the concept of indétermination nationale (national indetermination) to indifférence nationale (national indifference), advanced by Tara Zahra to characterize the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He uses the former term to refer to the Bosnian Muslim leaders’ long-standing perception that their community was mainly a religious and nationally undetermined group. This complex heritage continued to exert its influence after the important change that came about in the 1960s, when Bosnian Muslims were given official status as one of the six constitutive nations of socialist Yugoslavia. Bougarel gives the years of 1990-1995 special attention: he underlines the importance of the evolutions happening here, especially with the self-assertion of a Bosniak nation in 1993 and the complex positioning of Islam on this new stage of national self-affirmation. These evolutions in the first half of the 1990s have been embedded in a multitude of controversies and debates analyzed by Bougarel, and such debates also characterize the period following the war.

While illustrating the changes that have taken place in the 150-year period under scrutiny, Bougarel also detects several continuities. Looking at BiH as a territory which evolved through different forms of a larger imperial order, he underlines as a continuity the strategic tendency of Muslim/Bosniak elites to appeal for protection through the imperial power; such behaviour is also visible in post-Dayton BiH in relation to the international community. Bougarel also points out the (albeit varying) persistence of inner contradictions regarding discourses of self-identification, such as the hesitations about whether to define Bosnian Muslim identity along confessional, national, or territorial lines, and about how to negotiate among these three perspectives. More specifically, these hesitations also touch upon the question of whether to place the Muslim dimension of this identity within a Bosnian-Herzegovinian or a pan-Islamic global context.

Bougarel provides vivid insights into the heterogeneity of the Muslim/Bosniak community in BiH, its diversity, various actors, and ongoing debates. He convincingly and comprehensibly explains its paradoxes, ambiguities, and contradictions—three of Bougarel’s favourite terms. He has based his research on his extensive knowledge and his use of local sources and the research literature in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English, French, and German. Bougarel refers not only to the literature on the history of BiH and Islam in BiH, but also on Islam and on nationalism in general. Compared to previous studies on Islam in BiH that primarily focused on a single historical period, such as Robert Donia’s book on Islam in BiH under Austro-Hungarian rule, Bougarel’s book has the advantage of a longue durée perspective that covers several political frameworks in leading up to its eventual focus on the current situation.

There are only a few problematic aspects here. Although Bougarel defines nations as sociopolitical constructions, he uses, for example, ‘Bosniak nation’ not only as a term relevant to his discourse analysis, but sometimes slips into making it his own analytical category (for example, 311 and 360). What is more, although he strongly emphasizes the Muslim/Bosniak community’s internal diversity, at the same time the Muslim/Bosniak community, paradoxically, appears in his book as having hermetically sealed borders within a society that essentially seems reduced to its three ethnic communities, without there being spaces between or beyond them. Significantly, in this communitarian perspective, he sees also the ‘citizens’ parties’ of the 1990s as either ‘pluricommunitarian’ (pluricommunautaires, 176) or as part of the Bosniak community (for example, 243 and 247248). In spite of this, Bougarel’s book offers a very important and stimulating contribution that allows a better understanding of—and a more differentiated discussion about—the history of BiH and Islam. What is more, it substantially contributes to our knowledge about the complex interaction between nation-building processes and religious affiliation, and about the place of Islam in Europe more widely.