INTERETHNIC RELATIONS IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

DURING THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

(The Sarajevo Beacon)

By: Professor Džemaludin Latić, Sarajevo

Introductory remarks

There is a general view that the crisis in Bosnia started in the early 1990s and

that its root-cause was the break-up of the Communist system. This view is only

partially true – because the crisis in Bosnia has been going on ever since the

break-up of the two great empires which, like two umbrellas, used to cast their

shadow over the country: one which we may call eastern, that is to say, the

Ottoman Empire, whose presence in Bosnia ended in 1878, and the other,

western, that is to say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed in the

First World War. Both empires ushered a relatively long periods of peace in

Bosnia and in the Balkans inhabited by peoples of different nationalities and the

followers of four major religions: Islam, Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Judaism.

Socialist Yugoslavia brought a "peace of military barracks": the government of

one Communist party and the suppression of religious, national and political

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freedoms. Bosnia , with its single largest population of Muslim Bosniaks and

with its Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic population, was made an equal

federal republic within Yugoslavia only after the passing of the 1974

constitution but without "granting" the Bosnian Muslims the right to restore

their historical national name (Bosniaks); thus, the "construction fault“ in

Yugoslavia's edifice objectively paved the ground for the realization of the

centuries old dream of Greater Serbia – and of Greater Croatia for a while – by

carrying out a genocide on the territory of the Bosnian state.

I will talk about the conditions of the present day Bosnian state and its

perspectives later on. For now, I would like to present a point that, in Bosnia and

throughout most of the Balkan peninsula, we are now witnessing the break up of

the Ottoman Empire and its millet system. My second point is that the so-called

international community has been giving in increasingly to the surging Serb and

Croat ethnonationalisms which undermine future survival of an indigenous

European Muslim community in Bosnia clinched between the jaws of those two

ethnonationalisms and that, precisely because this is a non-Christian, Muslim

community, there is a silent discriminatory policy being applied on the part of

Europe and America towards Bosnian state and its citizens. Sarajevo is the

beacon of European civilization, but also its contradiction. In the bloody history

of this continent which reached its lowest points during the two world wars there

has always been the light of one multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural

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country with a long tradition of co-existence of peoples who belong to religions

and ethnicities. Bosnian society had one extra quality above the European

achievements in tolerance: in Bosnia the other was not simply tolerated, but was

respected and protected. Today Sarajevo represents a contradiction to a Europe,

which on the one hand pays lip service to the state of equal citizens in full

celebration of their harmonized identities, and on the other, confers legality on a

state or a quasi-state entity forged in the sword and fire of genocide against an

ethnic group, just as it supports ethnonationalist political projects. European

Union is a project of self-deliverance of this continent in the face of lethal ideas

of ethnonationalism, xenophobia and totalitarianism; therefore, the "Sarajevo

beacon" deserves support of the analysts, political scientists and diplomats of the

West.

We can thank the very Ottoman millet system for the fact that different religious

and ethnic groups used to live in the Balkan peninsula for centuries. That

system, although not a reflection of a fully Islamic concept of state and society,

grew out of Qur'anic teachings about people, language, race and religion and on

the Prophet's s.a.w.s. practice and here one thinks especially of the Constitution

of Medina (Sahifetul-Medina). In the language of the Qur'an, millet designates

not only a particular religion, but also a religious culture. This is how

contemporary Swiss sociologist and historian Urs Altermatt views this term in

his study entitled Ethnonationalism in Europe: the Sarajevo Beacon: "In

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Ottoman language, it was precisely the term millet that designated both a

community of people and a community of religion. Numerous millets had

separate churches and languages. As religious communities, they came under the

protection of the supreme Muslim government. As a rule, they ran their internal

affairs according to their own laws."1 The crux of my point is that a millet did

not have its exclusive territory within the Ottoman Empire; belonging to a millet

was determined on the basis of religious affiliation. "Members of a millet

enjoyed freedom of movement in the whole empire, but remained members of

their religious community. This background", as Altermatt emphaises "explains

why all ethnic, cultural and religious maps in the former Ottoman south eastern

Europe look so colourful."2

The millet system determined not only relations between community and state,

but also among various communities.3 All Muslims represented millet-i islam

regardless of their race, language, origins, or mezheb. In Sarajevo – as in the

whole of Bosnia – there existed for centuries, together with a Muslim millet, a

Latin or Catholic millet, an Orthodox millet, and, following their expulsion from

the Iberian peninsula and central Europe, the Sefardim and Ashkenazim who

first found refuge in Istanbul and Thessaloniki, and from the mid-16th century,

in Bosnia. The Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo has the longest continuity in the

1
Urs Altermatt. Ethnonationalism in Europe: the Sarajevo Beacon, Sarajevo, 1995, p. 79.
2
Ibid., p. 79.
3
For more on Ottoman pluarlism see a study by the current OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu A
Culture of Peaceful Coexistence (Kultura suživota), Sarajevo, bilingual, 2006.

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history of this people's migrations and persecutions. The non-Muslims of the

Ottoman Empire were treated as ahl al-kitab or dhimmis. Here is not the time or

place to elaborate these terms derived from the Qur'an and Sunna, but at a time

of heightened Islamophobia in the West in which these two terms seem to have

been especially singled out for attack, let me quote from Culture of Islam by

Isma'il R. Farouqi and his wife Lamya: "The honor with which Islam regards

Judaism and Christianity, their founders and scriptures, is not merely courtesy

but acknowledgment of religious truth. Islam sees them not as “other ways”

which it has to tolerate but as standing de jure, as truly revealed religions from

God. Moreover, their legitimate status is neither socio-political nor cultural nor

civilizational but religious. In this, Islam is unique for no religion in the world

has yet made belief in the truth of other religions a necessary condition of its

own faith and witness… Islam does not see itself as coming to the religious

scene ex nihilo, but as a reaffirmation of the same truth presented by all the

preceding prophets of Judaism and Christianity."4

When it comes to the millet system in Bosnia, one cannot avoid quoting from

Ahd-Nama, a royal decree issued by the founder of the millet system, sultan

Mehmed Fatih on 28 May 1463 to the Franciscan order which reads as follows:

"Mehmet the son of Murat-Khan always victorious! The mandate of the

honourable, sublime sultan’s sign and the shining seal of the conqueror of the
4
Culture of Islam, Macmillan, London, 1986, p. 191.

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world reads as follows: I, Sultan Mehmet Khan, inform all the world that those

who possess this imperial edict, the Bosnian Franciscans, are in my good graces

and do hereby command: Let nobody bother or disturb those mentioned in their

churches. Let them dwell in peace in my empire. And let those who have

become refugees be allowed to do so and be safe. Let them return and let them

settle in their monasteries without fear in all countries of my empire. Neither my

royal highness, nor my viziers or my employees, nor my servants, nor any

citizen of my empire shall insult or disturb them. Let nobody attack, insult or

endanger either their life or their property, nor the property of their church. And

should they bring somebody from abroad into my country, let them do so

without let or hindrance. And as I graciously issue this imperial edict, I hereby

call on you to take my great oath."

Ladies and Gentlemen,

With the downfall of the Ottoman Empire fell the millet system in Bosnia too.

By the mid-19th century, riding on the late wave of national romanticism, the

Orthodox millet in Bosnia began its transformation into Serbian nationality,

while a decade or so later the Catholic millet became Croat in nationality, that is,

part of the wider Croatian nationality. For about half a century, the millet-i

islam, deeply shaped by Islam, lived in a particular historical hiatus, that is,

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unfavourably inclined to the idea of nation. Then, with the launch of the political

organizations based on nationality on the eve of the World War One and in its

aftermath, the Muslim community in Bosnia tried to emphasize its national

identity, while the new states – the Yugoslav Kingdom, the Independent State of

Croatia and the Socialist Yugoslavia – all tried to suppress by force any national

movement among the Bosniaks.

During the Ottoman Empire, 75% of the Bosnian pashalik population belonged

to the Islamic millet. Today, having been decimated in the two world wars and

especially during the genocide of 1992-1995, Bosniaks live in four enclaves in

the Balkans. Their state of Bosnia is divided into two entities. In the entity

known as Republika Srpska, Bosniaks together with Croats used to constitute

more than 50% percent of population before the aggression; today they are less

than 10%. Thus the Bosniaks are paying a price because of the former millet

system; they are unable to become an organized national group, nor can they,

together with smaller sections of Serb and Croat peoples loyal to the idea of

Bosnia as a state of its citizens, restore the destroyed humane concept of the

millet system. The constitution which is being imposed on them by the USA and

leading European powers gives preference to ethnonational partition of this

country and to ethnonational projects. "I am fighting against all vestiges of the

Ottoman Empire in the Balkans,“ is how the war-time leader of Bosnian Serbs

and war criminal Radovan Karadžić used to boast. When prosecutor asked

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Momčilo Krajišnik, Karadžić's close collaborator and chairman of the self-styled

Republika Srpska parliament, why he sought to divide Bosnia into the so-called

autonomous Serb regions, he said that he did so in order to stop a demographic

growth not only among Muslims of Bosnia, but of former Yugoslavia as a

whole. And when during the siege of Sarajevo Dr Haris Silajdžić asked him how

long would Serb forces continue shelling the city, he replied: "As long as

Muslims continue talking that they want a multiethnic Bosnia, as long as they

want to live with the Serbs!"