Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe. By Emily Greble

Abstract

The Balkans’ diverse cultural heritage remains ensnared in formulaic representations that keep it outside normative “European” experiences. Emily Greble’s new book seeks to move beyond clumsy binaries by inspecting the 1878–1948 period that led to the contested forms of the state known as Yugoslavia. In suggesting that some Muslims contributed to the major political movements that shaped this modern state-building process, Greble adds to a rethinking of secularism and citizenship while inviting new questions about how we write such post-imperial histories. The problem with writing such histories that need a detailed excavation of archives left by interwar regimes is that these documents must be put in the context of violence used to govern Yugoslavia’s contested borderlands. While Greble’s archival sources suggest self-identified Islamic institutions based mainly in Bosnia evolved to cohabitate with other nation-building initiatives, and in the larger case of Yugoslavia, this meant balancing ethnonational associations with Christian sects and their “national” churches claiming authority over them. In other words, the evolution and then permanent establishment of an Islamic infrastructure had to necessarily mirror those Serb Orthodox and Slovene/Croat Catholic institutions that helped consolidate the political and economic power of some at the expense of others. For Greble, the “Muslim” programs that eventually manifested as rights to use “Sharia” and “Muslim education” indicated that (mostly South Slav) Muslims successfully navigated competing regimes governing the lands where they lived and of which they could become “citizens.”