The Ghost of the Ottoman Scourge: Ottoman Hauntology and Dystopia in Socialist Yugoslav History Textbooks (1945–1990)

Abstract

This article studies the depiction of the Ottoman period, and the dystopian narratives about that period, in history textbooks printed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during Socialist Yugoslavia. It connects literature on nationalism and education in the peculiar context of Bosnia-Herzegovina within former Socialist Yugoslavia. Housing a substantial native Slavic Muslim population, Bosnia was unique in that it was not a ‘national’ republic, but rather the only multi-national Republic within the Yugoslav federation. This population dates to the Ottoman period in Bosnia (1463–1878), when a significant part of the population converted to Islam. The period in question has been much maligned by Serbian and Croatian historiographies. It was presented as a ‘Dark Age’ in which a foreign imposition hindered the development of the nations into modernity. Conversely, Marxist writings too decried the backwardness of the Ottomans and Islamic Civilization as a whole. This intersection of nationalist and Marxist understandings of the past both envisioned a grand utopian future set against the abuses of the period, making it highly interesting to examine how textbooks presented it to younger generations. As representations of ‘official knowledge’, the textbooks therefore largely used the language of dystopia (a society worse than the reader’s) to present Ottoman rule. It was shown to be a period of unjust extraction, violence, and the end of independent development. However, this article argues, the books not only aimed to decry the historical injustices. They presented the regime and its modern values positively. Unfortunately, despite the political gains the Bosnian Muslim population gained in Yugoslavia, the textbook image of the Ottomans has hardly changed. This would have disastrous consequences in the Wars of the 1990s, when the Bosnian Muslims were conveniently cast as the ‘Turkish’ nemesis, as the Ghost of the House of Osman roamed largely free through Yugoslavia’s history textbooks.