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Making Muslim Women
European
Voluntary Associations, Gender and Islam
in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia
(1878–1941)
Fabio Giomi
Central European University Press
Budapest—New York
iii
© 2021 Fabio Giomi
Published in 2021 by
Central European University Press
Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary
Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000
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ISBN 978-963-386-369-5 hardback
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ISSN 2079-1119
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Giomi, Fabio, author.
Title: Making Muslim women European : voluntary associations, Islam, and
gender in post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878-1941) / Fabio Giomi.
Description: Budapest ; New York : Central European University Press,
[2021] | Series: CEU Press studies in the history of medicine, 2079-1119
; Volume XIII | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036441 (print) | LCCN 2020036442 (ebook) | ISBN
9789633863695 (cloth) | ISBN 9789633863688 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Muslim women--Bosnia and Herzegovina--Social conditions. |
Muslim women--Yugoslavia--Social conditions. | Women--Bosnia and
Herzegovina--Societies and clubs--History. |
Women--Yugoslavia--Societies and clubs--History. | Women--Europe--Social
conditions. | Europe--Civilization.
Classification: LCC HQ1719 .G56 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1719 (ebook) | DDC
305.48/69709497--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036441
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036442
CONTENTS
Lists of Abbreviations
vii
Lists of Figures
viii
Lists of Tables
xi
Acknowledgements
xv
1
Introduction
Chapter 1
At the Margins of the Habsburg Civilizing Mission
25
Chapter 2
Domesticating the Muslim Woman Question
67
Chapter 3
111
Muslim, Female and Volunteer
Chapter 4
167
Calling for Change
Chapter 5
227
Putting Change into Practice
Chapter 6
267
A Taste for Celebration
Chapter 7
Unforeseen Consequences
313
Conclusions
363
Consulted Archives
373
Bibliography
375
Index
389
v
LISTS OF ABBREVIATIONS
ABiH
AHNK
Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Arhiv hercegovačko-neretvanskog kantona, Archives of the HerzegovinaNeretva Canton
AJ Arhiv Jugoslavije, Archives of Yugoslavia
ARS Arhiv Republike Srpske, Archives of the Republic of Srpska
FG Fond Gajreta, Gajret Records
GOG Glavni odbor Gajreta, Gajret Central Branch
GONU Glavni odbor Narodne Uzdanice, Narodna Uzdanica Central Branch
HAS Historijski arhiv Sarajevo, Sarajevo Historical Archives
IAB Istorijski arhiv Beograda, Belgrade Historical Archives
JMD Jugoslovenska Muslimanska Demokracija, Yugoslav Muslim Democracy
JMO Jugoslovenska Muslimanska Organizacija, Yugoslav Muslim Organization
MGS Muzej grada Sarajeva, City Museum of Sarajevo
MONU Mjesni odbor Narodne Uzdanice, Narodna Uzdanica Local Branch
MNO Muslimanska Narodna Organzacija, Muslim Popular Organization
MPG Mjesni pododbor Gajreta, Gajret Local Branch
MRS Muzej Republike Srpske, Museum of the Republic of Srpska
MŽONU Mjesni ženski odbor Narodne Uzdanice, Narodna Uzdanica Local Female
Branch
MŽOŠ Muslimanska ženska osnovna škola, Muslim Female Elementary School
MŽPG Mjesni ženski pododbor Gajreta, Gajret Local Female Branch
MŽZM Muslimanska ženska zadruga Mostar, Muslim Women’s Association in
Mostar
PDS Personalni dosije službenika, Officials’ personal files
SANU Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, Serbian Academy of Sciences and
Arts
ZM Zemaljski muzej, Provincial Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina
ZV Zemaljska vlada, Provincial Government for Bosnia and Herzegovina
vii
LISTS OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Postcard depicting Banja Luka, circa 1910. Source: Magbul Škoro, Pozdrav iz Bosne i Hercegovine. Greetings from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Grus aus Bosnien-Herzegowina, vol. 1 (Sarajevo: Dom, 2009), 132.
Figures 2 and 3: Muslim women publicly abandoning the headscarf at the 1948
Antifašistički front žena Conference. Source: MGS, photography collection.
Figure 4: Alphonse Mucha, The Allegory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1900, tempera
on canvas, Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague.
Figure 5: Muslim woman wearing a feredža in Mostar, 1904. Source: ZM, Franjo
Topić’s photography collection, 499.
Figure 6: Bosnian Muslim women, undated. Source: ZM, Franjo Topić’s photography collection, 1034.
Figure 7: Interior of the Sarajevo Girls’ School, with students dressed in traditional clothes, 1906. Source: ZM, Franjo Topić’s photography collection, 202.
Figure 8: Sarajevo Girls’ School, turn of the century. Source: ZM, Franjo Topić’s
photography collection, 2603.
Figures 9-14: Portraits of the first generation of Muslim women writers. Source:
courtesy of Ajša Zahirović.
Figure 15: The Central branch of Gajret Osman Đikić in Belgrade. Source: ABiH,
FG, 27, 193(2) (undated).
Figure 16: A Panslavic party organized by Kolo Srpskih Sestara in Travnik, in 1928.
Source: Vardar. Kalendar "Kolo Srpskih Sestara" (1928): 139.
Figure 17: Gajret’s female chapter in Bihać, 1921. Source: Hamza Humo, Spomenica dvadesetipetogodišnjice Gajreta: 1903.–1928. (Sarajevo: Glavni odbor Gajreta,
1928), 115.
Figure 18: Merhamet’s female chapter in Trebinje, late 1930s or early 1940s. Source:
courtesy of Jasmina Cvjetić.
Figure 19: The paternalist emancipation. Source: “Lijepi primjer svijesti i razumijevanja prema školovanju naše muslimanke,” Gajret, no. 3 (1938): 56.
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 20: A gendered portrait of activism. Source: “Portreti gajretovih radnika,”
Gajret, no. 12 (1931): 299.
Figure 21: Delegates to the yearly Gajret Assembly in Sarajevo, 1931. Source: Gajret, no. 12 (1931): 369.
Figure 22: Gajret’s female student dorm in Mostar, early 1920s. Source: Hamza
Humo, Spomenica dvadesetipetogodišnjice Gajreta: 1903.-1928. (Sarajevo: Glavni
odbor Gajreta, 1928), 126.
Figure 23: A Gajret sewing class in Trebinje, late 1930s/early 1940s. Source: courtesy of Jasmina Cvjetić.
Figure 24: Early 20th-century teferič. Source: Mustafa A. Mulalić, Orijent na zapadu: savremeni kulturni i socijalni problemi muslimana jugoslovena (Belgrade: Skerlić, 1936), 244.
Figure 25: A Narodna Uzdanica teferič in Kiseljak, mid-1930s. Source: Kalendar
“Narodna Uzdanica” (1936): 154.
Figure 26: Gajret temporary party branch from Mostar, 1928. Source: Gajret, no.
15 (1928): 230.
Figure 27: Displaying the prizes collected by Gajret Muslim women activists for a
zabava raffle in Stolac, 1931. Source: Gajret, no. 11 (1931): 278.
Figure 28: Choreographed performance entitled “For the King and the Homeland,” held at a Gajret party on March 7, 1931 at the National Theater in Sarajevo.
Source: Gajret, no. 6 (1931): 139.
Figure 29: Gajret women’s choir from Banja Luka, late 1930s. Source: MRS, photography collection, Stanovnici, 346.
Figure 30: Bahrija Nuri Hadžić’s Cultural Metamorphosis, collage. Source: Mustafa A. Mulalić, Orijent na zapadu: savremeni kulturni i socijalni problemi muslimana jugoslovena (Belgrade: Skerlić, 1936), 331.
Figure 31: A scene from the play On, interpreted by Gajret pupils in Sarajevo.
Source: Gajret, no. 6 (1931): 153.
Figure 32: Performing the past. Source: Gajret, no. 18 (1928): 269.
Figure 33: Performing the past. Source: Novi Behar, no. 12–14 (1936–1937): 175.
Figure 34: Disseminating modern beauty: Miss Gajret winners from different Bosnian towns. Source: Mustafa A. Mulalić, Orijent na zapadu: savremeni kulturni i
socijalni problemi muslimana jugoslovena (Belgrade: Skerlić, 1936), 258.
Figure 35: Self-portrait of Gajret’s Library in Mostar, late 1930s. Source: Mahmud
Konjhodžić, Mostarke. Fragmenti o revolucionarnoj djelatnosti i patriotskoj opredjeljenosti žena Mostara, o njihovoj borbi za slobodu i socijalizam (Sarajevo: Veselin
Masleša, Sarajevo, 1981), 32.
ix
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 36: Vahida Maglajlić in the early 1940s. Source: Jasmina Musabegović,
Žene Bosne i Hercegovine u narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi 1941-1945. godine: sjećanja
učesnika (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1977), 560.
Figure 37: Ifaket Salihagić with her sons Omer and Halil, Banja Luka, late 1930s.
Source: MRS, photography collection.
Figure 38: Muslim women doing shopping in Sarajevo’s market, interwar period.
Source: ZM, photography collection, 23.
Figure 39: Mourners at Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević’s funeral in March 1938.
Source: Gazi husrefbeg library, photography collection.
Figures 40, 41 and 42: Muslim women from Sarajevo, 1930s. Source: HAS, photography collection.
x
LISTS OF TABLES
Table 1: Number of male and female pupils in state schools, school year 1899/1900.
Source: Vojslav Bogićević, Pismenost u Bosni i Hercegovini (Sarajevo: Veselin
Masleša 1975), 284.
Table 2: The Džinić Alley mekteb curriculum. Source: Ibrahim Kemura, “Počeci
modernog školovanja muslimanki (prve ženske muslimanske škole u Sarajevu),”
Glasnik Vrhovnog islamskog starješinstva u Federativnoj Narodnoj Republici Jugoslaviji, no. 1-2 (1974): 29.
Table 3: Hours dedicated to each subject in the extended course at Sarajevo’s Muslim Girls’ School, 1913. Source: Hajrudin Ćurić, Muslimansko školstvo u Bosni i
Hercegovini do 1918. godine (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1983), 249.
Table 4: Number of students at elementary school in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
school year 1918/19. Source: Učitelj, “Šta govore brojke o našem prosvjećivanju,”
Pravda, August 14 (1920): 2.
Table 5: Number of pupils attending elementary school for the school year 1931/32.
Source: Nafis Defterdarović, “Bosna u mraku,” Putokaz, no. 1-2-3 (1939): 394-6.
xi
To my grandmother
Lorena ‘Rudi’ Mantelli (1924–2010),
hat manufacturer,
who would have loved to study.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is a thorough revision and translation of the doctoral dissertation I defended at the University of Bologna and at the EHESS (École des
hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) in 2011. It has benefitted greatly from
the help and support of many people. First of all, I wish to thank my supervisor Armando Pitassio, who generously gave me an initiation in the history
of Southeastern Europe and continued to accompany me throughout the
adventure of my doctorate, always pushing me to follow my curiosity. I will
never be able to thank Nathalie Clayer enough, my second supervisor and
now amazing colleague and friend. She gave me the warmest welcome possible when I arrived in Paris for a six-month stay, and in the end I never left.
She taught me how to critically address Balkan Muslim studies and pushed
me in the broad ocean of the social sciences. I am also especially indebted
to Alexandre “Sacha” Popovic, pioneer in Balkan studies who, with his book
L’Islam balkanique, sparked my interest for this field when I was 24 and thus
changed the trajectory of my life. I feel blessed to have spent several years in
his warm company in Paris.
Several colleagues were kind and patient enough to read this text during
the long years of transition from a PhD dissertation into a book. Bernard
Lory, Xavier Bougarel and Stefano Petrungaro gave me great advice immediately after the defense, when the manuscript was still in Italian. More recently, Elissa Helms, Krassimira Daskalova and Adnan Jahić read the manuscript in its English version, helping me to push my reflection further. I am
also indebted to Andromeda Đại Lâm Tait, who proofread and copy-edited
this manuscript—and who at the same time did much more than that. His
thoughtful advice, and the continuous back-and-forthing between us really
improved the form and substance of my line of reasoning. Last but not least,
xv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
these pages would have many more misprints without the careful and intelligent reading of Thalie Barnier and Edita Matkić.
This book is the result of many research stays in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The list of archivists, librarians and museum curators who helped me when I
was in the field is too long to be addressed here. Nevertheless I cannot avoid
mentioning Mina Kujović, archivist and historian from the Bosnian State
Archives, who generously shared with me her knowledge, books and friends.
Also, the staff of the Bošnjački Institut - Fondacija Adil Zulfikarpašić, and in
particular Amina Rizvanbegović-Džuvić, Narcisa Puljek-Bubrić and Darija
Ciganković deserve my deepest gratitude for making me feel at home in their
wonderful institute. Jasmina Cvjetić, Fuad Hasanagić and Adis Bjelanović
were incredibly supportive friends, always ready to help with the tougher
translations. Stimulating conversations with Ahmet Alibašić, Berina Bašić,
Jakov Čaušević, Jasmina Čaušević, Damir Imamović, Husnija Kamberović,
Zulejha Merhemić, Zulejha Riđanović, Mevlida Serdarević, Đermana Šeta
and Ajša Zahirović helped me a great deal to interpret my findings in the archives. I would also like to thank the women of the association Tuzlanska
Amica, and in particular Irfanka Pašagić, who with their tireless everyday
work in a post-conflict Tuzla represent the living inspiration for this book.
This research was carried out with the support of different institutions
that, in the most precarious years of my life, offered some material support
and thus a certain degree of serenity: the University of Bologna, the EHESS,
the Faculty of Islamic Science in Sarajevo, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Circulating between these places made it possible for me to
meet a great many clever and generous colleagues who nourished this research and, sometimes in a seminar room, at others in more informal situations, helped me to consolidate my arguments: Efi Avdela, Elif Becan,
Sara Bernasconi, Luka Bogdanić, Giovanni Campolo, Francisca de Haan,
Franko Dota, Cecilie Endresen, Emily Greble, Pieter Judson, Sümbul Kaya,
Morgane Labbé, Laura Lee Downs, Arturo Marzano, Alba Nabulsi, Mary
Neuburger, Camila Pastor, Jelena Petrović, Monica Priante, Catharina
Raudvere, Rebecca Rogers, İrvin Cemil Shick, Ozan Soybakış, Zilka Spahić
Šiljak, Christelle Taraud, Mate Nikola Tokić, Fabrice Virgili, Ece Zerman,
Susan Zimmermann. Last but not least, the staff of my research center,
the CETOBaC (Centre d'études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasixvi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
atiques), as well as the participants of the EHESS seminars, allowed me to
grow up in an extremely rich intellectual environment, as a student and later
as a researcher.
I learnt that writing a PhD, and later a book, is also trying. I would have
never made it without the unbounded support of my family and friends.
Among them, my parents, Sylvain Dehove, Vincenzo Raimondi and Simon
Sarlin were simply irreplaceable.
xvii
INTRODUCTION
The traveler passing through the Bosnian town of Banja Luka circa 1910
could choose from a wide range of postcards to send home. While a considerable number of these cards depicted diverse aspects of the region’s rich
cultural heritage—picturesque villages, ruined fortresses, men and women
dancing in folk costumes—others showcased the newly-built infrastructure that was becoming an increasingly prominent part of the Bosnian land-
Figure 1: Postcard depicting Banja Luka, circa 1910.
Source: Magbul Škoro, Pozdrav iz Bosne i Hercegovine. Greetings from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Gruss aus Bosnien-Herzegowina, vol. 1 (Sarajevo: Dom, 2009), 132.
1
INTRODUCTION
scape: iron bridges, factories, grid-iron streets, railroads, etc. One postcard
in particular (see figure 1) affords a glimpse of Savior Street, one of the main
roads in the city center of Banja Luka. The Hotel Austria and Elliot Café are
clearly recognizable in the background, places which were at the heart of
the Central European, middle-class sociability that was gradually spreading
in town. At the center of the composition a couple can be seen sitting in the
front seat of a car. The couple is dressed according to European upper-class
fashion; the gentleman wears a suit and cap, and the lady, who is immediately obvious thanks to her white dress, wears a corset, a small cap and holds
a parasol. Distributed in a semicircle around the car, the urban crowd seems
to observe with curiosity this gendered performance of modernity, so unusual in early twentieth century Bosnia.
At first sight, the postcard could be a sketch of one of the many minor
towns of the Habsburg Empire. Yet there are elements that undoubtedly
point to the postcard’s Bosnian origin; the presence of three veiled figures—
three Muslim women. Indeed, as a region that had only recently come under
the control of Vienna in 1878, and had been a part of the Ottoman Empire for
four centuries before that, Bosnia and Herzegovina1 boasted a large Muslim
population—a unique case in the Habsburg Empire. The three veiled women’s position at the front of the stage is rather meaningful; they are isolated
from the background context, hidden beneath heavy feredža, a type of Muslim garment worn by women in Bosnian towns outside the domestic space at
the beginning of the twentieth century. Slightly removed from the rest of the
composition, these three figures are the best proof of Bosnia’s recent Ottoman, and thus Oriental past, and of its persistent exoticism in the eyes of the
Habsburg observer. Looking at this postcard, one might be tempted to think
that European modernity, entering the town in the form of a bourgeois couple riding a car, has touched all but Muslim women.
The assumption that Bosnian Muslim women remained for a long time
removed from social transformation has enjoyed a great deal of popularity,
inside and outside the perimeter of academia. In 2009, when as a doctoral
student I first started thinking about focusing on Muslim women in the first
decades of the post-Ottoman period—roughly speaking, after the sultans
1
In order to make the text more readable, in this book I refer to the historical region of “Bosnia and Herzegovina” for the most part simply as “Bosnia.”
2
INTRODUCTION
and before the communists—several colleagues kindly suggested I drop the
subject, and not just due to the risk of being accused of speaking on behalf
of women and stealing their voices. The reasons given to me were both of
a general nature, and specific to the research. General, because there often
appears to be something improper about a male historian deciding to focus on women’s and gender history—dealing with women’s history is a job
for women, and doing so implies that either you are not a real historian, or
that you are not a real man. Specific, because—as I was told by several Bosnian colleagues—for the period before 1945 there was just not enough archival material for a serious PhD dissertation, and more importantly there
was nothing in them that was interesting enough to be told. As I will show in
the second part of this Introduction, the existing scholarship seems indeed
to suggest that after 1878, Muslim women continued to lead more or less the
same lives as they had in the late Ottoman period; they rarely went to school
or entered the salaried job market, and they were mostly confined to the domestic space. At least until the triumphant Communist state empowered
them with its emancipatory policies in the aftermath of the Second World
War. I was also told that, if I really wanted to know more about Muslim
women, I ought to listen to sevdalinka, a kind of folk music closely associated
with Ottoman Bosnia, which even today has a lively cultural scene.2 These
songs often tell the story of urban Muslim women, their cry for unrequited
love and desire for their loved ones.3 The female protagonists in sevdalinakas
are often described as hidden from the public eye behind a veil or mušebak,
the wooden grille covering the windows of a house to guard against the eyes
of onlookers. Even though there are exceptions, the majority of these female
characters are represented as confined to the house, sometimes walking in
the narrow streets of the mahalas, or residential neighborhoods that made
up the urban mosaic of the Ottoman town. At first sight, these songs implicitly reinforced my first impressions gleaned from the current state of research; Muslim women were entities removed from the public space.
According to this line of reasoning, Bosnian Muslim women represented
a kind of anomaly, both in comparison with women in other Muslim societ2
3
The term is possibly from the Ottoman Turkish savda (“passionate love”), which in turn comes from the
Arabic sawda, one of the four humors of ancient medicine controlling emotions.
Recent scholarship is attempting a more nuanced reading of the way women are portrayed in sevdalinkas.
On this topic see Damir Imamović, Sevdah (Zenica: Vrijeme, 2017),149-52.
3
INTRODUCTION
ies, and in comparison with non-Muslim women in the Yugoslav region. As
a great deal of research has already convincingly shown, the decades at the
turn of the twentieth century represent a period of major change for Muslim women around the world. At a time when the Ottoman Empire was becoming a vast testing-ground, where competing “imagined communities”
were being forged and contested, the enforcement of appropriate gender
roles—and in particular appropriate femininity—turned out to be on extremely contentious ideological ground. In Istanbul, but also in Egypt, the
Maghreb, and the Mashrek, the developing public concern for the so-called
“woman question” involved secular and religious public figures, the colonizers and the colonized, as well as men and women.4 In the Yugoslav region,
roughly during the same decades, the history of non-Muslim women is no
less charged with change. At a time when the state defined itself as a promoter of progress and modernity, women began to be considered unfit to accomplish their role as mothers and educators of future generations, and then
became an object of reform and regeneration. Christian and Jewish Women
of the Yugoslav region—whether they lived in the Ottoman or Habsburg
Empire, or in the Serbian and Montenegrin states—experienced new forms
of education, learned to write and speak in public, joined the paid workforce, transformed their consumption practices and everyday life, and took
part in the political struggle amidst the ranks of nationalist, socialist and
feminist movements. In close relation with what their counterparts were doing in other European states, women imagined competing projects of social
reform, took to the streets to demand better work and living conditions, and
the right to vote.5 Moreover, research from the last few decades has shown
4
5
The research on Muslim women between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries is extensive.
Several volumes, which already make up the canons of Women’s and Gender History, helped to shape
my approach on this topic: Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996); Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Fatima
Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a
Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt:
Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Additional literature will be referenced throughout this text.
On women in the Yugoslav region see in particular Jovanka Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije u radničkom pokretu i ženskim organizacijama 1918–1941 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1978). An irreplaceable
tool for the study of the history of women in the Yugoslav region is Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central,
4
INTRODUCTION
us the extent to which women forged the course of their own lives, respecting or transgressing the boundaries imposed by class, age, political, ethnic
and religious affiliations. How was it then possible to imagine that Muslim
women in Bosnia were completely removed from all of these changes?
Gendering Associational Culture
This book is an attempt to tell a different story and to contribute to the history of Bosnian Muslims in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era, by putting women and their experiences in the picture. In a historiography traditionally focused on national, class, and ethno-confessional categories, the
goal is to shift the major interest to gender and explore its heuristic power.6
More concretely, the book covers a period that falls between 1878, when the
Congress of Berlin assigned this Ottoman province to the Habsburg Empire, and 1941, when Axis troops invaded Yugoslavia. In the space of approximately six decades, this region was integrated into two continental empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg, and into a state based on the national
principle, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. In order to explore the history of Muslim
women and the evolution of a debate on Muslim, post-Ottoman gender relations, this book focuses on a specific social organization: the voluntary association. Usually associated with urban middle-class Western Europe and
North America, voluntary associations became more prominent in the Yugoslav region from at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In a region that was at that time shared between Vienna and Istanbul, they turned
up in virtually all of the languages in use—Verein in German, cemiyet in Ottoman Turkish, udruženje or društvo in Serbo-Croatian,7 not to mention the
6
7
Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006) and Jelena Petrović, Women’s Authorship in Interwar Yugoslavia. The Politics of
Love and Struggle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
On the lack of gender-sensitive scholarship in Balkan Muslims studies, see Ina Merdjanova, Rediscovering the Umma: Muslims in the Balkans between Nationalism and Transnationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82–102.
At present, in the countries of former Yugoslavia, the official state languages include Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Albanian. Without engaging in any of the sensitive political debates among Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins, it can be stated that Serbian,
Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrinian are mutually intelligible. In the period under study in this book,
this language was referred to by the state under several terms: zemaljski jezik (provincial language), srpski (Serbian), hrvatski (Croatian), jugoslovenski (Yugoslavian), srpsko-hrvatski (Serbo-Croatian) državni
5
INTRODUCTION
kaleidoscope of local idioms that would later be called “minority languages.”
Several generations of philosophers, historians and social scientists have already stressed the primary role played by associations in the making of what
we are now used to calling modernity.
The term “voluntary association” generally refers to an organization that
is contractual in nature, which distinguishes it from other forms of “traditional” organizations based on an assigned status, such as place of origin or
blood-ties. Researchers often consider these institutionalized groups to be
characterized by two principal markers, i.e. their non-governmental nature
and their non-profit orientations, traits that have led scholars to consider voluntary associations as intermediary bodies that are autonomous from both
the strictures of the state and family control. Thanks to this specific position,
associations are usually considered as a kind of free space where individuals
with spare time—men and progressively women as well—can express their
beliefs, and promote their interests in coordination with their fellow members. The relationship between these communities of interest and the making of the public sphere has long been underlined; the French philosopher
Alexis de Tocqueville had already observed in the early nineteenth century
that “newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers.”8
Voluntary and selective membership, statutes laying out limited and explicit
goals, self-government through written acts, and the appointment of roles
through an elective process: these other key elements are usually associated
with voluntary associations. It goes without saying that historical research
has shown the extent to which this is just an ideal type; once associations
leave the World of Ideas and enter into human history they undergo transformations, diversions, misappropriations, and they are not necessarily synonymous with liberal modernity.9
8
9
jezik (State language), narodni jezik (popular, or national, language) or even naš jezik (our language). For
the sake of simplicity, this language will be referred to as the “Serbo-Croatian language.” The approach
adopted by this book is to cite the form used in the primary or secondary source. For an overview on
these issues, see in particular Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian
and Its Disintegration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Fontana Press, 1969), 518.
Several texts have contributed to shaping my perception of associations, and in particular: Graeme Morton, Boudien de Vries, Robert J. Morris, eds., Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places: Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1–16 and Maurice Agulhon,
“L’histoire sociale et les associations,” Revue de l’économie sociale, no. 14 (1998): 35–44. For more definitions of associations, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational Word (New York: Clarendon Press, 2000), 16; Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia:
6
INTRODUCTION
At first glance, the idea of focusing on voluntary associations in the Yugoslav region may seem bizarre or misinformed, to say the least. The Bosnian people and the inhabitants of the Balkans in general are not usually considered to be—to quote Arthur M. Schlesinger, speaking about the United
States—“nation(s) of joiners.”10 At least since the beginning of the twentieth
century, journalism, literature and scientific research have converged to reinforce an image of the Balkan peoples as the European continent’s “savages,”
a sort of “internal Other” as Maria Todorova put it, or “semi-Orientals,” to
quote Larry Wolff, only capable of mobilizing themselves through common
ancestral bonds such as ethnicity, blood-ties and religion.11 The gory collapse
of Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s, a process that in Bosnia took on a particularly dramatic turn, has only contributed to engraining this image; their associational culture, and by extension their civil society in general, has been
branded as intrinsically incomplete, defective, or even entirely missing. The
reason for this historical failure is most often assigned to the longue durée; at
the root of this impossibility to adhere to an idealized Western European modernity, what is most often mentioned is the prevalence of rural societies dominated by autocratic empires, weak economic growth, a lack of cultural unity,
and individualistic rational ethos.12 Built upon several years of research across
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia, this book aims first of all to contribute to clearing the field of these Balkanist assumptions, and to demonstrate that Bosnian associational culture was neither absent nor defective, but
vital, dynamic and deeply interconnected with the development of voluntary
associations on a global scale.13
10
11
12
13
Science, Patriotism and Civil Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5–6. On voluntary associations in the Yugoslav region, see also Fabio Giomi and Stefano Petrungaro, “Voluntary
Associations, State and Gender in Interwar Yugoslavia. An Introduction, European Review of History 26,
no. 1 (2019): 1–18.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” The American Historical Review 50, no. 1
(1944), 1–25.
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Larry Wolff, Inventing
Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994).
Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994);
George Schöpflin, “The Political Traditions of Eastern Europe” Daedalus 119, no. 1 (1990): 55–90. For
a criticism of this position, see Anastassios Anastassiadis and Nathalie Clayer, eds., Society, Politics and
State-Formation in South-Eastern Europe during the 19th century (Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives,
2011), 11–32 and Bojan Bilić, “A concept that is everything and nothing: Why not to study (post)Yugoslav
anti-war and peace activism from a civil society perspective,” Sociologija 53, no. 3 (2011): 297–322.
For a global history of voluntary associations, see in particular Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Civil Society:
1750–1914 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
7
INTRODUCTION
In a region where Muslim women remained largely illiterate, and therefore first-person literature written by them was very rare, this books focusses on voluntary associations for a specific reason. As has already been
noted by scholars who have taken this subject seriously, such as French historian Maurice Agulhon,14 associations are graphomaniac actors who leave
behind a plethora of written traces. At least when they have survived the injuries of time, turmoil and war, associations’ archival and printed sources
represent a largely unexploited goldmine of information where gender historians can hope to discover the names, choices and ideas of the Muslim
women who navigated the decades between the empire(s) and the nationstate. What I am particularly interested in understanding is how Muslim
women potentially used—if at all—the new space of possibilities opened up
by voluntary work in post-Ottoman Bosnia, and later Yugoslavia, be this in
philanthropic, cultural, feminist or revivalist associations. How did they engage in existing associational networks? Did they establish their own associations? How did they legitimize volunteering? What really interests me here
is gaining a glimpse, through the associational prism, of Muslim women in
their relationships with the rest of society and how that changed over time.
How did they engage in voluntary activities that challenged, at least to some
extent, the prescribed separation between men and women, but also between Muslims and non-Muslims, still common in the Bosnian Muslim urban strata? What kinds of gendered divisions were established around their
associational labor? How was the line separating men and women, Muslims
and non-Muslims, moved, renegotiated and contested? How did Muslim
women manage to gain access to the public space, and how did they learn
to interact with the state and religious institutions? Whenever possible, this
book seeks to reassess Muslim women’s “capacity to exercise their will, to
determinate the shape of their own lives, and to partake in the shaping of
their culture and society”15—in a word, to give them back their agency, and
get rid once and for all of the Orientalist stereotype portraying them as silenced and oppressed. In a historical period in which virtually every journal dedicated dozens of articles to debating gender relations, usually framed
according to the well-known formula žensko pitanje (the woman question),
14 Maurice Agulhon, Pénitents et Francs-Maçons de l’ancienne Provence (Paris: Fayard, 1984), i-xiii and 1-20.
15 Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.
8
INTRODUCTION
special attention will be assigned to how this debate developed among Bosnian Muslims. What kind of political and cultural references did Muslim intellectuals of both sexes have? Is there any specificity to the domestication
of this debate among Bosnian Muslims? How did Muslim women engage in
this debate? How did class, age, level of education and religiosity shape their
ideas, the circulation of these ideas, and participation in the debates that
regularly exploded in the Bosnian, and later Yugoslav, public sphere?
It would be impossible to give a comprehensive image of the multitude
of associations that were established in Bosnia in the period from 1878 to
1941. This research has adopted two selection criteria. First, associations in
which Muslim women directly took part have been taken into account; as
members, donors, sympathizers or beneficiaries (e.g. scholarship holders,
students hosted in association dorms, public lecture attendees, etc.). Secondly, the group of associations that engaged with Muslim women and with
the Muslim woman question is taken into account here. The information I
was able to collect on these associations varied a great deal from one case to
another. Many associations will only be given a brief mention in this book,
either because they were short-lived or because I was only able to obtain
fragmentary information about them. Other associations will make regular
appearances throughout this work; the largest organization that can be associated with the pre-1945 period is without a doubt Gajret (Effort). Established in Sarajevo in 1903, this association rapidly extended to many other
Bosnian towns, and even beyond the province; for example, in the Sandjak of Novi Pazar, Southern Serbia (modern-day Macedonia), and Serbia,
especially in Belgrade. Besides its main mission—allocating scholarships
to Muslim students of both sexes—the association expanded to a diverse
range of other activities: printed journals and pamphlets, recreational and
leisure activities, public lessons and literacy courses. As this book will attempt to show, Gajret became one of the main forums for Muslim (mostly
male) public figures to develop a discourse on the Muslim woman question. Attended only by men in the beginning, during the interwar period
the association’s doors were also opened to Muslim women.16 In order to
distance themselves from Gajret’s openly pro-Serbian and pro-governmen16 Ibrahim Kemura, Uloga Gajreta u društvenom životu Muslimana Bosne i Hercegovine: 1903–1941 (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1986).
9
INTRODUCTION
tal stance, other members of the Muslim male elite established Narodna Uzdanica (Popular Mainstray) in 1924, with the same goal and structure as
their rival association, but with pro-Croatian leanings.17 Each according to
their national alignment, these two Muslim cultural associations systematically cooperated with Croatian and Serbian associations working out of
Belgrade and Zagreb. Given their similar structure and agenda—working
toward educating the Muslim youth—in this book I refer to these two associations as “Muslim cultural associations.”
Besides these two large-scale Muslim associational networks, a different
kind of organization was also developing in Bosnia: philanthropic associations. Usually established at the town level, the main preoccupation of these
associations was the care of the urban poor. As was usually the case in both
the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, these associations were set up along
confessional lines. In some isolated cases, Muslim women chose to establish their own philanthropic associations, such as Osvitanje (Dawn) in 1919,
based in Sarajevo.18 However, in most cases, Muslim women participated
in philanthropic associations through specific female branches of mixed associations.19 Unlike cultural associations, in which Muslim and non-Muslim women often worked together in the name of national sisterhood, the
confessional homogeneity of these philanthropic associations remained unchallenged. Though Muslim cultural and philanthropic associations remain
the principal focus of this book, it will also take a look at the case of El-Hidaje (The Right Path), an association established by revivalist Islamic religious scholars in the second half of the 1930s. Before the Second World War,
El-Hidaje had managed to establish a network of local branches in the principal towns of Bosnia and Serbia. Even though, until the beginning of the
war, membership to this association was reserved to men, this association
made an original contribution to the debate on post-Ottoman Muslim gender relations, and this is why it has its place in this book.20
Muslim associations were not the only institutions where Muslim
17 Ibrahim Kemura, Značaj i uloga Narodne Uzdanice u društvenom životu bošnjaka: 1923.–1945. (Sarajevo:
Bošnjački Institut, fondacija Adila Zulfikarpašića i Institut za Istoriju u Sarajevu, 2002).
18 Nusret Kujraković, “Osvitanje. Prvo udruženje muslimanki u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Prilozi Instituta za
istoriju, no. 38 (2009): 145–164.
19 Uzeir Bavčić, Merhamet (1913–2003) (Sarajevo: Muslimansko dobrotvorno društvo “Merhamet,” 2003).
20 Muharem Dautović, Uloga El-Hidaje u društvenom i vjersko-prosvjetnom životu bošnjaka (1936-1945)
(M.A. diss., Faculty of Islamic Sciences Sarajevo, 2005).
10
INTRODUCTION
women became visible and that took on the Muslim woman question. This
research would be severely undermined if it omitted two other poles: the
feminist associations and the communist movement which, in particular
in the early 1920s and late 1930s, spread their ideas in Yugoslavia, building their networks across different national and confessional groups. As regards the feminists, among the various associations of this kind that became prominent in the Yugoslav public sphere, special attention has been
given to Ženski Pokret (Women’s Movement), an association based in Belgrade that in the aftermath of the Great War expanded to establish sister
branches in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As for the communist sympathizers, special attention will be assigned to the ephemeral but vocal groups of
Muslim university students in Zagreb and Belgrade, as well as their presence in several associations in Bosnia, thanks especially to the involvement
of secondary school students. Even though, as this work will show, Muslim women only exceptionally got close to feminist and communist groups,
both groups spoke out loudly and in public about their “Muslim sisters,”
or the “working Muslim woman”—as they often called them—countering
the almost complete monopoly of Muslim men on the discourse that defined the terms of the Muslim woman question.21
In research, like in every other domain, to choose is to renounce. Choosing voluntary associations as a privileged site of analysis raises problems and
projects new shadows that must be addressed in an Introduction. First of all,
in a multiconfessional society such as that of Bosnia, where the borders of
different religious communities were far from impermeable, how should we
identify Muslim women? Muslim given names and surnames were for me
primary indicators in considering someone as sociologically Muslim, even
if it this does not necessarily tell us anything about their degree of personal
religious feeling and practice. Although this method can be most effective,
this is not always the case, and sometimes people used names and surnames
that are common to both Muslim and non-Muslims in the region. Even if I of
course did my best to double-check all of the information I used to support
my research, there is a thin margin of error, especially for names which are
mentioned in the sources only once. Besides this general caveat, choosing
21 Thomas A. Emmert, “Ženski Pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in the 1920s,” in Gender Politics
in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, ed. Sabrina P.
Ramet (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 33–50.
11
INTRODUCTION
to work on voluntary associations also necessarily pushes other segments
of Yugoslav society to the background. First of all, associations were an eminently urban and middle-class phenomenon; they involved mostly teachers, students, white-collar workers, sometimes landowners and shopkeepers
of both sexes, distinguished from the rest of the population by their level of
education, working conditions and consumer habits.22 Muslim women who
belonged to the small but growing working class, and especially the peasantry (80% of the Yugoslav population on the eve of the Second World War)
will remain in the very background of this book. The same is true for Muslim women of non-Slavic origin, in particular those who belonged to the
minorities of Turkish- and Roma-speaking populations, and Slavic-speaking Muslims living outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who are mentioned
only episodically and fall outside of the perimeter of this research. Last but
not least, it is worth recalling that associational sources do not allow us to reconstruct Muslim women’s presence in the public space in its entirety. There
was doubtless much more going on in these women’s lives than what can be
gleaned from written and visual archives. In particular, informal, oral interactions, which generally did not enter into the records, no doubt represented a significant segment of their experience, and remains terra incognita, and will probably remain that way.
More Horses Than Women, Still
Before moving on to a description of the book’s structure, it seems necessary to say a few more words about the achievements and gaps in the existing research on Muslim women at the turn of the century. My hypothesis
here is that the history of Bosnian (and even Yugoslav) Muslim women in
the first decades of the post-Ottoman period is located in a sort of blind spot
between different historical—and political—discourses.
After the Second World War, the dominant Yugoslav historical narrative
considered the National Liberation to be the “year zero” of Muslim women’s
access to the public space. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and more
22 A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein, eds., The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–28, 107–20; Jürgen Kocka, ed., Les Bourgeoisies européennes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 1996) and Pamela M. Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe: 1789–
1914 France, Germany, Italy and Russia (Basingstoke and London: MacMillan, 1990), 1–22.
12
INTRODUCTION
particularly the Antifašistički front žena (Women’s Antifascist Front, an organization established in December 1942), represented the driving forces
of this emancipatory process. According to the official narrative, emancipation was a three-step process: Muslim women’s participation in the War of
National Liberation, women obtaining the right to vote, and the banning of
the veil by the newly established federated socialist republic of Bosnia and
Herzegovina on September 28, 1950.23 As had already happened in other
countries during the interwar period, especially in the Soviet Union, the
public ceremonies in which Muslim women publicly abandoned the headscarf became symbolic of the end of the timeless patriarchal oppression of
Muslim women, and at the same time symbolic of the Socialist palingenesis
of the whole society (see figures 2 and 3).24
All that had happened “before” this moment is therefore often downplayed, even though groundbreaking research, such as Vera Erlich’s work
on Yugoslav rural families in the 1930s,25 has pointed out that, even before
1945, a deep and ongoing transformation in gender relations had been taking place. Examples of this kind of dominant socialist narrative are abundant. “The Fighting Path of the Yugoslav Woman”, a book published in
Belgrade in 1972 and written to celebrate the role of women in the War of
National Liberation, briefly recognized some changes in Muslim women’s
lives during the interwar period: access to voluntary associations, the development of a debate on Muslim femininity, the transformation of veiling
practices, etc. “In any case,” the author writes, “the difficult conditions for
women, as workers, could not be improved through appeals, petitions and
philanthropic initiatives. The roots [of their terrible condition] went deeper,
and for this reason a transformation in women’s lives could only be brought
about through their integration into the revolutionary workers’ movement
and into the fight against the capitalist order.”26 The message is clear; there
was no space for the emancipation of Muslim women before, and outside
23 On this topic, see in particular Senija Milišić, Emancipacija muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini nakon
oslobođenja (1947–1952) (M.A. diss., University of Sarajevo, 1986).
24 For a comparative approach to anti-veiling campaigns, see in particular Stephanie Cronin, ed., Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress (London and New York:
Routledge, 2014).
25 Vera S. Erlich, Family in Transition: A Study of 300 Yugoslav Villages (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1966).
26 Dragutin Kosorić, ed., Borbeni put žena Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Leksikografski zavod “Sveznanje,” 1972),
45.
13
INTRODUCTION
Figures 2 and 3: Muslim women publicly abandoning the headscarf at the 1948
Antifašistički front žena Conference.
Source: MGS, photography collection.
of, the path traced by the Communist Party. Celia Hawkesworth, who almost two decades ago contributed her groundbreaking work to the study
of female public writing in Serbia and Bosnia, summarizes this process very
well, stating that “the first forty years of the twentieth century represent a
real ‘golden age’ for women throughout the region, but this was virtually forgotten in the aftermath of the Second World War as a result of the distorting
effects of communist ideology.”27
27 Celia Hawkesworth, Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), 123.
14
INTRODUCTION
Nonetheless, even the most orthodox socialist Yugoslav history book has
its merits and thus has a place in the building of this book. Eager to show
how men and women of every ethno-national group had contributed to the
establishment of the socialist state, in each federal republic the Institute of
the History of the Worker’s Movement collected information on a number
of women who had distinguished themselves in the War of National Liberation. These women had fought in the war alongside their male counterparts,
in many cases losing their lives against Axis and ustaša forces. According to
some estimates, around 13% of war combatants were women, of which 93%
entered the socialist pantheon after the war, having received the Order of
National Hero, as opposed to 1,241 men (or 7.03% of combatants).28 Often
based on archival research and interviews, these books are an opportunity
to explore the lives of several Muslim women, to reconstruct their educational and social backgrounds in the 1930s, and the different ways in which
they became a part of communist organizations. A good example of these
žene-heroji, or “women heroes”—as they are called in a 1967 book29—is Vahida Maglajlić, a Muslim from Banja Luka who, after Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers in April 1941, entered the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia and joined the growing Partisan resistance movement. Vahida,
who in the 1930s played an important role in different city associations, was
killed by German troops. As the only Bosnian Muslim woman to receive the
Order of National Hero, her name is still engraved on stone monuments and
given to kindergartens and parks.30
Since the late 1970s, the study of women in Yugoslavia has undergone important changes. This new approach to writing women’s history is emblematic of a “shift,” according to Ivana Pantelić and Biljana Dojčinović, “from
the socialist understanding of feminism, regulated by the state, toward a
more individual and theoretical approach”31 that has made its way into Yugoslavia. Women historians such as Jovanka Kecman, Lydia Sklevicky and
28 For a discussion on these figures, see Ivana Pantelić, “Yugoslav Female Partisans in World War II,”
Cahiers balkanique 41 (2013): 239–50.
29 Žene heroji (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1967), or “Women Heroes,” is the title of a book by Mila Beoković that
focuses on the lives of nine women who died in the National Liberation War.
30 Barbara Jancar-Webster, Women and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941–1945 (Denver: Arden Press, 1990)
and Marko Attila Hoare, Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 66.
31 Ivana Pantelić and Biljana Dojčinović, “Women’s and Gender History: The Case of Serbia,” Aspasia 6
(2012): 136.
15
INTRODUCTION
Neda Božinović were the main agents of this significant change in historical
research, nourished and influenced by the discipline’s evolutions at a transnational level. As Biljana Kašić said of Sklevicky’s work, “one of [the] motivations for carrying out this research was to decode the demagogy at work
in revolutionary ideology and analyze the gap between the declarative and
the real, particularly the proclaimed emancipation of women alongside the
maintenance of patriarchal structures in socialist Yugoslavia.”32 In their pioneering work, these women historians expanded their research to cover what
was called at the time “bourgeois organizations,” that is middle class women’s/feminist voluntary associations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.33 In the following decades, and especially after the end of the
Yugoslav federation, new historians expanded this research, introduced new
methodological approaches and considerably broadened our knowledge of
women and gender history in the Yugoslav region.34 However, this scholarship only marginally included Muslim women. Mostly operating from the
main academic centers of the country—Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana—
these researchers mainly focused on the country’s northern, post-Habsburg
regions—Slovenia, Serbia, Vojvodina, and Croatia. The post-Ottoman
south—Macedonia, Bosnia, and Kosovo—where the majority of Muslims
historically lived, remained at the very margins of this research effort.35 As a
result, Muslim women were only ever included in this narrative incidentally,
mostly mentioned as the object of (unrealized) emancipation by their “unequal sisters,” i.e. non-Muslim female/feminist activists. From the beginning of the 1980s, some articles seemed to announce a rise in interest specifically for Bosnian Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, in particular for
32 Biljana Kašić, “Sklevicky, Lydia (1952–1990),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and
Feminisms, 517.
33 Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije, 5; Neda Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX i XX veku (Belgrade: Žene u
crnom & Devedeset Četvrta, 1996); Lydia Sklevicky, “Karakteristike organiziranog djelovanja žena u
Jugoslaviji u razdoblju do Drugog svjetskog rata”, Polja: časopis za kulturu, umetnost i društvena pitanja
30, no. 308 (1984): 415–7 and 30, no. 309 (1984): 454–6 and Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi (Zagreb:
Ženska infoteka, 1996).
34 Miroslav Jovanović and Slobodan Naumović, eds., Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe: Historical
Perspective in Womanhood and Manhood in the 19th and 20th Century (Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu
istoriju, 2002); Svetlana Stefanović, Žensko pitanje u beogradskoj štampi i periodici (1918–1941) (M.A.
diss., University of Belgrade, 2000); Magdalena Koh, Kada sazremo kao kultura: stvaralaštvo srpskih spisateljica na početku XX veka: (kanon - žanr - rod) (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012).
35 For an overview of the research, Sabina Žnidaršić Žagar and Nina Vodopivec, “Searching for Women’s
and Gender History in Slovenia,” Aspasia 6 (2012): 156–65; Biljana Kašić and Sandra Prlenda, “Women’s
History in Croatia: Displaced and Unhomed,” Aspasia 7 (2013): 154–62.
16
INTRODUCTION
their relationship with voluntary associations and their access to education
and employment. These articles started to explore the debates around the
veil developing during the interwar period, which involved both secular and
religious notables.36 Nevertheless, this interest turned out to be only temporary, and the articles produced were never followed by any kind of systematic research. The silence on this subject thus only served to implicitly confirm the idea that Muslim women had remained in the shadow of a timeless
patriarchal oppression, obscurantism and passivity up to the establishment
of the Socialist State.
The developments that at least to some extent affected the way in which
Muslim women’s experiences were approached did not only occur within
the confines of Yugoslav Women’s History. Islamic studies, which during
the 1980s had benefitted from significant improvements both in Yugoslavia
and abroad, played a crucial role in all of this. In 1986, the Paris-based orientalist Alexandre Popovic published L’Islam balkanique (Balkan Islam), a
book that for decades would be an important milestone in studies on postOttoman Balkan Muslims.37 The result of at least a decade of research, this
work was the first to comprehensively deal with the patchwork of Muslim
populations of Southeastern Europe, at that time all but forgotten by Western scholarship, as was the case for Muslims living in Socialist countries.38
Popovic’s book, and his work more in general, gave for the first time a critical overview of the historical trajectories of the Muslim populations in this
part of Europe, of the evolution of their principal community institutions—
schools, sharia courts, pious endowments, hierarchies of religious officials,
etc.—and of their integration into the Balkan states. His research provided
the groundwork for several generations of scholars, profoundly expanding
36 Senija Penava, “Izvori i literatura o problemima emancipacije muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Prilozi Instituta za Istoriju 18 (1981): 273–84; Senija Milišić, “O pitanju emancipacije muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Prilozi Instituta za istoriju 28 (1999): 225–241; Ljiljana BeljkašićHadžidedić, “Učešće muslimanskih žena u tradicionalnim privrednim djelatnostima u Sarajevu krajem
XIX i početkom XX vijeka,” in Prilozi historiji Sarajeva. Radovi sa znanstvenog simpozija pola milenija Sarajeva, ed. Dževad Juzbašić (Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju and Orijentalni institut, 1997), 301–14. For an
overview of the body of research on women’s and gender history in Bosnia and Herzegovina, see Gorana Mlinarević and Lamija Kosović, “Women’s Movements and Gender Studies in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Aspasia 5 (2011): 129–38.
37 Alexandre Popovic, L’Islam balkanique: Les Musulmans du sud-est européen dans la période post-ottomane
(Berlin and Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986).
38 On the notion of “forgotten Muslims,” see Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Les
Musulmans oubliés: L’Islam en Union soviétique (Paris: La Découverte, 1981), 5.
17
INTRODUCTION
our knowledge of Balkan Muslims, and in some cases dealt with women and
gender issues, notably the question of the veil.
While the Yugoslav state was entering its final stages and beginning to
disintegrate, in Bosnia there was a growing interest for the intellectual history of Bosnian Muslims, and for Islamic studies in general. Starting in the
early 1990s, scholars such as Fikret Karčić and Enes Karić explored the debates developing within the Muslim community in post-Ottoman times, including as part of their analysis the development of the so-called “Muslim
woman question.” However, this line of enquiry primarily explored the intellectual history of prominent male Muslim figures since the late Ottoman
period, and mobilized Muslim women only insomuch as they were symbolic
figures in the discursive battlefield among these men, be they religious or
secular. Scarce interest, or none at all, has been lent to “real” Muslim women
and their role in the debate. Nevertheless, decades later this body of research
remains of vital importance for those working on the cultural evolution of
Bosnian Muslims, and has huge merits. First of all it has reappraised, at least
implicitly, the importance of gender relations in post-Ottoman Muslim history, and the extent to which the debate about gender was indeed a political
issue. Secondly, in stressing the importance of the relationship between the
Muslim intellectuals of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and their fellow-Muslims in
the Middle East, this research has also begun to show that debating gender
issues was an eminently transnational venture.39 Thirdly, it has shed light on
the veil debate, a topic that, as stated by Ina Merdjanova, “can become a battleground on which power struggles are waged, and power relations at different levels are articulated and reshaped: between Muslims and the state,
on the one hand, and among Muslims themselves, on the other.”40
The “discovery” of Balkan Muslims, fostered by Islamic Studies both
from within and from outside of the Yugoslav region, was rapidly cast into
the limelight in the blaze of Yugoslavia’s collapse, a process that in Bosnia
and Herzegovina took the form of a bloody war (1992–95). During the conflict and in the aftermath, several books were published in English on the
39 Fikret Karčić, Društveno-pravni aspekt islamskog reformizma: pokret za reformu šerijatskog prava i njegov odjek
u Jugoslaviji u prvoj polovini XX vijeka (Sarajevo: Islamski teološki fakultet, 1990), Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks
and the Challenges of Modernity (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 1999), Enes Karić, Prilozi za povijest islamskog mišljenja
u Bosni i Hercegovini XX stoljeća (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 2004), Šaćir Filandra, Bošnjaci i moderna: humanistička misao Bošnjaka od polovine XIX do polovine XX stoljeća (Sarajevo: Bosanski Kulturni Centar, 1996).
40 Merdjanova, Rediscovering the Umma, 94.
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INTRODUCTION
history of Bosnian Muslims. The primary aim of these publications was to
understand and explain the conflict for an international readership that was
entirely unfamiliar with this region.41 In consequence of the atrocious images coming out of Sarajevo, Srebrenica and many other places completely
unknown to the wider public until that moment, people suddenly became
aware of Bosnian Muslims—or to be more precise, of Bosniaks (Bošnjaci),
the national name officially adopted by them in 1993, at the height of the war.
Many people, including myself, at that time a teenager, discovered through
TV images of half-destroyed minarets that Muslims were not a presence
living somewhere beyond the European continent, or recent arrivals who
had emigrated for economic reasons. As a matter of fact, there were Muslim
populations that had been living on European soil for centuries. Awareness
about Bosnian Muslim women increased; one need only search for “Bosnian Muslim Women” in the catalogues of leading libraries across the world,
or even on the Internet, to see the impressive number of texts that have been
produced on gender violence and rape as a weapon of war.42 This outpouring
of research, also reinforced by NGOs and reports from international organizations (the UN and the European Union in particular), dealt with Muslim
women mostly as victims of physical, psychological and symbolic violence.
As this scholarship has widely shown, women became the embodiment of
different ethnic communities; “our women” versus “their women,” as put by
an article from 1995.43 The activism of Muslim women during and after the
war remained unexplored. Recent scholarship is trying to reappraise this
period and the role of Muslim women in it, to challenge the narrative of victimhood, often gendered, mobilized by all of the political actors of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, and to give back to Muslim women their agency.44
Invisibilized, marginalized, victimized; according to this line of reasoning, it seems that the story of Bosnian Muslim women is a perfect case of
41 Among the many texts that were published during and in the aftermath of the war in Bosnia, see especially Mark Pinson, ed., The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages
to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
42 Stefano Petrungaro, Balcani: Una storia di violenza? (Roma: Carocci, 2012), 121–34.
43 Julie Mostov, “‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in
the Balkans,” Peace and Change 20, no. 4 (October 1995): 515–29.
44 On this topic, see in particular Elissa Helms, Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) and Zilka Spahić
Šiljak, Shining Humanity: Life Stories of Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
19
INTRODUCTION
“female invisibility in history.”45 Bosnia’s transition into post-socialism not
only brought about the return of a patriarchical society—a circumstance
that surely does not favor gender-sensitive approaches—but also instilled an
obsession for ethnicity and nationality in scholarly research, which for years
has obscured other avenues for exploration. At first sight, it would seem that
what Lydia Sklevicky said in 1989 about women in Yugoslav historical research is still true, that there were “more horses than women,”46 at least for
Muslims. Luckily, on closer inspection it becomes evident that this is no
longer the case. In the last few years, a growing number of scholars have focused on the pre-1941 experiences of Bosnian Muslim women. What is so
interesting is that they are only rarely professional historians; they mostly
come from gender studies backgrounds, or are sociology, literature, and art
history graduates. In many cases, they write from the margins of their academic field, and they dedicate an MA thesis to this topic before moving
on to different professional experiences. The researchers are—it probably
goes without saying—mostly women: students, archivists, and NGO activists that, thanks to funding from abroad, have in many cases been able to do
original archival research. The topics addressed by them are numerous: representations in visual art and literature,47 Muslim women and philanthropy,48
or education and teaching,49 to cite a few. Some of these texts work at a local level, exploring the history of women in a specific town or locality.50 Oth45 On the issue of (in)visibility, see in particular Joan W. Scott, “The Problem of Visibility,” in Retrieving
Women’s History : Changing Perceptions of the Role of Women in Politics and Society, ed. Jay Kleinberg (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988), 5–29.
46 Lydia Sklevicky, “More Horses than Women. On the Difficulties of Founding Women’s History in Yugoslavia,” Gender and History 1, no. 1 (1989): 68–73.
47 Jelena Petrović, “Representations: Fiction, Modern: Southeast Europe,” in Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, Brill, 2009, DOI: 10.1163/1872-5309_ewic_EWICCOM_0624d and Sarita Vujković,
U građanskom ogledalu: Identiteti žena bosanskohercegovačke građanske kulture (1878. – 1941.) (Banja
Luka and Belgrade: Muzej savremene umjetnosti Republike Srpske i Kulturni centar Beograd, 2009).
48 On Muslim female philanthropy, Kerima Filan, “Women Founders of Pious Endowments in Ottoman
Bosnia,” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, eds. Amila Buturović and İrvin
Cemil Schick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 99–126.
49 Mina Kujović, “Jedna zaboravljena učiteljica: Hasnija Berberović,” Građa Arhiva Bosne i Hercegovine 1
(2009): 179–86; and Mina Kujović, “Ko su bile prve nastavnice u Muslimanskoj osnovnoj i višoj
djevojačkoj narodnoj školi u Sarajevu (1894.–1918.)” Novi Muallim 6, no. 21 (1426/2005): 48–55. See
also Remzija Hurić-Bećirović, Školovanje muslimanki u Bosni i Hercegovini pod austrougarskom vlašću
(M.A. diss., Faculty of Islamic Science, Sarajevo, 2010).
50 Three volumes—two of them written with the support of NGOs—have started to explore the history
of women and gender in the regions of Semberija, Bratunac (Eastern Bosnia) and Banja Luka (Northern Bosnia): Tanja Lazić, Ljubinka Vukašinović and Radmila Žigić, eds., Žene u istoriji Semberije (Bijeljina: Organizacija žena Lara, 2012); Mensura Mustafić, Žene u vremenu, Donne nel tempo (Sarajevo: Forum
20
INTRODUCTION
ers deal with the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, situated in the broader
Yugoslav region.51 A few months before the publication of this book, a new
book by Adnan Jahić on the Muslim woman question in post-Ottoman Bosnia offered a rich overview of the gender politics of Bosnian Islamic religious institutions, and deeply enriched our knowledge on this topic.52 Moreover, new scholarship has allowed us to establish what happened to Muslim
women in the Yugoslav region in the broader context of the Balkans, and the
post-Ottoman and post-Habsburg regions.53
The Book’s Structure
This book is structured in seven parts, organized according to chronological and thematic criteria. The first two chapters examine the first forty years
of post-Ottoman Bosnia, when the region became a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After focusing on the Habsburg public sphere's representations of Bosnia, the first chapter will take stock of Vienna’s educational policies implemented in the region, as well as the parallel development of a local
associational culture. Special attention will be given to the role and position
of Muslim women, and how some of them succeeded in navigating between
the expectations of Bosnian Muslim society, those of the Habsburg authorities, and their own, to build a new kind of cultural capital altogether. In continuation with this line of reasoning, Chapter Two will address the debate
on the Muslim woman question that was taking shape in Bosnia, and more
žena Bratunac, 2010); Draga Gajić, Život i stvaralaštvo žena Banjaluke (Banja Luka: Grafopapir, 2013). Recently, a book has summarized this body of research: Jasmina Čaušević, ed., Women Documented: Women and Public Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 20th Century (Sarajevo: Sarajevo Open Centre, 2014).
For an extended version of the latter work in Bosnian, see Jasmina Čaušević, ed., Zabilježene: Žene i javni
život Bosne i Hercegovine u 20. vijeku: Drugo, dopunjeno i izmijenjeno izdanje (Sarajevo: Sarajevski Otvoreni Centar, 2014).
51 See in particular Nusret Kujraković, Žensko pitanje i socijalni položaj bošnjakinje u Bosni i Hercegovini
između dva svjetska rata (M.A. diss., University of Sarajevo, 2008). This thesis is very well documented,
and a precious resource for exploring the evolution of Muslim gender relations in interwar Bosnia. For
women’s movements, see also the work of the sociologist Zlatiborka Popov-Momčinović, Ženski pokret
u Bosni i Hercegovini: artikulacija jedne kontrakulture (Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar and Fondacija Cure, 2013), in particular pages 57–93.
52 Adnan Jahić, Muslimansko žensko pitanje u Bosni i Hercegovini 1908–1950 (Zagreb: Bošnjačka nacionalna
zajednica za Grad Zagreb i Zagrebačku županiju, Naučnoistraživački institut Ibn Sina Sarajevo, Gradski ured za obrazovanje, kulturu i sport Grada Zagreba, 2017).
53 Karl Kaser, Patriarchy after patriarchy: gender relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500–2000 (Berlin
and Wien: LIT, 2008), Agatha Schwartz, ed., Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its Legacy (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010).
21
INTRODUCTION
broadly in the Yugoslav region on the eve of the twentieth century. Special
attention is dedicated to the transnational circulation of people and ideas
that shaped this debate, involving both Europe and the Middle East, and
on the specific role of the thin cohort of women who managed to play a part
in it. These first two chapters highlight one of the major arguments of this
book: that debating appropriate Muslim gender relations was a way to discuss the fate of the Muslim community as a whole, in the post-Ottoman, European context.
In the political and social turmoil that accompanied the end of the Great
War and the creation of the first Yugoslavia, there was a transformation in
Muslim women’s engagement in the public space. They did not simply limit
themselves to written contributions in the press, or to support for associations in the form of donations, as they had done up until that point; they
also engaged in volunteering, becoming physically visible in the Bosnian
and gradually Yugoslav public space, in cities and in villages. For some of
them, this open challenge to the rules of sexual and confessional segregation that were still being enforced at that time was also accompanied by a renegotiation, and sometimes the complete abandonment, of the veiling practice. Chapter Three addresses this crucial shift, focusing in particular on
the presence of Muslim women in cultural, philanthropic and feminist associations, in Bosnia but also in the two main university cities of the country, Zagreb and Belgrade. This new situation required both men and women
to find new words and ideas to describe and address it; Chapter Four thus
looks at the radical reconfiguration of the Muslim woman question in the
associational press during the 1920s and 1930s. If, until the Great War, discussions on this topic essentially revolved around the contents of, spaces for
and limits of female education, after 1918 many new issues were added to
the debate, such as the place of Muslim women in the national community.
Even if different references were mobilized by the activists of these associations, the written words they produced had one strong common theme:
that of fostering a growing inclusion of Muslim women in the forming Yugoslav social fabric. Here again, the idea that the Muslim population was living as a backward minority in Europe, and for that reason in need of change
and progress, structured the whole debate. However, in their mission to promote their competing ideas of appropriate post-Ottoman gender rules, associations did not uniquely limit themselves to putting pen to paper, they
22
INTRODUCTION
actively strove to put these ideas into practice. Chapter Five thus focusses
on the gender politics implemented by the associations, including the establishment of vocational schools and student dorms, workshops, literacy
courses, scholarship etc., and how these measures were modulated according to class variables. Among these initiatives, special attention will be given
to the festive culture that the associations cultivated in the interwar years.
As a matter of fact, Muslim women invested a great deal of time and energy
in this apparently un-political domain of activity, using it to increase their
individual and collective responsibility and visibility. For this reason, Chapter Six is dedicated to an analysis of associational festivities as a tool for the
empowerment of Muslim women.
The last chapter of this book will focus on the second half of the 1930s,
a short time lapse in which several major changes occurred. Shaped by radical shifts happening both in Europe and the Middle East, two new political forces gained visibility in Muslim and Yugoslav society: the communists
and the Islamic revivalists. Despite taking up starkly opposing positions on
virtually every issue on their agenda, these political forces had at least two
points in common: they considered Muslim women to play a crucial role in
their projects of social transformation; and they assigned to the voluntary
association, until then considered to be a bourgeois, progressive and intrinsically liberal institution, the crucial role of spreading their ideas to the Muslim population. For this reason, Chapter Seven compares the approaches
and discourses of these two political forces, and more precisely looks at how,
on the eve of the Second World War, they proposed new alternatives to the
political and social crisis shaking Yugoslavia and Europe.
23