Balkan Muslims and the Middle East

The current revival of Islam among Balkan Muslims did not simply start when war broke out in Bosnia in 1992. It is part of a much longer history of contact with the Middle East.

This book is the first to examine the evolving relationship between the Balkans and the Middle East covering three phases: the establishment of communist Yugoslavia in 1946, the period of its violent collapse, and during its uneasy post-war and post-Yugoslav independence. Haruc Karcic identifies how official links with the Middle East sparked an Islamic revival. Particularly significant were the large-scale student exchanges between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, and Yugoslavia’s export of its military and technological knowledge to the Middle East. The book reveals that Yugoslavia realized it could use its Muslim population as ‘gate openers’ in winning lucrative business deals in the Arab world. Furthermore, the visibility and increasing number of Yugoslav Muslims in the Middle East were used for their Arabic skills to lobby for support when the war broke out.

The book uncovers how Balkan Muslims have survived and adapted to their turbulent history and what contact with Muslim-majority states meant to them. It is based on empirical research and primary sources including interviews, the archives of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and articles and reports published in the journals ‘Glasnik’ and ’Takvim’, and the newspapers ‘Preporod’ and ‘Oslobodjenje’.