Bosniak

The Bosniaks (, Cyrillic: Бошњаци, ; , ) are a South Slavic ethnic group native to the Southeast European historical region of Bosnia, today part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and who share a common ancestry, culture, history and the Bosnian language. Traditionally and predominantly adhering to Sunni Islam, they constitute native communities in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and the Republic of Kosovo. Largely due to displacement stemming from the Bosnian War in the 1990s they also make up a significant diaspora with several communities across Europe, the Americas and Oceania.

Bosniaks are typically characterized by their historic ties to the Bosnian historical region, adherence to Islam since the 15th and 16th centuries, culture, and the Bosnian language. Bosniaks have also frequently been denoted Bosnian Muslims in the Anglophone sphere mainly owing to this having been the primary verbiage used in the media coverage of the Bosnian War during the 1990s, however this term is today considered problematic for several reasons when intended as an ethnic descriptor rather than a religious one.Since the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ''Bosniak'' has replaced ''Muslim'' as an official ethnic term in part to avoid confusion with the religious term "Muslim”: an adherent of Islam. Hence, for the sake of ethnic distinction, omission of ”Bosniak” in favor of ”Bosnian Muslim” may today even be perceived as insensible to Bosniak national identity. Bosniaks may also often simply be referred to as Bosnians, though this term is understood to denote all inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina (regardless of ethnic identity) or apply to citizens of the country.

Etymology

According to the ''Bosniak'' entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first preserved use of "Bosniak" in English was by English diplomat and historian Paul Rycaut in 1680 as ''Bosnack'', cognate with post-classical Latin ''Bosniacus'' (1682 or earlier), French ''Bosniaque'' (1695 or earlier) or German ''Bosniak'' (1737 or earlier). The modern spelling is contained in the 1836 ''Penny Cyclopaedia'' V. 231/1: "''The inhabitants of Bosnia are composed of Bosniaks, a race of Sclavonian origin''". In the Slavic languages, ''-ak'' is a common suffix appended to words to create a masculine noun, for instance also found in the ethnonym of Poles (''Polak'') and Slovaks (''Slovák''). As such, "Bosniak" is etymologically equivalent to its non-ethnic counterpart "Bosnian" (which entered English around the same time via the Middle French, ''Bosnien''): a native of Bosnia.

From the perspective of Bosniaks, ''bosanstvo'' (Bosnianhood) and ''bošnjaštvo'' (Bosniakhood) are closely and mutually interconnected, as Bosniaks connect their identity with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The earliest attestation to a Bosnian ethnonym emerged with the historical term ''"Bošnjanin"'' (Latin: ''Bosniensis'') which denoted the people of the medieval Bosnian Kingdom. By the 15th century, the suffix ''-(n)in'' had been replaced by ''-ak'' to create the current form ''Bošnjak'' (Bosniak), first attested in the diplomacy of Bosnian king Tvrtko II who in 1440 dispatched a delegation (''Apparatu virisque insignis'') to the Polish king of Hungary, Władysław Warneńczyk (1440–1444), asserting a common Slavic ancestry and language between the ''Bosniak'' and Pole. The Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute thus defines ''Bosniak'' as "the name for the subjects of the Bosnian rulers in the pre-Ottoman era, subjects of the Sultans during the Ottoman era, and the current name for the most numerous of the three constituent peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniak, as well as the older term ''Bošnjanin'' (in Lat. ''Bosnensis''), is originally a name defining the inhabitants of the medieval Bosnian state".

Linguists have most commonly proposed the toponym Bosnia to be derived from the eponymous river '' Bosna''; widely believed to be a pre-Slavic hydronym in origin and possibly mentioned for the first time during the 1st century AD by Roman historian Marcus Velleius Paterculus as ''Bathinus flumen''.

Linguist Petar Skok expressed an opinion that the chronological transformation of this hydronym from the Roman times to its final Slavicization occurred in the following order; *''Bassanus''> *''Bassenus''> *''Bassinus''> *''Bosina''> ''Bosьna''> ''Bosna''.

According to the English medievalist William Miller in the work ''Essays on the Latin Orient'' (1921), the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin designation ..Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks ...

Identity

Bosniaks are generally defined as the South Slavic nation on the territory of the former Yugoslavia whose members identify themselves with Bosnia and Herzegovina as their ethnic state and are part of such a common nation, and of whom a majority are Muslim by religion. Nevertheless, leaders and intellectuals of the Bosniak community may have various perceptions of what it means to be Bosniak. Some may point to an Islamic heritage, while others stress the purely secular and national character of the Bosniak identity and its connection with Bosnian territory and history.

For the duration of Ottoman rule, the multiconfessional community of Bosnia was delineated primarily by faith rather than ethnic or national conceptualisation, and "Bosniak" came to refer to all inhabitants of Bosnia as a territorial designation. When Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, national identification in the modern sense had been a largely foreign concept to Bosnians of both the Christian and Muslim faiths, substantially lagging behind the Romantic nationalism of Europe at the time. In this regard, Christian Bosnians had not described themselves as either Serbs or Croats before the 19th century, particularly before the Austrian occupation, when the current tri-ethnic reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina was configured based on religious affiliation. For the Muslim Bosnians, this process was further delayed not least by the wish to retain local privileges bestowed upon them by the social structure of Ottoman Bosnia.

Austria-Hungary

The Austro-Hungarian administration of the joint Finance Minister Béni Kállay promoted the idea of a non-confessional unitary "Bosniak" identity that would encompass all inhabitants (more akin to "Bosnism"), going even as far as prohibiting Bosnian cultural associations from using the terms "Serb" and "Croat" in their names in the 1880s. In 1883, they officially called the vernacular language "Bosnian". The policy placed its hopes mainly with the Catholic community (who were not yet as deeply entrenched in Croat nationalism as the Orthodox were in the Serb one) and the Muslim community (seeking to distance them from the Ottoman Empire). In reality, only a small circle of Muslim notables at the time favoured such a unitary nation. The main proponent of the movement was Mehmed Kapetanović. Although it failed, the Bosniak ideology promoted by the Austrian-Hungarian authorities laid the foundation for the modern Bosniak identity. By emphasising the pre-Ottoman past, it created a founding myth, a theory of the massive conversion of medieval Bogumils to Islam upon the Ottoman conquest, offering a historical continuity and reasoning behind their presence in Europe.

Stephan Burián von Rajecz became the Finance Minister in 1903, marking a turning point in Austrian-Hungarian national policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina. They abandoned the failed Bosniak project and promoted a communitarian identity for the various groups within Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1907, they changed the name of the vernacular language to Serbo-Croatian. The Serbo-Croatian Muslims were referred to as "Mohammedans" until the early 1900s, when the term "Muslims" gained wider acceptance. The term gained official recognition during the 1910 census.

While the communitarisation of the socio-political life of the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic communities was harmonised with Serb and Croat nationalist sentiment, such a process was absent in the Muslim community. In the Austrian-Hungarian period and after it, the majority of Bosnian Muslims lacked national identity, while those who did often changed it through their lifetime. Historian Robert Donia wrote that "the declarations f nationalitywere mostly tactical and political; some Muslims changed from one camp to the other on several occasions. Simply stated, a separate Muslim identity was too advanced to be easily renounced by any significant number of Bosnian Muslims".

Despite the low school attendance, the Muslim community produced a small portion of intelligentsia. The intelligentsia conflicted with the traditional Muslim elites, urging them to abandon Ottoman nostalgia and accept European modernity. The intellectuals refused a national identity limited to Bosnian Muslims, instead opting to join the two existing camps: the Serbian or the Croatian. The division between the two camps further weakened the Muslim intelligentsia. According to Donia, "more Muslims declared themselves as Croats prior to the turn of the wentiethcentury. They tended to be young intellectuals schooled in Zagreb, Vienna, or elsewhere in the Monarchy. After 1900, more declared themselves Serbs, probably drawn by the magnetic military and political successes of independent Serbia".

The traditional representatives of the Bosnian Muslims were indifferent towards the idea of a national identity or deeply reserved about being included in one. During a parliamentary discussion about the name of the vernacular language, the Bosnian Muslim representative Derviš Bey Miralem stated that:

Yugoslavia

Until 1968, the Bosnian Muslims were given no official recognition as a distinct ethnicity in the former Yugoslavia. In 1968, the Constitution of Yugoslavia was thus amended to introduce a " Muslim nationality" that would define native Slavic Serbo-Croatian speaking Muslims on the territory of the former Yugoslavia; effectively recognizing a constitutive Yugoslav nation alongside Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians. Prior to this, the great majority of Bosnian Muslims had declared either "Ethnically Undecided Muslim" or – to a lesser extent – "Undecided Yugoslav" in Yugoslav censuses as the other available options were "Serb-Muslim" and "Croat-Muslim". Albeit achieving national recognition, the novel use of "Muslim" as an ethnic rather than religious denomination was met with scepticism by leading Bosnian Muslim political figures such as Hamdija Pozderac who remarked "they are not giving us Bosnianhood, they are offering Muslimness. Let us take what they are offering, even if it is the wrong name, but we will open a process".

Modern identity

By the early 1990s, a vast majority of Bosnian Muslims identified as ethnic Muslims. According to a poll from 1990, only 1.8% of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina supported the idea of a "Bosniak" national identity (by then already an essentially archaic term), while 17% considered the name to encompass all of the inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their main political party, the Party of Democratic Action, rejected the idea of Bosniak identity and managed to expel those who promoted it. The supporters of the Bosniak nationhood established their political party, the Muslim Bosniak Organisation, and received only 1.1% of the votes during the 1990 general election. At the 1991 census, 1,496 people identified as Muslims-Bosniaks, 1,285 as Bosniaks and 876 as Bosniaks-Muslims, totalling to 3,657 or 0.08% of the total population.

On 27 September 1993, however, after the leading political, cultural, and religious representatives of Bosnian Muslims held an assembly and at the same time when they rejected the Owen–Stoltenberg peace plan adopted the Bosniak name deciding to "return to our people their historical and national name of Bosniaks, to tie ourselves in this way for our country of Bosnia and its state-legal tradition, for our Bosnian language and all spiritual tradition of our history". The main reason for the SDA to adopt the Bosniak identity, only three years after expelling the supporters of the idea from their party ranks, was due to foreign policy considerations. One of the leading SDA figures Džemaludin Latić, the editor of the official gazette of the party, commented on the decision stating that: "In Europe, he who doesn't have a national name, doesn't have a country" and that "we must be Bosniaks, that what we are, to survive in our country". The decision to adopt the Bosniak identity was primarily influenced by the change of opinion of the former communist intellectuals such as Atif Purivatra, Alija Isaković and those who were a part of the pan-Islamists such as Rusmir Mahmutćehajić (who was a staunch opponent of Bosniak identity), all of whom saw the changing of the name to Bosniak as a way to connect the Bosnian Muslims to the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In other ex-Yugoslav countries with significant Slavic Muslim populations, adoption of the Bosniak name has been less consistent. The effects of this phenomenon are most evident in the censuses. For instance, the 2003 Montenegrin census recorded 48,184 people who registered as Bosniaks and 28,714 who registered as Muslim by nationality. Although Montenegro's Slavic Muslims form one ethnic community with a shared culture and history, this community is divided on whether to register as Bosniaks (''i.e.'' adopt Bosniak national identity) or as Muslims by nationality.Dimitrovova, Bohdana
"Bosniak or Muslim? Dilemma of one Nation with two Names."
. ''Southeast European Politics'', Vol. II, No. 2. October 2001. Similarly, the 2002 Slovenian census recorded 8,062 people who registered as Bosnians, presumably highlighting (in large part) the decision of many secular Bosniaks to primarily identify themselves in that way (a situation somewhat comparable to the " Yugoslav" option during the socialist period). However, such people comprise a minority (even in countries such as Montenegro where it is a significant political issue) while the great majority of Slavic Muslims in the former Yugoslavia have adopted the Bosniak national name.

Relation to Bosnian nationalism

National consciousness developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina among the three ethnic groups in the 19th century, with emergent national identities being influenced by the millet system in place in Ottoman society (where 'religion and nationality were closely intertwined and often synonyms'). During Ottoman rule, there was a clear distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. There were different tax categories and clothes, but only in the late 18th- and early 19th century "the differentiations develop into ethnic and national forms of identification", according to Soeren Keil. The bordering countries of Serbia and Croatia consequently laid claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina; a combination of religion, ethnic identity and the territorial claim was the basis for the three distinct nations.

Expressions of a Bosnian identity that transcended confessional boundaries were uncommon. Among Muslim ayans and certain Franciscan priests, a strong sense of Bosnian identity primarily reflected regional affiliation while maintaining a clear confessional dimension. For Christians, this regional sentiment coexisted with Serbian or Croatian national identification. For Muslims, it was tied to the protection of local privileges but did not challenge their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. In this context, their use of the term "Bosniak" to denote regional origin lacked national significance. By the time the Ottoman period in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended in 1878, the concept of national identification remained largely absent among Bosnian Muslims.

Franciscan Ivan Franjo Jukić viewed Bosnians as exclusively Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, while he regarded Muslims as Turks. He maintained that Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats were among the "tribes" that formed the broader "Illyrian nation." Sometimes the term ''Turčin'' (Turk) was commonly used to describe the Bosnian and other Slavic Muslims, designating religious, and not ethnic belonging. The Italian diplomat M. A. Pigafetta, wrote in 1585 that Bosnian Christian converts to Islam refused to be identified as "Turks", but as "Muslims".

Klement Božić, an interpreter at the Prussian consulate in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 19th century, noted that Bosnian Christians referred to their Muslim fellow countrymen as "Turks" and Muslims from other places as "Ottomans," and that Bosnian Muslims would not call an Ottoman a Turk or consider him a brother. He also mentioned the mutual dislike between Bosnian Muslims and Ottomans. In 1829, geographer Conrad Malte-Brun wrote that Muslims in Constantinople commonly used the term "infidel" to describe Bosnian Muslims and believed Bosnians, descended from northern warriors, were barbaric due to their isolation from European enlightenment. In 1842, Croatian writer Matija Mažuranić observed that in Bosnia, Christians did not call themselves Bosniaks, while Muslims did and considered Christians as serfs. Muslim city dwellers, craftsmen, and artisans, who were free and tax-exempt, also identified as Bosniaks and spoke Bosniak language."

Before that, it was Franciscan Filip Lastrić (1700–1783) who first wrote on the commonality of the citizens in the Bosnian ''eyalet'', regardless of their religion. In his work ''Epitome vetustatum provinciae Bosniensis'' (1765), he claimed that all inhabitants of the Bosnian province (''eyalet'') constituted "one people" of the same descent.

Relation to Croat and Serb nationalism

As a melting ground for confrontations between different religions, national mythologies, and concepts of statehood, much of the historiography of Bosnia and Herzegovina has since the 19th century been the subject of competing Serb and Croat nationalist claims part of wider Serbian and Croatian hegemonic aspirations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, inherently interwoven into the complex nature of the Bosnian War at the end of the 20th century.
As Andras Riedlmayer 's research for the Hague Tribunal demonstrates: "What happened in Bosnia is not just genocide, the willful destruction of the essential foundations of one particular community or group of people within a society" " ... "What happened in Bosnia is also described as sociocide, the murdering of a progressive, complex, and enlightened society so that a regressive, simple, and bigoted society could replace it."

Social anthropologist Tone Bringa develops that "Neither Bosniak, nor Croat, nor Serb identities can be fully understood with reference only to Islam or Christianity respectively, but have to be considered in a specific Bosnian context that has resulted in a shared history and locality among Bosnians of Islamic as well as Christian backgrounds."

According to Mitja Velikonja, Bosnia and Herzegovina constitutes "a historical entity which has its own identity and its own history". Robert Donia claims that as Serbia and Croatia only occupied parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina briefly in the Middle Ages, neither have any serious historical claims to Bosnia. Moreover, Donia states that although Bosnia did interact with its Serb and Croat neighbours over the centuries, it had a very different history and culture from them. 12th-century Byzantine historian John Kinnamos reported that Bosnia was not subordinated to the Grand Count of Serbia; rather the Bosnians "had their distinct way of life and government". The expert on medieval Balkan history John V.A. Fine reports that the Bosnians (''Bošnjani'') have been a distinct people since at least the 10th century.

It is noted that writers on nationalism in Yugoslavia or the Bosnian War tend to ignore or overlook the Bosnian Muslim ideology and activity and see them as victims of other nationalisms and not nationalistic themselves.

Origins

The Early Slavs, a people from northeastern Europe, settled the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina (and neighboring regions) after the sixth century (amid the Migration Period), and were composed of small tribal units drawn from a single Slavic confederation known to the Byzantines as the ''Sclaveni'' (whilst the related '' Antes'', roughly speaking, colonized the eastern portions of the Balkans).

Recent Anglophone scholarship has tended to downplay the role of migrations. For example, Timothy Gregory conjectures that "It is now generally agreed that the people who lived in the Balkans after the Slavic "invasions" were probably, for the most part, the same as those who had lived there earlier, although the creation of new political groups and the arrival of small numbers of immigrants caused people to look at themselves as distinct from their neighbours, including the Byzantines." However, the archaeological evidence paints a picture of widespread depopulation, perhaps a tactical re-settlement of Byzantine populations from provincial hinterlands to Coastal towns after 620 CE.

In former Yugoslav historiography, a second migration of "Serb" and "Croat" tribes (variously placed in the 7th to 9th century) is viewed as that of elites imposing themselves on a more numerous and 'amorphous' Slavic populace, however such a paradigm needs to be clarified empirically.

Eighth-century sources mention early Slavophone polities, such as the '' Guduscani'' in northern Dalmatia, the principality of Slavs in Lower Pannonia, and that of Serbs (''Sorabos'') who were 'said to hold much of Dalmatia'.

The earliest reference to Bosnia as such is the ''De Administrando Imperio'', written by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (r. 913–959). At the end of chapter 32 ("Of the Serbs and of the country they now dwell in"), after a detailed political history, Porphyrogenitus asserts that the prince of Serbia has always submitted himself to Rome, in preference to Rome's regional rivals, the Bulgarians. He then gives two lists of ''kastra oikoumena'' (inhabited cities), the first being those "''en tē baptismenē serbia''" (in baptized Serbia; six listed), the second being "''εἱς τὸ χορίον Βόσονα, τὸ Κάτερα καί τὸ Δεσνήκ'' / ''eis to chorion Bosona, to Katera kai to Desnēk''" (in the territory of Bosona, he cities ofKatera and Desnik).

To Tibor Zivkovic, this suggests that from a tenth-century Byzantine viewpoint, Bosnia was a territory within the principality of Serbia. The implicit distinction made by Porphyrogenitus between "baptised Serbia" and the territory of Bosona is noteworthy.

Subsequently, Bosnia might have been nominally vassal to various rulers from Croatia and Duklja, but by the end of the twelfth century, it came to form an independent unit under an autonomous ruler, Ban Kulin, who called himself Bosnian.

In the 14th century, a Bosnian kingdom centred on the river Bosna emerged. Its people, when not using local (county, regional) names, called themselves Bosnians.

Following the conquest of Bosnia by the Ottoman Empire in the mid-15th century, there was a rapid and extensive wave of conversion from Christianity to Islam, and by the early 1600s roughly two-thirds of Bosnians were Muslim. In addition, a smaller number of converts from outside Bosnia were in time assimilated into the common Bosniak unit. These included Croats (mainly from Turkish Croatia), the Muslims of Slavonia who fled to Bosnia following the Austro-Turkish war), Serbian and Montenegrin Muhacirs (in Sandžak particularly Islamicized descendants of the Old Herzegovinian and highlander tribes from Brda region, such as Rovčani, Moračani, Drobnjaci and Kuči), and slavicized Vlachs,, pp. 199. Albanians and German Saxons.

Genetics

According to 2013 autosomal IBD survey "of recent genealogical ancestry over the past 3,000 years at a continental scale", the speakers of Serbo-Croatian language share a very high number of common ancestors dating to the migration period approximately 1,500 years ago with Poland and Romania-Bulgaria cluster among others in Eastern Europe. It is concluded to be caused by the Hunnic and Slavic expansion, which was a "relatively small population that expanded over a large geographic area", particularly "the expansion of the Slavic populations into regions of low population density beginning in the sixth century" and that it is "highly coincident with the modern distribution of Slavic languages". The 2015 IBD analysis found that the South Slavs have lower proximity to Greeks than with East Slavs and West Slavs, and "even patterns of IBD sharing among East-West Slavs–'inter-Slavic' populations (Hungarians, Romanians and Gagauz)–and South Slavs, i.e. across an area of assumed historic movements of people including Slavs". The slight peak of shared IBD segments between South and East-West Slavs suggests a shared "Slavonic-time ancestry".

An autosomal analysis study of 90 samples showed that Western Balkan populations had a genetic uniformity, intermediate between South Europe and Eastern Europe, in line with their geographic location. According to the same study, Bosnians (together with Croatians) are by autosomal DNA closest to East European populations and overlap mostly with Hungarians. In the 2015 analysis, Bosnians formed a western South Slavic cluster with the Croatians and Slovenians in comparison to an eastern cluster formed by Macedonians and Bulgarians with Serbians in the middle. The western cluster (Bosnians included) inclines Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks, while the eastern cluster toward Romanians and some extent Greeks. Based on analysis of IBD sharing, Middle Eastern populations most likely did not contribute to genetics in Islamicized populations in the Western Balkans, including Bosniaks, as these share similar patterns with neighbouring Christian populations.

Y-DNA studies on Bosniaks (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) show close affinity to other neighbouring South Slavs. Y-DNA results show notable frequencies of I2 with 43.50% (especially its subclade I2-CTS10228+), R1a with 15.30% (mostly its two subclades R1a-CTS1211+ and R1a-M458+), E-V13 with 12.90% and J-M410 with 8.70%. Y-DNA studies done for the majority Bosniak populated cities of Zenica and Tuzla Canton

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