Between East and West

Pan-Islamism was a movement of Muslim political renewal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite its historical situatedness in Balkan Muslim politics between the 1870s and 1940s, the concept continues to be employed by historians of recent Bosnian national history to describe trends among Bosnian Muslim activists. The curious anachronism has to do with the late construction of Bosniak national identity in which pan-Islamism was used by Bosnian nationalists and their rivals up into the 1990s. After the term Islamism was problematised in the 1990s, pan-Islamism has been reframed as a “spiritual” phenomenon, reflecting a complex identity building of a non-sovereign religious minority that uses means of regional or cultural identification for its own affirmation. The aim of this chapter is to look at the changing character of Bosnian pan-Islamism throughout the 20th century from the perspective of a proto-national phenomenon. This chapter will analyse the autonomist-reformist, revivalist, and activist forms of pan-Islamism in their specific contexts. The aim is to understand the specific role of the imagined belonging to a larger geographical and cultural bloc where regional imagination sustains a process of nationalisation.