BEYOND
MOSQUE, CHURCH,
AND STATE
Alternative Narratives of the
Nation in the Balkans
Edited by
THEODORA DRAGOSTINOVA
and
YANA HASHAMOVA
Central European University Press
Budapest–New York
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Table of Contents
List of Plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preface and Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
ix
INTRODUCTION
Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives of
the Nation in the Balkans
Theodora Dragostinova and Yana Hashamova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Part I. HISTORICAL DILEMMAS
1.Emergence and Historical Development of Muslim
Communities in the Ottoman Balkans: Historical and
Historiographical Remarks
Nikolay Antov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.From Exorcism to Historicism: The Legacy of Empire
and the Pains of Nation-Making in the Balkans
İpek K. Yosmaoğlu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
57
3.Patriotic Publics: Rethinking Empire, Nationality, and the
Popular Press in Ottoman and Habsburg Bosnia
Edin Hajdarpasic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
. . . . .
4.In Search of the Bulgarians: Mapping the Nation through
National Classifications
Theodora Dragostinova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
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Table of Contents
5.Faith and Nation: Politicians, Intellectuals, and the Official
Recognition of a Muslim Nation in Tito’s Yugoslavia
Brenna Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
6.The Feeble Charm of National(ist) Communism:
Intellectuals and Cultural Politics in Zhivkov’s Bulgaria
Irina Gigova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .
151
Part II. CONTEMPORARY DEBATES
7.E mos shikjoni kish e xhamija (And Look Not to Church and
Mosque): How Albania and Macedonia Illuminate Bosnia
and Bulgaria
Victor A. Friedman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
8.Women between State and Mosque: Compliance or
Agency?
Yana Hashamova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
9.(Post?)National Portraits from the Postsocialist Soundstage:
Three Bulgarian Folkloric Productions of the 2000s
Donna A. Buchanan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
10.Who Brought Ataka to the Political Scene? Analysis of the
Vote for Bulgaria’s Radical Nationalists
Maria Popova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
259
11.Local Governance in Bosnia: Addressing Ethno-Nationally
and Locally Defined Interests?
Paula M. Pickering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
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Preface and Acknowledgements
The idea for this volume emerged from a conference held at The Ohio
State University, “Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Negotiating
Religious and Ethno-National Identities in the Balkans,” 6–8 October
2011. The goal of the conference was to engage the issue of linguistic,
religious, and ethno-national diversity in the Balkans from a variety of
perspectives while questioning assumptions of Balkan expectionalism
by challenging well-entrenched stereotypes about the area both in academia and in the general public space. The conference was generously
funded through a Collaborative Research Grant from the Division of
Arts & Humanities and a Faculty Grant from the Mershon Center for
International Security Studies, Ohio State University. The organizers
also wish to express their gratitude to the Slavic and East European
Center, the Department for Slavic Languages and Cultures Paisii
Fund, and the Department of History.
Considering the findings of the conference and further research,
we narrowed down the topic of the volume to alternative notions of
the nation in the Balkans, showcasing the existence of non-national
and anti-national alternatives to state-centered ideas of the territorial
nation in a variety of case studies. While focusing on areas that are
usually considered “hotbeds” of national unrest due to their religious
and ethno-national diversity, such as Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, and
Bulgaria, the contributors challenge the readers to engage in a new way
of thinking about the region and Balkan studies in general. The volume
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BEYOND MOSQUE, CHURCH, AND STATE
includes contributions from leading and junior scholars on the Balkans
and presents a truly interdisciplinary perspective from the fields of
history, cultural linguistics, musicology, film studies, and political
science. Its goal is twofold: to showcase cutting-edge research on the
Balkans in a variety of disciplines and to provide a textbook for upperlevel undergraduate and graduate courses on the Balkans, nationalism,
state-building, and identity in a comparative European perspective.
The volume will also appeal to governmental agencies that continue to
monitor, study, and fund research on the area and to the general educated reader interested in the Balkans.
We wish to thank our contributors for their painstaking work in
a challenging project that sough to integrate different disciplines and
their respective (often conflicting) research questions and methodologies. The reader will discover that the transliteration styles of the chapters differ, but we wanted to preserve the interdisciplinary nature of
the scholarly dialogue both in content and form. The comments of the
reviewers of Central European University Press kept us on our toes as
we were making the final changes in anticipation of an open-minded,
engaged, and interdisciplinary audience. Many thanks to Jordan Peters
for help with the conference, to Catalina Hunt for editing and formatting some of the early chapter drafts, and to Justin Wilmes for preparing the final version of the volume for submission.
All web links were accessed and active in May 2015, unless noted
otherwise.
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