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SMAIL BALICIT~~ Cultural Achievements of Bosnian Muslims
same time, efforts were made, surreptitiously or openly, to eliminate the
historical designation Bosniak from the political and popular consciousness.
Thus the Serbian political propaganda that the Bosnian Muslims, by
adopting Islam, had betrayed the nation, which in their case was not Serbian
anyway, is as preposterous as it is unfounded. The results of a census carried
out in 1991 on the territory of the former Yugoslavia gave the total number of
2,299.328 "Muslims on the national scene", i.e. Bosniaks; 90% of whom
declared Bosnian as their language, this being the actual term used for the idiom
spoken in Bosnia during the Ottoman rule and during the period of Austro-
Hungarian administration.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The Muslim community of Bosnia-Herzegovina embodies a viable culture, the
roots of which go back to the middle of the fifteenth century and the arrival of
the Ottoman Turks.
The culture of Islam is evident throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
especially in its principal int'ellectual and spiritual centres of Mostar and
Sarajevo. The latter is an important centre of Islamic education, for the Ghai
Khusrew Beg Madrasah and the great library of GhHzi Khusrew Beg are located
there. In addition, such monuments of Islamic civilization as mosques, clock
towers, mausoleums and public baths have given a singularly Islamic stamp to
the older Bosnian settlements.
Bosnia's connection with Islam probably dates from the tenth century.
The people of the region came to learn about the new religion from the
Hungarian Ismaelitak, or Ismaelites, who came to Bosnia between the tenth and
fourteenth centuries as soldiers, financial advisers, and merchants in the service
of the Hungarian and Croatian kings.
During the twelfth century, groups of the Turkish Islamic tribe of
Kalisians established settlements in Bosnia, Syrmium, and MaEva. Among the
place-names which give us evidence, even today, of the life of these Kalisians
in eastern Bosnia are Kalesije and Saraki (from Saracens) near Zvornik;
Saratica, near Mali Zvornik; and AgaroviCi (deriving from Agarenians, that is,
"descendants of Hagar"), near Rogatica. The most ancient mosque in Bosnia,
in Ustikolina, was in use at least fifty years before the conquest of Bosnia by the
Turks in 1463.
However, one cannot speak of any developing cultural influence of
Islam before the arrival of the Ottomans; any monuments or other immediate
cultural remains of these small medieval settlements were lost in the events that
led to the formation of the first Slavic states in southeast Europe. It is in the late
fifteenth century that the history of Islamic Bosnia really begins, for the Turkish
advent was followed by the gradual spread of Islam. A large number of the
Bosnian nobles and landowners did not share the prevailing Croatian allegiance
to the Roman Catholic Church, but had long been members of a Manichean
sect, called Bogomils, against whom thirteenth-century popes had launched
crusades. Moreover, the Ottoman Turks offered them what was virtually "first-