Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

communist Yugoslavia the Catholic Church (including its Croatian and Slovene
branches) was organized into 5 ecclesiastical provinces, 8 archdioceses,
13 dioceses, and 4 apostolic administraturae, with a total of 2,702 parishes,
182 monasteries, and 415 convents. Bishops communicated with state authorities
through the BKJ, headquartered in Zagreb. The BKJ regularly cooperated
with the papal nuncio in Belgrade, and this official would attend
all conference sessions by invitation (not by his “higher authority”). The
Church had 32 bishops, 4,121 diocesan priests, 1,416 monks, and 6,587
nuns. There was also an influential Church unit abroad, with 181 parishes
and missions with 250 priests. The Catholic Church in Yugoslavia had 2
Catholic universities in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Zagreb, with theological
schools in Zagreb and Split; and 7 Catholic colleges and 19 seminaries for
preparation of priests were attended in the 1980s by some 1,300 students.
There are also two institutes for Croats and Slovenes in Rome who attend
Catholic universities. The Catholic Church in Yugoslavia maintained two
publishing houses and 32 book publishers, in addition to some 180 periodicals
and religious newspapers with a circulation of over seven hundred
thousand. 46
The Muslim Religious Organization
(The Islamic Community)
Prior to the Austrian rule established in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1878
and 1908, Bosnian Muslim religious leaders, clergy, and other learned men
trained in Islamic law and theology (ulema) did not have an autonomous
religious organization. These South Slavs of Christian (Serbian and Croatian)
ancestry operated under Ottoman religious authority (the Meshihat) in Istanbul.
During the Austrian rule, Bosnian Muslim clergy showed more enthusiasm
toward the establishment of a self-administered religious institution.
47 In the interwar Yugoslav kingdom, the Muslim Religious
Organization, headquartered first at Belgrade and then in Sarajevo, became
autonomous but close to the Bosnian Muslim political party, the Yugoslav
Muslim Organization (YMO). The Belgrade regime supported both the Muslim
Religious Organization and the YMO and used them as checks against
the two major domestic nationalisms. In both Yugoslavias, the Muslim religious
organization supported the common state and viewed it as an acceptable
political framework for Slavic as well as non-Slavic Muslims scattered
across Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Sandjak, Montenegro, Kosovo,
Macedonia, and Croatia. During World War II, most of the lower clergy and
lay Muslim leaders, including many beys, sided with the partisan movement.
The Muslim religious organization (the Islamic Religious Community, later
renamed into Islamic Community) rebuilt itself in socialist Yugoslavia. In
the early 1980s, the Islamic Community (IZ) was an organization of Muslim
clerical and lay officials headquartered in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.
During the communist era, the unified Muslim religious organization was
religion, ethnicity, and nationhood 11