Muslims in Eastern Europe by Račius Egdūnas;

Author:Račius, Egdūnas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Montenegro and Serbia

For fifteen years after the start of the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro formed a reconstituted federal state, out of inertia officially called Yugoslavia. For this reason, but also because these two constitutive parts of post-socialist Yugoslavia shared the Bosniak-Muslim-dominated region of Sandžak while in areas along their eastern borders having ethnic Albanian minorities, in an analysis of the development of Islam one may talk of these two by-now-sovereign states as making up a separate sub-region among the post-Yugoslav states. Historically, the territories of both countries had been under Ottoman rule for several centuries before becoming independent in 1878, only to be reunited in post-First World War monarchical Yugoslavia and continue so until the complete erradication of Yugoslavia from the world map in 2006, when Montenegro went its own way.

Though both Serbia and Montenegro were part of the Ottoman Empire for some 350 years and their cities were fairly Islamised, unlike in neighbouring Bosnia and the Albanian lands, the bulk of their Slavic population remained Christian Orthodox. During numerous incursions by Austrians and uprisings of locals, much of the Islamic infrastructure in the form of buildings (including mosques, madrasas, tekkes and turbes) was destroyed and whatever remained was wiped away at the end of the nineteenth century, when both countries won independence from the Ottoman suzerainty. While during the Ottoman period the Montenegrin capital city Podgorica had not been an urban centre of any importance, the Serbian capital city Belgrade was one of the largest Ottoman cities in Europe. As such, it was full of Islamic architecture and Muslim inhabitants, with close to 100 mosques in the heyday of the Ottoman period in the seventeenth century. Today Belgrade has only one surviving historical mosque, but even that was torched by assailants in 2004 (this not being the first time it was attacked), in an apparent revenge act for the burnt Christian sites in Kosovo. With its four historical mosques and several other Muslim religious establishments, Podgorica today thus has more Islamic architecture than Belgrade.

After it annexed Kosovo and Macedonia in the aftermath of the 1912–13 Balkan wars, Serbia became the possessor of sizeable Albanian Muslim communities. During the socialist Yugoslavian period, when Macedonia was made into a separate federal republic, the Serbian Muslim population shrank significantly to encompass Albanian-inhabited Kosovo, Albanian-dominated Preševo Valley and the northern part of Sandžak, inhabited by Slavic-speaking Muslims, the future Bosniaks. Montenegro, for its part, swallowed the southern part of Bosniak-inhabited Sandžak while its eastern border went deep into Albanian-populated areas, bordering what after the Balkan wars became monarchical and later republican Albania.

In the post-communist era, with Kosovo gone since 1999, the Serbian Muslim community consists of two geographically distant parts – the majority Bosniaks are concentrated in Raška district (called Sandžak of Novi Pazar by the Bosniaks) bordering Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the minority Albanians inhabit the Preševo Valley straddling the Macedonian border. The two Muslim enclaves in Serbia are physically separated by independent Kosovo. Since

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