This book builds upon an impressive list of works (in both French and English) by Xavier Bougarel on the topic of Islam and nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A result of over twenty years of intensive research, it discusses the construction of a Bosniak national identity in its complex relationship to Islam, while also reminding us of the multiple imperial legacies that have left their marks in the political and religious dynamics of the Balkan region.

Exploring the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans in her illuminating Imagining the Balkans (1996), historian Maria Todorova asserts that the complex and multiple imprints of the Ottoman Empire have rendered the Balkans “the Ottoman legacy.” According to Bougarel, the imperial legacies that have informed and reshaped political projects and social realities in the region include Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian frameworks, traces from the local histories of the earlier Byzantine and Venetian empires, as well as more direct and strong influences from the quasi-imperial political projects of the interwar and the post-1945 Yugoslav states. Drawing on Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank's definition of empire as a political entity which seeks to manage its religious and ethnic diversity by exercising power in indirect, decentralized ways rather than by suppressing it (4), Bougarel argues that the rivalries between the modern South Slavic nationalisms are “partly attributable to their embeddedness in different imperial frameworks,” rather than to the medieval kingdoms which those nationalisms claim as predecessors (9). His conceptualization thus follows the imperial and colonial turn in the social sciences since the 1970s.

The chronologically-structured narrative of the book is organized in eight chapters. The first four chapters deal with the period of the Austro-Hungarian occupation (1878–1918), the first Yugoslavia (1918–41), WWII (1941–45), and communist Yugoslavia (1945–90), respectively. The fifth, sixth and seventh chapters look at the tumultuous period between 1990 and 1995 by engaging with the issues of how Muslim/Bosniak elites positioned themselves with regard to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the newly-acquired independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the impact of the war on the reshaping of Muslim/Bosniak national identity, and the international influences from both the west and the larger Muslim world that played out in Muslim/Bosniak national self-definition. The last chapter discusses the political and religious developments from the end of the war in 1995 to 2013. The author prioritizes a “top-down” perspective which focuses on the political, religious, and intellectual elites and bases his research “mainly on existing academic literature, press archives, and, less directly, fieldwork carried out in the 1990s and 2000s” (4). The limitations of this approach notwithstanding, the study demonstrates in-depth knowledge of the political, social, and religious developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina in minute detail.

The multinational Bosnia-Herzegovina was a playground for the competing Serb and Croat nationalisms from the late nineteenth century onwards, while the Muslim community was characterized by what Bougarel calls “national indetermination” until the 1960s. Major factors for the belated nationalization include “a certain nostalgia for the Ottoman empirical order” and the “enduring allegiance of the traditional Muslim elites to the central power” (2). Under the Austro-Hungarian occupation, the traditional and the secularizing Muslim elites formed alternate alliances with the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats, respectively, to demand the autonomy of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the author sees as a “search for empire” as the multinational society rendered nation-state projects irrelevant. Built on the ruins of the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires, the first Yugoslavia was a hybrid between an empire and a nation-state. The interwar period was a time of consolidation of Croat and Serb national identities, while the nationalization of the Muslim identities gained prominence from 1968 onwards, when the Yugoslav government categorized the Bosnian Muslims as a nation. During their nation-building, the Bosnian Muslims reaffirmed their allegiance to the multinational state rather than developing aspirations for a nation-state, which was a reenactment of the traditional allegiance of the Muslim elites to the central powers. The 1960s saw also the revival of the Islamic religious community (IC) in the context of the role assigned to it by Tito in the Non-Aligned Movement.

The pan-Islamist circle around Alija Izetbegović, which rose to prominence in the 1970s, promoted a “religiously inspired pro-nationalism” (98) as opposed to the secular intellectuals who sought to minimize the place of Islam in national identity. After the pan-Islamists entered politics by establishing a major party (Party of Democratic Action, SDA) in 1990, however, they preferred to focus on a nationalist rather than a pan-Islamist agenda. During the war, the SDA established a one-party state and placed Islam at the heart of Muslim/Bosniak national identity in addition to using it as a marker of political and ideological allegiance, similarly to the way in which communist ideology was used by the regime of Josip Broz Tito.

A major agent in the war-time re-Islamization was the IC, which attached imams to each army unit to provide the combatants with moral and religious support. Furthermore, the political leadership turned to the Muslim world for help, which arrived in the form of military assistance, humanitarian aid, and foreign jihadists. Transnational Islamic actors often spread neo-Salafi ideas and practices, which competed with the local Hanafi Sunnism and triggered the pluralization of religious life, thus challenging the IC's monopoly on Islam.

The attempts at the re-Islamization of Bosnian Muslims’ national identity triggered many controversies and led instead to the nationalization of Islam. In 1993, the all-Yugoslav IC was dissolved and a national IC was set up in its place, which resulted in the nationalization of Islamic religious institutions. With the growing role of Islam in the public space, religious practice became increasingly associated with political careerism and hypocrisy, which prompted disenchantment with religion. The increased visibility of Islam in the public space did not necessarily transfer into higher levels of religious piety. Furthermore, re-Islamization campaigns helped widen the divide between the country's diverse communities. Since mid-2000s, the IC has resumed its role as a national proxy institution, taking advantage of the SDA weakness. It supported unanimously the Euro-Atlantic integration of the country, and sought a leading role in defining the future of Islam in Europe.

The book under review shows pointedly the controversial and uncertain nationalization of the Bosnian Muslims, which shifts from attempts to minimize the role of Islam within national identity in the 1960s to a resolute assertion of the centrality of religion in the 1990s. The book invites us to think beyond the prevailing wisdom in the literature on Balkan history that modern ideologies and practices of homogenizing nationalisms were the sole culprits for the post-Yugoslav wars by showing the role of  imperial legacies in the shaping and sustaining of religiously-based communal boundaries and rivalries that underpinned the construction of competing national projects. In a meticulously-researched and detailed account on the formation of Muslim/Bosniak national identity, Bougarel tackles the complex and contradictory ways in which traces of bygone empires continuously resurface in modern political dynamics.

The author's preference for a “top-down” approach explains the lack of attention to the gender-differentiated experiences of Muslim/Bosniak nation-building—as such an approach inevitably reflects the dominant masculine perspective. This thoroughly-researched book would have benefited from a brief analysis of the controversial neo-liberal economic and social transformations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which after 1995 merged with post-war reconstruction and exacerbated the contradictions of Muslim/Bosniak nation-building. The paradoxes of post-war nationalization of Islam, which was carried out by the pro-Islamist political leadership, and which Bougarel brilliantly describes, are also related, to my mind, to the cooptation of Islam by the neo-liberal project—which is, after all, another imperial framework.

This book offers the most systematic and comprehensive exploration of the convoluted politics of Muslim/Bosniak national identity construction, and is a major contribution to the studies of Balkan and Yugoslav histories. It is a compelling reading for students, scholars, policy makers, and the informed public.