Being Muslim the Bosnian way

by Tone Bringa

"I have been able to follow a Bosnian community over a period of six years, during which it has undergone dramatic changes and events. In the late eighties people were working hard against ... economic crisis ... In 1990 they were full of optimism about the future ... In January 1993 it was a village in fear surrounded by war on all sides ... In April 1993 the village was attacked by Croat forces. In October 1993 none of the four hundred Muslims in the village remained. They had either fled, been placed in detention camps, or been killed." Thus begins Tone Bringa's moving ethnographic account of Bosnian Muslims' lives in a rural village located near Sarajevo. Although they represent a majority of the population in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Muslims are still members of a minority culture in the region that was once Yugoslavia. The question of ethno-national identity has become paramount in this society, and the author focuses on religion as the defining characteris