Bosniak nationalism

Bosnian nationalism is the nationalism that asserts the nationality of Bosniaks and promotes the cultural unity of the Bosniaks. It is variably referred to as either Bošnjaštvo (Bosniakhood/Bosniakism/Bosniakdom) or Bosanstvo (Bosnianhood/Bosnianism/Bosniandom).

In both the past and present, Bosnian nationalism has been largely based upon a focus to preserve the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to ensure the national and cultural unity and rights of Bosniaks.

The earliest vestige of a Bosnian identity initially emerged in medieval Bosnia and lacked any religious connotation. The situation remained largely unchanged throughout the Ottoman period with terms such as "Boşnak milleti", "Boşnak kavmi", and "Boşnak taifesi" (all meaning, roughly, "the Bosnian/Bosniak people") being used to describe Bosnians in an ethnic or "tribal" sense. After the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, the Austrian administration officially endorsed Bošnjaštvo ('Bosniakhood') as the basis of a continued multi-confessional Bosnian nation. The policy aspired to isolate Bosnia and Herzegovina from its irredentist neighbors (Orthodox Serbia, Catholic Croatia, and the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire) and to negate the concept of Croatian and Serbian nationhood which had already begun to make headway among Bosnia and Herzegovina's Catholic and Orthodox communities, respectively. Nevertheless, in part due to the dominant standing held in the previous centuries by the native Muslim population in Ottoman Bosnia, a sense of Bosnian nationhood was cherished mainly by Muslim Bosnians, while fiercely opposed by nationalists from Serbia and Croatia who were instead opting to claim the Bosnian Muslim population as their own, a move that was rejected by most Bosnian Muslims.

In an article of the journal Bošnjak ("The Bosniak"), Bosniak author and mayor of Sarajevo Mehmed-beg Kapetanović declared that Bosnian Muslims were neither Croats nor Serbs but a distinct, though related, people:

Whereas the Croats argue that the Orthodox are our greatest enemies and that Serbdom is the same as Orthodoxy, the Serbs wear themselves out calling our attention to some bogus history, by which they have Serbianized the whole world. We shall never deny that we belong to the South Slav family; but we shall remain Bosniaks, like our forefathers, and nothing else.

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