Islam and Muslims in the Perspective of Croatian Historiography

This chapter deals with the perception of Islam and Muslims in Croatian historiographic sources in the period between c. 1500 and c. 1990. Already in the early modern period Croatian narrative sources, in the context of ongoing Ottoman wars, some very negative perceptions about Islam, and particularly about converts to Islam, became widespread, but there were relatively numerous exceptions to these attitudes. In the nineteenth century, closely related to the development of activities of South Slavic national integration ideologies centred in Croatia, negative stereotypes about converts to Islam persisted and even became more prominent. Croatian historians of the nineteenth century often use extremely negative constructions about Bosnian and Croatian converts to Islam, sometimes under the influence of Orientalist travelogues and folk oral tradition. Between end of the nineteenth century and 1930s, under the influence of social and political changes in Croatia and wider context, the open anti-Islamic discourse disappeared—including the vilification of converts—while anti-Ottoman attitudes in general remained. After the Second World War, research of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s history, especially on issues such as Islamization, declined in Croatia.