Bosniaks of Serbia (Serbian: Бошњаци у Србији, romanized: Bošnjaci u Srbiji) are a recognized national minority in Serbia. According to the 2022 census, the population of ethnic Bosniaks in Serbia is 153,801, constituting 2.3% of the total population, which makes them the third-largest ethnic group in the country. The vast majority of them live in the southwestern part of the country that borders Montenegro and Kosovo, called Sandžak. Their cultural center is located in Novi Pazar.
The first major political organising of the Sandžak Bosniaks happened at the Sjenica conference, held in August 1917, during the Austrian-Hungarian occupation of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar. The Bosniak representatives at the conference decided to ask the Austrian-Hungarian authorities to separate the Sanjak of Novi Pazar from Serbia and Montenegro and merge it with Bosnia and Herzegovina, or at least to give an autonomy to the region.[3]
After the end of the World War I and the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, the Sandžak region also become a part of the newly created country. At the Constitutional Assembly election held in 1920, the Sandžak Bosniaks voted for the People's Radical Party. The main reason for supporting the radicals was a promise made to several influential Bosniaks that they would be compensated for losing their lands during the agrarian reform.[4]
Sandžak Muslims organised themselves jointly with the Albanians in the Džemijet party, that covered the area of the present-day Kosovo, North Macedonia and Sandžak. The main goal of the Džemijet was the protection of interests of Bosniaks and Albanians. Džemijet was founded in 1919 in Skopje and was led by Nexhip Draga and later by his brother Ferhat Bey Draga. After it was founded in Skopje, branches of the party were soon founded in Kosovo, Sandžak and the rest of Macedonia. District and municipal branches in Sandžak were founded at a meeting of Džemijet held in Novi Pazar in 1922. The meeting was highly attended, and it insisted upon Bosniak unity instead of division by various political parties.
One of the most important political figures of the Bosniaks in part of Sandžak situated at Serbia's geographic territory was Mufti Muamer Zukorlić, who led revival of Bosniak teritorial and institutional organization in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Religion
According to the 2011 Census, almost all Bosniaks in Serbia are Muslim (99.5%). The remainder is not religious or did not declare their religion.[5] The Bosniaks make up the basis or 75% of the Muslim community in Serbia, while most other Muslims being ethnic Albanians or Romani.
Demographics
Bosniaks, as ethnic minority, are primarily the ones living in south-western Serbia, in the region historically known as Sandžak, which is today divided between the states of Serbia and Montenegro. Colloquially referred to as Sandžaklije by themselves and others, Bosniaks form the majority in three out of six municipalities in the Serbian part of Sandžak: Novi Pazar (77.1%), Tutin (90%) and Sjenica (73.8%) and comprise an overall majority of 59.6%. The town of Novi Pazar is a cultural center of the Bosniaks in Serbia. Many Bosniaks from the Sandžak area left after the fall of the Ottoman Empire to continental Turkey. Over the years a large number of Bosniaks from the Sandžak region left to other countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, United States, Canada, Australia, etc. A second group is formed by Bosniaks that came from Bosnia and Herzegovina to the largest cities in Serbia during 20th century as economic migrants and inter-Yugoslav migrations.
Today, the majority of Bosniaks are Sunni Muslim and adhere to the Hanafi school of thought, the largest and oldest school of Islamic law in jurisprudence within Sunni Islam. Some in this region who identify as Bosniak do so on account of religious identity as Muslims, but are ethnically Albanian and live in villages (Boroštica, Doliće, Ugao) located in the Pešter region. They have adopted a Bosniak identity in censuses, due to inter-marriage, during the period of SFR Yugoslavia, or due to sociopolitical discrimination against Albanians following the break-up of SFRJ.[6]
^Andrea Pieroni, Maria Elena Giusti, & Cassandra L. Quave (2011). "Cross-cultural ethnobiology in the Western Balkans: medical ethnobotany and ethnozoology among Albanians and Serbs in the Pešter Plateau, Sandžak, South-Western Serbia." Human Ecology. 39.(3): 335. "The current population of the Albanian villages is partly “bosniakicised”, since in the last two generations a number of Albanian males began to intermarry with (Muslim) Bosniak women of Pešter. This is one of the reasons why locals in Ugao were declared to be “Bosniaks” in the last census of 2002, or, in Boroštica, to be simply “Muslims”, and in both cases abandoning the previous ethnic label of “Albanians”, which these villages used in the census conducted during “Yugoslavian” times. A number of our informants confirmed that the self-attribution “Albanian” was purposely abandoned in order to avoid problems following the Yugoslav Wars and associated violent incursions of Serbian para-military forces in the area. The oldest generation of the villagers however are still fluent in a dialect of Ghegh Albanian, which appears to have been neglected by European linguists thus far. Additionally, the presence of an Albanian minority in this area has never been brought to the attention of international stakeholders by either the former Yugoslav or the current Serbian authorities."
Crnovršanin, Harun; Sadiković, Nuro (2001). Sandžak - porobljena zemlja : Bosna, Sandžak i Kosovo kroz historiju (1. izd ed.). Wuppertal: Bosanska riječ--Bosnisches Wort. ISBN9783934149793.
Kamberović, Husnija (2009). "Projugoslavenska struja među muslimanskim političarima 1918. godine". Historijska Traganja (in Serbo-Croatian). Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju (3). ISSN1840-3875.
Novi Pazar
Tutin
Sjenica
