Abstract

During the 19th century, due to the gradual withdraw of the Sublime Porte, different Balkan Muslim communities were forced out of the Ottoman empire's borders. This fate affected also the Muslim population of Bulgaria and Bosnia Herzegovina: as established by the Congress of Berlin, since 1878 they were forced to live under non-Muslim governments. However, for the Balkan Muslim communities the transition to a post-Ottoman framework generally meant political, social and cultural marginalization. The Muslim intellectual elite - organized around newspapers, associations and other cultural institutions - widely discussed for almost sixty years how to cope with the new living conditions and how to to react to that trend. This contribution aims to analyze the development of a Muslim public discourse in Bosnia and Bulgaria between 1878 and 1941 and to underline its intellectual references, main characters and contents.