Muslims and the Making of Modern

Europe Emily Greble

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i

Muslims and the Making

of Modern Europe
ii
iii

Muslims and
the Making of
Modern Europe
z
EMILY GREBLE

1
iv

1
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DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538807.001.0001

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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
v

For Matthew
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vi

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Glossary of Islamic Terms  xiii
List of Foreign Place Names  xv

Introduction  1

PART I. The Long Post-​Ottoman Transition, 1878–​1921

1. Muslim Rights and Political Belonging After the Congress

of Berlin  23

2. Confessional Sovereignty and the Formation of a Muslim

Legal Other  53
3. Survival and Autonomy: Lessons of the Balkan Wars and the
First World War  81

4. Second-​or Third-​Class Citizens: Becoming Minorities after

World War I  107

PART II. Yugoslav Experiments in Nation-​Building, 1918–​1941

5. The Shari’a Mandate and Yugoslav Nation-​Building  135

6. “The Bonfire of Muslim Unity”: Muslim Politics and the Crisis of

Yugoslav Democracy  164

7. Islamic Legal Revivalism and the Crisis of Europe  191

vi

viii Contents

PART III. War and Political Reordering, 1941–​1949

8. “Back to Islam!”: The Promise and Possibility of Hitler’s Europe  213

9. The Eradication of the Shari’a Legal Order in Tito’s Yugoslavia  231

Conclusion  255

Notes  263
Bibliography  321
Index  337
ix

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my partner, Matthew Worsnick, without

whom I would never have had the courage or wherewithal to travel to a dozen
archives in five countries over the past ten years, pregnant, with dog, with dog
and infant, with toddler and infant, with toddler and preschooler, and so on.
As my editor, Matthew has revised some of the best lines of this book; as my
champion, he not only enabled me, but encouraged me to undertake a re-
search project that he knew was a labor of love. Through our annual research
pilgrimages, our two curious sons, Thomas and Samuel, came to believe that
mothers and fathers are scholars, and that historians have great adventures
hunting for remote mountainside monasteries, abandoned forts, and secret
caves where Tito may have hidden during World War II. They have lived this
book since they were in the womb, and they have rarely called into question
why their lives are not quite like those of their friends (except once, when they
were 5 and 7 years old, as we were crossing the Serbia-​Bosnia border by foot
because I inadvertently hired an illegal taxi and we were denied entry at the
border. As they rolled their little suitcases for a mile, hunched over with heavy
backpacks filled with Pokémon cards and Legos, they asked whether next year
they might go to summer camp instead). My debt to this incredible family is
immeasurable.
My late father used to joke that I have an uncanny ability to convince
people to join “Team Greble” to support me in my crazy endeavors. The team
for this book has been particularly robust, and I am immensely grateful.
In our weekly exchanges for nearly two decades, Aleksandar Gašić, my in-
vincible research assistant, has offered his intellect, good humor, friendship,
research acumen, and translation assistance. His tireless support has sustained
me in more ways than I can count. Irena Rosić-​Gašić regularly stepped in to
decipher unintelligible handwritten Cyrillic sources; she also ensured that the
children and I always had proper medical care when our lives (and bodies)
x

x Acknowledgments

turned upside down on Balkan research adventures. This book would not
have happened without them.
In a project whose research involved many countries and many different
archives, I have benefited immeasurably from the support and assistance
of many talented archivists across the Balkans, who have protected the do-
minion of history through war, regime change, political instability, and eco-
nomic crisis, and who opened every door to me with warmth and grace. There
are far too many extraordinary archivists and librarians to thank by name, and
any attempt to do so will inevitably exclude too many. These unsung heroes
are the greatest possible gift to historians of southeastern Europe; they are the
people who make books happen.
The late Ivo Banac, a pioneer in Yugoslav history, read the entire manu-
script months before he died, offering advice and criticism all the way down
to the diacritical marks in the footnotes. Historians Jane Burbank and Fred
Cooper graciously read the complete manuscript and flew to Nashville to
share their thoughts with me. Pieter Judson and Oxford University Press’s
two anonymous readers provided wonderfully detailed, thoughtful, and en-
couraging reader’s reports, believing in this project even as they called out
its unresolved corners. Over the past decade, Lâle Can’s sophisticated and
nuanced readings of early drafts were pivotal to the book’s arguments and ap-
proach. Many generous friends and colleagues have read sections or provided
other support along the way: Isa Blumi, Julia Cohen, Theodora Dragostinova,
Robert Hayden, James McFarland, Paul Miller-​Melamed, Rebecca Reich,
James Robertson, Allison Schachter, and Samira Sheikh. Kathryn Ciancia,
Malgorzata Fidelis, Irina Gigova Ganaway, Maureen Healy, Kate Lebow, and
Andrea Orzoff have been reading and improving my work for over a decade.
Daniela Blei marvelously edited an earlier version of the manuscript. Vladislav
Lilić patiently revised the footnotes, while also challenging me to think dif-
ferently about some of the book’s claims. Ivana Marinković inspired me to
maintain my language skills in moments when travel was impossible. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to Norman Naimark, Robert Donia, James Sheehan,
and Larry Wolff, inimitable mentors and senior colleagues, who encouraged
and supported my work even in moments when it seemed like I was heading
off on a wild goose chase.
It is a privilege to be part of vibrant intellectual homes that nourish ideas
and provide community. I am fortunate to have had two such homes while
writing this book: I thank my colleagues in the History Department at the
City College of New York, where I began this project, and in the German,
Russian and East European Studies and History Departments at Vanderbilt
xi

Acknowledgments xi

University, where I completed it. My gratitude extends especially to my former

City College colleagues Beth Baron, Craig Daigle, Greg Downs, Jennifer
Johnson, Andreas Killen, Adrienne Petty, and Cliff Rosenberg who read early
drafts, and to my Vanderbilt colleagues Celia Applegate, David Blackbourn,
Joel Harrington, Leor Halevi, Ari Joskowicz, and Helmut Smith, who spent
a day rigorously critiquing the entire manuscript. I have been sustained by
collegial departments, and thank Lutz Koepnick, Meike Werner, and Eddie
Wright-​Rios for their support and guidance.
The support and friendship of many remarkable scholars across the former
Yugoslavia has nurtured me during my many months of research abroad.
I thank especially historians Vanni D’Allesi, Andrea Feldman, Miloš Jagodić,
Husnija Kamberović, Hikmet Karčić, Vjeran Pavlaković, Momčilo Petrović,
and Vladimir Petrović, as well as Dragan and Saliha Marković, whose passion
for publishing good scholarship is infectious.
This book has been generously supported by a Fulbright Award in Serbia,
IREX, the Diane and Harold Wohl fellowship at the Advanced Institute
for Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC, a National Endowment for the
Humanities Faculty Award, a City College of New York Humanities and Arts
award, the PSC-​CUNY Research Fund, and Vanderbilt University’s College
for the Arts and Sciences. At Vanderbilt, the Max Kade Center for European
and German Studies provided material and intellectual support, as did a
Provost Writing Studio award, which helped me workshop the manuscript.
I completed this book as the William S. Vaughn fellow at the Robert Penn
Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt and am grateful for the mag-
nificent gift of time and the wonderful community of fellows.
My parents, Diane and Thomas Greble, instilled in me a love of travel and
history that has become the foundation of my life and my work. The gift of
supportive parents is invaluable, and I thank them. My mother’s dedication
to my brother has taught me how to be a mother without losing myself and to
fight for what I believe in with my family by my side. My sister, Julia Stensby,
remains a loyal and critical reader, the person who will tell me when nothing
makes sense. My brother, Matthew Greble, reminds me to find the joy in
every part of this difficult journey. I also thank my supportive aunts, Susan
O’Donnell and Joyce Koestenblatt, who never flinch to drop things to help
me, and my Anderson, Hess, Knox, Metzger, Millen, Murphy, O’Donnell,
Stensby, and Worsnick extended families. Chelsea and Rich Melé gave us the
priceless gift of watching Roko when he could no longer travel to the Balkans.
My in-​laws, Susan and Greg Worsnick, cared for our family in some of the
darkest moments of this book’s life, managing meals and childcare while I was
xi

xii Acknowledgments

injured, wheelchair bound, and determined to write. The nourishing friend-

ship of Emily Weltman and Jake Gamage, Ravit Reichman and Ted Weesner,
Liz Cohen, Katie Brennan, Elise Molinelli Martin, Deb and Rob Wollner,
Irfana and Dino Trampa, Indira and Eldar Telegrafčić, Asim Guhdija,
Daniella Berman and Tony Cak, Ari Bryen, Kim Welch, Doug Shadle, Jesse
Kauffman, Alex Distler, Erin Dillon, Karen Robbins, Jenny Hagel, Ashley
Simone, and Christopher Johnson and Haydee Searcy has been instrumental.
Finishing a book during a pandemic and lockdown is grueling. I am
grateful to Susan Ferber, whose faith in this project has persisted for over a
decade, and who managed my anxieties and shepherded this book to pub-
lication. Jeremy Toynbee patiently and professionaly guided me through
production. Allison Schachter and Ben Tran were a lifeline of friendship
and neighborliness. I am also appreciative of Chuck Sabo, head of school at
St. Bernard Academy, and the many SBA teachers who did everything they
could to safely open school whenever it was possible. If school had remained
closed for the 2020–​21 academic year, as it did for millions of children across
America, this book would not be finished. There is little that is more chal-
lenging to the intellectual life of academic parents than spending endless days
managing the virtual learning of one’s young children, while attempting to
write and do research. Anyone who has spent many months lecturing to col-
lege students from the floor of their bathroom or running PhD qualifying
exams over Zoom on a patio under a blanket in the cold rain, their children
peering through the glass door during a scheduled “brain break,” will under-
stand this gratitude.
Finally, I am eternally indebted to Alison Frank Johnson, Aimee Genell,
and Dominique Reill, whose convivial friendship and snarky, humorous, and
loving daily text messages sustained me through the pandemic. Their will-
ingness to read chapter after chapter with wit and wisdom and their uncanny
ability to find the right words of encouragement in moments when it all
seemed impossible, pushed me over the finish line.
xi

Glossary of Islamic Terms

there are many Islamic, Ottoman, and regional-​specific terms used

throughout this book, some of which have alternative spellings in Turkish
or Arabic, and some of which have different meaning in southeastern
Europe than in other parts of the world. Where possible, I elaborate on these
definitions in the text. This basic glossary includes some of the more com-
monly used terms that may be unfamiliar to readers. It is not intended to be
exhaustive. Alternative spellings are provided in parentheses.
dervish, sufi a follower of Islamic mysticism
imam religious and prayer leader
Islamic Religious Community a formal administrative body created to
oversee Islam in Austria-​Hungary, which
continued into the twentieth century
hodža (also hoca) regional term used broadly for Muslim
teachers, professors, imams, and other
religious professionals
mosque place of workshop
mufti Islamic legal expert
mutivelj administrator for a waqf
madrasa (also medresa) Muslim secondary school or religious
college
mekteb Muslim primary school
Qur’an (also Koran) the central religious text of Islam, which
Muslims believe to be a revelation from
God (Allah)
qadi (also kadi) Islamic judge
xvi

xiv Glossary of Islamic Terms

Reis-​ul-​ulema head of the ulema, an administrative

position created by Austria-​Hungary in
Bosnia-​Herzegovina, which continued to
be used by the Yugoslav state
tekke a Sufi lodge or place of worship
Shari’a (also sharia, šerijat, divine law for Muslims, as imagined by
shari’ah) God
Shari’a court judge the bureaucratized qadi in Austria-​
Hungary, which continued into the
Yugoslav state
ulema (also ulama) religious scholars
Ulema Medžlis a council of ulema that advised the Reis-​ul-​
ulema in Austria-​Hungary and Yugoslavia
waqf (also vakuf, vakīf) an inalienable charitable endowment
constituted under Shari’a
xv

List of Foreign Place Names

the towns below are referenced regularly in the text. Many had different
historical names; some have different names in different languages. The most
commonly used name by English speakers is listed first, followed by the place
name (when relevant) in Ottoman Turkish, South Slavic languages, and
Albanian.
English Ottoman South Slavic Albanian
Bar Bar Bar Tivari
Belgrade Belgrad Beograd Belgradi
Bitola/​Monastir Manastır Bitolj | Bitola Manastiri
Mostar Mostar Mostar Mostari
Niš Niş Niš Nish
Novi Pazar Yeni Pazar Novi Pazar Pazari i Ri (known
as Sanxhaku)
Peć Ipek Peć Peja
Pljevlja Taşlıca Pljevlja Plevla
Podgorica Podgoriçe Podgorica Podgorica
Prishtina Priştina Priština Prishtinë
Prizren Prizren Prizren Prizreni
Sarajevo Saraybosna Sarajevo Sarajeva
Shkodër İşkodra Skadar Shkodër
Skopje Üsküp Skoplje | Skopje Shkup
Tetovo Kalkandelen Tetovo Tetovë
Tuzla Tuzla Tuzla Tuzlla
Ulcinj Ülgün Ulcinj Ulqin
xvi
xvi

Muslims and the Making

of Modern Europe
xvi
1

Introduction

In September 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, a Muslim
peasant named Iljaza petitioned the district people’s court in the small town
of Novi Pazar, Yugoslavia, to reject his wife’s request for a divorce. His wife,
Džuzida, claimed that he did not provide her with adequate shoes or clothes,
and that he beat her, which she presented as justification under Shari’a law to
divorce him. Iljaza countered that he had worked for the recently victorious
Yugoslav Partisan (communist) army for four months without pay, making
it difficult to provide for his wife. This Partisan fighter swore to the local
court that in the future, he would live according “to our Shari’a laws.” The
discontinuities of this plea, and others found in courthouses across postwar
Yugoslavia, were striking. Muslims were citing Shari’a law in an emerging
communist state whose most recent predecessors were an overtly Christian
nation-​state and a fascist occupation regime. Moreover, they sought to as-
suage the court’s doubt by pledging fidelity not to Yugoslavia or civil law
but to Islamic law. Why either spouse thought a civil court should rule on
a matter of Islamic law is unclear, as is what happened to the Muslim judges
who would have adjudicated the matter earlier. Iljaza and Džuzida were two
Muslims caught up in the muddled and transitional nature of postwar justice.
Since no civil marriage law existed, and newly arriving socialist judges lacked
an alternative legal framework to resolve the matter, they applied Shari’a prec-
edent, deciding in the husband’s favor. Džuzida was apparently undeterred
and launched an appeal. Under Shari’a law, a wife was entitled to a divorce if
her husband could not provide her with shelter. According to her furious hus-
band, she had set out in November 1945 to prove definitively that this was the
case. Her unconventional strategy: burn down her husband’s house.1
Beyond its sensational dimensions, the testimonies and rebuttals deployed
in this court case and other disputes brought before postwar socialist courts
2

2 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

evinced a particular legal world that existed in mid-​twentieth-​century Europe,

one in which Muslims interpreted rights; framed their collective cultures, po-
litical organizations, and social norms; and engaged with civil institutions,
their neighbors, and each other from the perspective that they were, legally,
Muslims. For them, being Muslim was not simply a confessional identity or
a matter of belief but a legal category enshrined in decades of legal codes,
institutionalized in the structures of state institutions, and embedded in the
region’s frameworks for belonging. This book seeks to understand how this
came to be and what it reveals about Muslims’ place in the post-​Ottoman
Balkans and the European political project of citizenship more generally.
It does so by tracing the stories of several generations of Muslim men,
women, and children beginning in 1878, when over a million Ottoman
Muslims became citizens of other European states, and ending in 1946–​1949,
when communists in Yugoslavia eradicated the Shari’a judiciary and imposed
a centralized, socialist legal order. It follows the fortunes (and misfortunes)
of merchants, peasants, and landowners, muftis and preachers, teachers and
students, believers and non-​believers, the literate and illiterate across a diverse
landscape that spanned from seaside port towns on the shores of the Adriatic
to mountainous villages deep in the heart of the Balkans, a multi-​day journey
to the nearest town. These were overwhelmingly local Muslim communities;
that is, they were made up of families who had lived in the Balkans for
centuries (at least). Their histories are European histories.
Looking at a map from the mid-​nineteenth century, the geographic
starting point of this study might seem arbitrary: it includes lands from sev-
eral Ottoman provinces whose political boundaries would be sliced through
and rearranged numerous times over the next seven decades, dividing
communities with shared religious, linguistic, legal, and political cultures
across different states. The Ottoman Muslims at the center of this study would
find themselves after 1878 (or 1912–​1913) residents of Serbia, Montenegro,
and Austria-​Hungary; successive generations would be citizens of two dis-
tinct Yugoslav states as well as a range of Axis occupation and satellite states
in the twentieth century.
The geography of these lands where Muslims lived varied wildly. There
were sweeping farmlands where Christian and Muslim peasants tilled land for
Ottoman Muslim landowners; alpine mountains with rocky soil where wild
goats roamed; waterfalls and crystal blue lakes whose tranquility attracted re-
ligious divines and became sites of Orthodox Christian monasteries and Sufi
tekkes; and bustling cities where peasants sold produce and Muslim, Christian,
and Jewish merchants traded in bazaars, a node to the vast Mediterranean
3

Introduction 3

RUSSIA

HABSBURG
MONARCHY

DANUBIAN
Belgrade PRINCIPALITIES
Tuzla (autonomous Ottoman principalities)
Bosnia- SERBIA
Her zegovina (autonomous Ottoman
Sarajevo principality)
Mostar
Niš BULGARIA
Novi Sofia Black Sea
Cetinje Pazar
Podgorica OTTO MAN EMPIRE
MONTENEGRO Prizren
(autonomous Ottoman
principality) Shkodër Skopje/Uskub

Adriatic Sea Monastir

Salonica

GREECE

0 80 160 Miles

0 80 160 Kilometers

Figure I.1 Ottoman Europe, circa 1850, political boundaries.

economic networks that stretched beyond. Centuries of Ottoman rule left a

physical imprint on these lands: minarets dotted the landscape; the sounds
of the muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer, formed the aural backdrop to eve-
ryday life wherever Muslims lived.
The international system transformed rapidly in the decades that this
book analyzes, and Muslims, like many European populations, were often
left to their own devices in navigating political and economic changes. As
4

4 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

RUSSIA
A U S T R IA-
H U N G A R Y

Belgrade ROMANIA
BOSNIA- Šabac
HERZEGOVINA SERBIA
SANJAK OF
Sarajevo NOVI PAZAR
Niš
VILAYET BULGARIA
Novi OF Black Sea
Podgorica PazarKOSOVO
EASTERN RUMELIA
MONTENEGRO Prizren (annexed by Bulgaria
Bar in 1885/86)
Ulcinj Shkodër Skopje/Uskub
Adriatic Sea O
T
MonastirT
O
ALBANIA M
founded in 1912 A N
E M
P I R E

GREECE
International boundaries, 1878
International boundaries, 1878
International boundaries, 1913
Acquired by Serbia after 1913
Acquired by Montenegro after 1913
Acquired by Romania after 1913
0 80 160 Miles Acquired by Greece
Greeceafter
after1913
1913

0 80 160 Kilometers Acquired by Bulgariaafter

Bulgaria after1913
1913

Figure I.2 Political boundaries of Ottoman and post-​Ottoman Europe between the
Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913. Borders drawn are ap-
proximate: source maps served polemical purposes and in many places local boundaries
remained contested.

the political boundaries of the Ottoman empire shrank, Muslims came under
scrutiny. They were objects of international treaties deciding whether they
could stay in their lands or would need to leave, whether their local trading
patterns would fit within new commercial treaties and systems of taxation,
whether their understandings of law and society would match those of new
governments. In altering the political map of Ottoman Europe, European
statesmen treated Muslim societies and desires as an afterthought. New
5

Introduction 5

AUSTRIA
HUNGARY

Ljubljana
Zagreb
ROMANIA

Belgrade
Tuzla

Y U G O S L AV I A
Sarajevo
Niš
Mostar Novi
Pazar Black
Prishtina
BULGARIA
Cetinje Sea
Prizren
Bar Skopje
Tetovo
Adriatic Sea
Monastir

ALBANIA
TURKEY
GREECE

0 80 160 Miles

0 80 160 Kilometers

Figure I.3 Yugoslavia, 1918–​1941. Some political boundaries changed during this
period.

political boundaries zigzagged through Muslim villages and across histori-

cally contingent regions, at times leaving family members living in different
states. The borders were woven around and through massive lakes, often
unbeknownst to the local fishermen living there; they jutted into mountains
where sheep grazed. Borders severed economic routes that connected inte-
rior towns to port markets. They cut through and redefined legal boundaries,
undermining preexisting Ottoman, Islamic, Christian, and civil court sys-
tems. New rulers brought new languages and new bureaucratic norms, as
well as new frameworks for ethics and new ways of organizing society. Local
Muslims adapted, responded, and resisted. Some stayed. Others voluntarily
left. Many faced expulsion.
For centuries, southeastern Europe was home to heterogeneous, multi-​
lingual, complex Muslim societies who lived among heterogeneous, multi-​
lingual, complex communities of Christians (Greek Orthodox, Bulgarian
Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Evangelicals, and Armenian
6

6 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

Christians) and Jews (Sephardim and Ashkenazim). People in these lands

spoke and wrote in numerous Slavic languages, Ottoman Turkish, Albanian,
Romani, Tatar, Arabic, Ladino, German, and Greek. Many people were fluent
in more than one language, as is common in multi-​lingual imperial lands and
their successor states. Most were illiterate, also unexceptional in nineteenth-​
century Europe. With the withdrawal of the Ottomans, all of these people
were encountering a new world order, and their responses would be as varied
as the selection of the responses of the Muslims analyzed here.2
Precisely how many Muslims lived in the Balkans at any given moment
is contested. In the region at the center of this book’s analysis, it was usu-
ally about 1 to 2 million people. Like many statistical questions about the late
Ottoman period, there are conflicting data on how many Muslims fled or
were expelled from Ottoman lands during and after wars and border changes
as well as conflicting demographic data on how many people remained in
their homes.3 Government censuses had varying political aims, with many
new governments grossly underestimating Muslim populations in order
to legitimize the conquest of their lands.4 There were also large numbers of
Muslims who lived in political limbo as stateless people, refugees, or tempo-
rary migrants in the aftermath of the wars of the 1870s, the Balkan Wars of
1912–​1913, the First World War, and the Second World War. Some moun-
tainous and rural communities deliberately avoided the bureaucratic gaze,
refusing to accept new political boundaries, instead living as outlaws and
bandits within them.5 Many historians have settled on 12 percent as a good es-
timate for Muslims living in Yugoslavia in the mid-​twentieth century—​about
1.5 million people—​but this number takes too seriously the 1921 Yugoslav
census, whose methods and motives, like those of most censuses, were highly
political. Subsequent censuses subsumed some Muslims under different na-
tional categories and failed to count others at all.
Explanations for the presence of Muslims in the Balkans also vary and
are deeply politicized.6 Some descended from Christian converts to Islam;
some had ancestors who migrated to Europe from other parts of the Ottoman
Empire centuries earlier. Less contested is their variability. As in other parts
of the world, Islam in southeastern Europe was locally inflected and malle-
able; it was a set of beliefs, cultural, and social practices and also a worldview.
Pluralism extended also to religious practice, which included Sunni Muslims,
who adhered to the Hanafi legal school of Islam, and a variety of communities
whose members practiced a range of Sufi traditions and syncretic approaches
that reflected the region’s Ottoman heritage.7 These distinctions would
contribute to and also become layered on top of national and political
7

Introduction 7

movements that Muslims formed in response to the changing political order.

The era of modern politics, which called for people to divide into differently
conceived groups, would galvanize schisms and factions within and across
different Muslim communities. There was no one way of being Muslim in
the Balkans or anywhere in Europe. There was also no consensus on how to
respond to the many radical changes to the international and regional legal
order that occurred from the 1870s to the 1940s. Where there is consensus is
in the European consciousness: across time and space, and despite linguistic,
religious, economic, national, and cultural divides, Muslims were understood
first and foremost as Muslims.8

Familiar and Unfamiliar European Stories

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ma-
jority of the world’s Muslims would be absorbed by non-​Muslim European
governments, radically transforming Muslim societies and Islamic
institutions around the world.9 Muslims living under European empires
faced similar challenges to the Muslim communities analyzed here. There
were also important differences. The legacy of being part of an Islamic em-
pire, the presence of Muslim majorities in towns and villages, the rapid and
radical shifts in political boundaries, and the region’s geo-​political position
between Ottoman, Mediterranean, Middle East, southern European, and
central European worlds—​all of these things unquestionably shaped Balkan
Muslim experiences in distinct ways. Indeed, the Muslims at the center of this
book were not a product of the systems of European colonialism that shaped
Muslim lives around the world well into the twentieth century.
And yet, readers will find here discussions reminiscent of twentieth-​and
twenty-​first-​century disputes about headscarves in French schools, migrants
in Germany, mosques in Austria, and Shari’a courts in England. In the post-​
Ottoman Balkans, there are familiar stories of refugees, humanitarian crises,
and mass violence, and familiar questions about how Islam operates in sec-
ular Western societies. Similar European anxieties arose over Muslim loyalty,
fanaticism, and Islamism, and similar Muslim frustrations over discrimina-
tion, repression, and marginalization in the countries they call home. Indeed,
well over a century before contemporary debates over headscarves, Shari’a
courts, terrorism, refugees, assimilation, and Muslims’ place in European so-
ciety would incite impassioned political battles and media frenzy, European
diplomats and statesmen, legal theorists, and Muslim scholars and jurists
were debating these same questions. Southeastern Europe was central to the
8

8 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

European experience of encountering Islam.10 It was a place where founda-

tional questions on the relationship between confession and citizenship were
being hashed out. It was here that Muslims were first legally classified, in in-
ternational treaty and domestic laws, as citizens of modern European states
and where they would be codified in international law as “minorities.” It was
also here where Muslims would boldly call out contradictions between na-
tionalism and liberalism and would expose the paradoxes of allegedly neutral
concepts such as religious freedom and rights.
So why are the stories told in this book so unfamiliar to historians of Europe
and Europeans themselves? Why should it come as a surprise that a hundred
years ago, a European constitution enshrined a Shari’a judiciary or that Islamic
political movements that resembled the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
existed in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s? In part, historical silences are en-
demic to the way that European history has been conceptualized in opposi-
tion to the Muslim societies living within it: the expulsion of Muslims from
medieval Spain and Italy and the shrinking of Ottoman lands in the early
modern and modern era were historically framed as normative corrections to
a historical mistake. Indeed, as historian Larry Wolff has demonstrated in his
work on Eastern Europe, since the early eighteenth century, the political goal
of driving the Turks out of Europe was entangled with the Enlightenment
project of defining European civilization and its antithesis.11 By the nine-
teenth century, the Ottoman Balkans were the imagined Orient within
Europe itself, as historian Maria Todorova describes, the uncivilized, barbaric,
and exotic lands whose reabsorption into “Europe” signified “not only com-
plete and radical breaks with the past, but its negation,” and “rejection of the
political past.”12
Furthermore, the historiographies of Eastern Europe have long been
severed from those of other parts of Europe. While important histories of
Eastern Europe and southeastern Europe have drawn attention to significant
Muslim communities and their place in shaping European states and societies,
within broader European history, these studies are relegated to the realm
of Europe’s East: apart, marginal, on the fringes from what constitutes real
European history.13 Instead, histories of Muslims in Europe are dominated by
the study of Muslims as new arrivals in the twentieth century—​alternately, as
colonial subjects who made their way to imperial metropoles, migrant workers,
or, recently, asylum seekers. While such studies can be well-​intentioned, the
emphasis on Muslims as foreigners mirrored colonial framings of Muslims
as Others to a subjective European norm.14 This book shows that Muslims
have been part of modern European history from the beginning. They were
9

Introduction 9

not newcomers but indigenous inhabitants of vast territories. They were

Europeans with local cultures and legal norms that other Europeans wanted
to erase and yet were accounted for in the laws and structures of these states.
The “myth” of European secularism, as anthropologist Talal Asad describes
it, also impedes the history of Muslims in Europe. The place of Christianity
in defining and conceptualizing “what is Europe” and “who is European” has
been ambivalent since constructions of “Europe” first emerged. In theory,
secularizing states sought to shift political legitimacy from the realm of the
divine to that of the people. In the wake of the Enlightenment, secularizing
projects aimed to replace religious legal and moral systems with those
grounded in science, education, and civics; to end political supremacy of re-
ligious authorities; and to shift religious life to the realm of family, personal
space, and morality. New state institutions, notably schools, the army, and
state taxation, replaced religion as the basis for social cohesion.15
Secularism might have been the goal, but religion powerfully shaped
European statehood. In every modern European state, from Britain and
France to Serbia and Greece, presumptions of Christianity continued to
play an important role in national culture, law, and concepts of morality.
Historian Joan Scott goes so far as to argue that the concept of European
state sovereignty, enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, “inextri-
cably intertwined” Christianity with European statehood, a legacy that
Enlightenment thought subtly reinforced and sublimated.16 At a structural
level, European governments retained some formal relationship or genetic re-
semblance to their Christian institutions, whether through a national church,
state subsidies, or the integration of Christian ethics into family law and na-
tional cultures. Religion was not excised from public life or culture, nor was
it supposed to be. As theorist and anthropologist Saba Mahmood argues, the
political ideology of the secularizing state necessitated the supervision of reli-
gion.17 This was the case for people of all faiths, whether part of the majority
or the minority, but it always proved problematic for religious minorities be-
cause it created opportunities for intervention and control.
The presumption of the secular as areligious had especially serious
consequences for Muslims in Europe, because their confessional norms, in-
tellectual frameworks, and legal structures were, from the outset, deemed for-
eign to an arbitrary European Christian norm. Well into the mid-​twentieth
century, Muslims’ place in most European societies remained tethered to
Islam. From tsarist Russia, which developed separate administrative and legal
structures for its Muslim subjects, to the British Empire, which created Anglo-​
Muhammadan law that defined Muslims’ legal rights and social position
10

10 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

vis-​à-​vis Islam, European policymakers presumed that Muslim concepts

of law and the Islamic organization of family, property, and even economy
were incompatible with their modernizing state projects.18 Even in France,
which pioneered policies of Jewish emancipation and is often considered
the cradle of secular citizenship, lawmakers treated Muslims as categorically
unassimilable: until 1946, laws for Muslim citizenship in the French empire
required renouncing Islam.19 Across Europe—​from West to East, North to
South—​Muslims were consistently understood as a community apart from
Christian Europeans because of the ways they drew on ritual, community,
and religious traditions in defining their social and political communities.20
Belief in Muslims’ inherent difference as well as a belief that Islam was incom-
patible with secular law shaped domestic and international policies on both
sides of the Atlantic well into the twentieth century, leaving behind a legacy
of Muslim exclusion.
In formerly Ottoman lands, these dynamics were amplified because the
Ottoman Empire was an Islamic empire, while most of the states emerging
in its former European territories were majority Christian. The transfer
of Ottoman lands to other European states always involved the purging
of dominant Muslim cultures and the Islamic legal norms that shaped
concepts of public morality, social norms, and community, replacing them
with something new.21 In the countries analyzed in this book, the (previ-
ously) dominant Muslim culture became subordinate to an allegedly neutral,
Christian-​inflected modernity. The centrality of Christianity to the evolution
of discrete national cultures in the nineteenth century meant that these states
felt Christian and privileged Christian national members, even when laws
suggested paths for Muslim inclusion.22
Nation-​building across the Balkans almost always played out to the dis-
advantage of Muslim citizens because Muslims owned the vast majority of
the land in Ottoman Europe and Christians wanted it. Or framed in terms
of nation-​building, new ideas of national sovereignty necessitated a delib-
erate restructuring of Ottoman land tenure, economic networks, and social
classes that shifted power away from Muslims.23 This had profound psycho-
logical consequences for Muslims and how they understood their place in
the states and societies that succeeded the Ottoman Empire. Losing power,
money, and prestige engendered frustration and anger. Regional experiences
of mass expulsion, massacres, discrimination, and forced population transfers
produced a collective trauma, both for the people left behind and those in
neighboring states who wondered if this might be their fate. Moreover, the
foundational myths and national framings of new governments ruling in
1

Introduction 11

post-​Ottoman Europe overwhelmingly depicted Muslims as the remnants of

historical occupiers (the so-​called Ottoman yoke); as migrants and racialized
Others; as backward, superstitious, and unfamiliar neighbors; or as partial
members of the nation in need of civilizing and nationalization. There was
a profound irony in this discursive shift, since Muslims represented the edu-
cated and privileged elite within the Ottoman empire. This irony was not lost
on members of the Muslim elite.
The persistence—​ and also the modification and contestation—​ of
Ottoman legal, social, and religious institutions in European states and
societies is also important to this story. There was no sharp break between the
Ottoman era and its aftermath, just as there was no radical rupture between
other European empires and their successor states.24 Every post-​Ottoman state,
in some way, preserved and supported Islamic legal traditions and institutions
while simultaneously using those institutions to introduce nation-​building
agendas. Throughout this book are examples of different Balkan governments
that sought to reinvent Ottoman and Islamic institutions in hopes of concur-
rently defining and supervising the Muslim population.
Analyzing law and society through Muslim experiences offers insights
into the character of the post-​imperial legal order more broadly. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “imperial rights regime,” as
historian Jane Burbank describes the Russian empire, was transforming
into something new.25 But this was a process. Instead of clearly demarcated
categories of subject and citizen, national and minority is a gradual, shifting
framework of belonging, one in which various states experimented with laws
and legal structures for different groups of people. Peeling back the layers of
this process reveals how concepts of protections and tolerance, which had
undergirded the early modern relationship between individuals and their sov-
ereign, became reformulated as rights and citizenship in the twentieth cen-
tury. The framework of “minority rights” that developed after the First World
War remained firmly bound to Ottoman frameworks for thinking about
law and society and also for thinking about the relationship between social
groups and the state.26
Throughout this study, the term post-​Ottoman Europe is employed as a
temporal and geographic framework for thinking about these parts of south-
eastern Europe that had once belonged to the Ottomans, and where distinct
Ottoman confessional, legal, and social legacies shaped later states, societies,
and nation-​building efforts.27 The Ottoman Empire was considered by
other Great Powers to be part of Europe and was part of the Concert of
Europe, though by the nineteenth century it was recast as the “sick man of
12

12 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

Europe,” which justified the erosion of its sovereignty and the conquest of
its lands. The idea of “post-​Ottoman” allows for consideration of what it
meant for Muslims to remain legally, personally, or spiritually connected
to the Ottoman sovereign when the Islamic empire continued to exist. It
also helps explain how Muslims understood their negotiations with new
state authorities in lands that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, par-
ticularly how they understood concepts like autonomy and an Islamic legal
domain, and used these terms to define their relationship with European
governments.28
After the abolition of the Ottoman empire and the caliphate in 1923 and
1924, respectively, the idea of post-​Ottoman took on new meaning. Across
the globe, Europeans ruled over more Muslims than in any previous historical
era. Without the possibility of Ottoman restoration and without the spiritual
leadership embodied in the person of the caliph, Muslims in post-​Ottoman
lands wrestled with how to reconstitute an Islamic community. They also
fought to define a place for an Ottoman legacy and history in the political and
legal cultures of their successor states of the twentieth century.29 Indeed, well
into the 1940s, Muslims in southeastern Europe felt bound to the Ottoman
past and committed to drawing on it as they defined a place for Islam, and for
themselves, in Europe. The term post-​Ottoman thus not only implies a geo-
graphic and political relationship but also highlights how Ottoman confes-
sional, legal, and social legacies shaped the states and societies that succeeded
the Ottoman Empire.

A Narrative Gaze Where Subjects Come

Before the State
The history of Muslims in Europe raises a historiographical problem.
Most historians begin from the perspective of a state (or in transnational
approaches, comparing states to one another): this is how they are trained and
how archives are organized. Thus, they become experts on Muslims in France,
Muslims in Russia, Muslims in Austria-​Hungary, Muslims in the Third Reich,
and so on, and they frame their inquiries along the lines of how a particular
state treated Muslims or why Shari’a courts exist in Britain or what was the
relationship between Muslims and the Third Reich? Historians then travel to
the relevant state’s archives—​aware of the biases of institutional archives but
equipped with methods to help transcend them—​and set out to write that
history. Indeed, this book began as a study of Muslims in Yugoslavia with ex-
actly that approach.
13

Introduction 13

But somewhere along the way of writing the book, I realized that
Yugoslavia might represent the way I had been trained to think about the
country I study, but it was certainly not the way that the Muslims of my
sources conceptualized their worlds. My intellectual epiphany was no acci-
dent: an Ottoman historian once asked me what would happen to my nar-
rative if I tried to begin each chapter from the perspective of Muslims rather
than from the lens of states or international institutions.
Therefore, to move beyond the narratives of nations and states, this book
takes as its starting point the shattering of the Ottoman world and the dis-
placement of Muslim communities across different states that captured
Ottoman lands or succeeded from them. It follows the twists and turns of
nation-​building through records amassed by madrasas, waqfs, mufti offices,
organizations of ulema, and the Shari’a courts; memoirs, travelogues, and
private correspondence; and published writings in Islamic legal journals
and popular newspapers printed especially for Muslim audiences. It ekes out
exchanges with Muslims in government records preserved by municipalities,
provisional assemblies, and state ministries as well as through consular offices.
It asks, how did Muslims experience and understand their place in the rapidly
changing political order of late nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Europe?
What was the relationship among international actors, state authorities, and
Muslim powerbrokers in defining Muslims’ place within European states,
societies, cultures, and legal structures? How did collective experiences of
mass trauma—​expulsions, mass killings, repression, and discrimination—​
affect Muslims’ negotiating strategies and goals in the aftermath of war? In
wrestling with these questions, it explores how Muslims maneuvered within
and beyond many different kinds of states: constitutional democracies, au-
thoritarian monarchies, empires, nationalizing regimes, and fascist and com-
munist ideological projects. Although the sources for different time periods
vary, throughout this book, my goal has been to see the people involved, not
just the states affecting them. In so doing, I show how Islamic institutions si-
multaneously shaped and reflected European nation-​building initiatives and
how Muslims in Europe understood and influenced law and society in the
lands where they lived.

-
This history begins at the Congress of Berlin of 1878, which redrew the po-
litical boundaries of Ottoman Europe and specified that some Ottoman
Muslims could retain citizenship in the new states that emerged. Subsequent
14

14 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

international treaties, constitutions, and domestic legal codes from the 1880s
to the 1940s would, in various ways, cement this system. Muslim men did
not have to renounce Islam to acquire full citizenship. Nor did they have,
on paper, differentiated political, property, or civil rights because of faith, as
was the case in some other European states, such as the British, Russian, and
French empires. (Muslim women, like other women in the region, had lim-
ited political rights, though in marriage and property, they sometimes had
more rights than their Christian neighbors).30 Also enshrined in the 1878
Congress of Berlin was a guarantee that Muslims would have confessional
self-​governance. This meant that Muslims retained authority over Islamic
courts, schools, and their pious endowments, and that Shari’a law continued
to define collective legal norms and institutional structures, which in turn
shaped society and cultural customs. Such Islamic rights are similar to what is
commonly referred to as personal status laws in European empires. But there
was an important difference: whereas nineteenth-​century European empires
like France, Britain, and Russia gave Muslims Islamic rights instead of cit-
izenship rights, the countries explored in this study—​Serbia, Montenegro,
Austria-​Hungary, and (after 1918) Yugoslavia—​provided Muslims with dis-
tinct Islamic rights because they were citizens.
From the 1880s through the 1940s, a broad range of Muslim men—​
Islamic scholars, judges, merchants, intellectuals, landowners—​negotiated
with different European political authorities to resolve what this meant.
They tirelessly fought for, and sometimes won, the right to define the terms
of Muslim citizenship and the boundaries of the promised Islamic legal do-
main. When governments tried to impose their own presumptions of these
legal boundaries—​whether in 1913 or 1929 or 1946—​Islamic jurists resisted,
seeking instead to strengthen their own control. Their opposition assumed
different forms, from bureaucratic subversion to armed resistance. This would
recur around the world: in Muslim majority countries, in the Ottoman em-
pire, in the mandates after World War I, and in European countries with
Muslim minorities. It was not preordained that Islamic law would have to
take a backseat to secular, European legal structures. Indeed, for many Muslim
communities, the real possibility that a Shari’a judiciary could coexist with
secular law persisted into the 1940s.
Personal accounts that animate this book showcase how Muslims sought
to translate their self-​conceptions, legal processes, and existing categories of
difference into an organizational language that European state-​makers could
understand and thus accommodate. Such acts of translation were not merely
linguistic: they were a more fundamental collective act that required a shift
15

Introduction 15

in one’s own self-​conception as well as a reshaping of internal institutions,

bureaucracies, alliances, and even daily practices. In short, to accept a new
state’s guarantees of religious rights, Muslims in the Balkans had to refor-
mulate their religious, social, and cultural practices in reference to the image
of Europe projected from the new state center. They were able to do so, in
part, because of a presumption built into new worldviews when it came to
Muslims: that they were a distinct community apart from the European
whole. Ironically, the very act of bringing Muslims into European states as
citizens reified them as a community defined primarily by Islam and thus dis-
tinct from those states and the rest of their citizenries.
Part I of this book explores how the pluralistic legal and political sys-
tems of empire were gradually supplanted with centralizing bureaucracies,
armies, educational systems, legal codes, and taxation schemes, illuminating
complications of legal separation. Muslims were at the center of the question
of whether separate but equal could ever be just, arguing for legal distinctions,
not against them. In more abstract ways, jurisdictional debates over what
constituted an Islamic legal realm illuminate some of the many contradictions
in the project of European state-​ building itself: tensions between the
ideologies of religious freedom and secular governance and between calls for
nation-​building and apprehensions over minority rights.
The first part shows how international treaties and legal norms shaped the
ways that Muslims were conceptualized in regional and local discourse, which
in turn affected the possibilities, or impossibilities, for Muslims to find space
for themselves in new nation-​building projects. This was especially the case
after the First World War, when the Paris Peace Treaties introduced a new
system of nationalizing states and minority rights to replace Europe’s multi-​
confessional land empires, which collapsed under pressures during and after
the war. More than ever, the categories of “citizen” and “nationality” became
the predominant ways of organizing Europeans into political units, and the
moniker “minority” became the legal and political vehicle to describe people
who did not fit into these frameworks.
Turning to the case of Muslims in a newly constituted Yugoslav state,
Part II thinks through how this imperial legacy shaped Muslims’ experiences
and organizing strategies in the twentieth century. Special clauses in the
Paris Peace Conference’s Treaty of Saint Germain (1919) defined Muslims
as minorities and made bold promises for their equality and religious rights.
But what this Muslim minority meant was ambiguous. Muslims living in
Yugoslavia did not easily fit into international boxes, and they came under
tremendous pressure to reconstitute themselves in order to fit within new
16

16 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

frameworks for thinking about nations and peoples.31 In other Balkan

countries, entire Muslim communities were subject to forced deportation
transfers to Turkey.32 But in Yugoslavia, Muslims overwhelmingly remained.
Investigating how Islamic institutions developed in interwar Yugoslavia
reveals how Muslims found spaces for agency in European states. It also
introduces a local variation on a global story: how European state authorities
would attempt to seize on the Shari’a judiciary as a mechanism to intervene
in and supervise Muslims’ lives.
Because minority protections gave power only to groups of minorities,
not to individuals, many Yugoslav Muslims felt forced to unify. In the im-
mediate aftermath of the First World War, they would find common ground
on Shari’a law and protections for both private land and religious property,
and they would push for these rights in conceding to the new government.
Despite protests from many civil lawmakers (and also Muslim progressives),
in 1921, the new Yugoslav state would enshrine a Shari’a judiciary in its first
constitution. This constitutional provision allowed Muslims to define their
minority-​ness in legal terms. However, it was a temporary unity that would
soon be tested by the heterogeneity of Muslims in these lands. Internal
factionalization grew across many different fault lines: language, region, class,
political goals, and religious practice. Exploring this impasse draws attention
to different kinds of political spaces that Muslims used in their efforts to shape
their place in Europe: political parties, madrasas, cultural associations, waqf
boards, nationalist organizations, and Islamic activist groups that mobilized
to create an alternative Islamic society. In 1923, in a prescient critique of how
European presumptions about “minorities” would hurt Muslims, a Muslim
newspaper in Bosnia warned fellow Muslims that the failure of the region’s
Muslims to develop a unifying platform would lead to “civil war, in which
Muslims will slaughter Muslims.”33 In the 1940s, during and after World War
II, this prediction was gruesomely realized.
Part III of this book investigates why significant groups of Muslims rejected
the European political order that was created after World War I and how
they came to place their trust in new ideological movements that countered
European liberalism. Some turned to political Islam and Islamic legal reviv-
alism, which offered new tools of mass politics and an ideological framework
to rethink the modern state and the place of Islam within it. Others turned to
the fascists, who promised Muslims political autonomy and confessional sov-
ereignty.34 Many Balkan Muslims found this an attractive alliance before and
during World War II. The communists offered safety, prosperity, and equality,
appealing prospects to other Muslims.
17

Introduction 17

The communists would win the war and the postwar elections in 1945, set-
ting the terms for Muslim belonging for the next half century. Within a year,
they would undo a half-​century of legal and political experiments on what
constituted Muslim citizenship: they eliminated Shari’a law and the Shari’a ju-
diciary, dismantled other sacred Islamic institutions, and coopted the Islamic
legal profession. They would be met with a new form of Islamic resistance, as
Muslim activists and bandits organized to subvert the encroaching atheistic
state and re-​Islamicize society. Some Muslims would understand the conflicts
of the 1940s as a final chapter in a long post-​Ottoman era. Others would un-
derstand their predicament as part of the emerging ideological Cold War,
hoping that Turkey, with the backing of the Americans and British, would
intervene to help them.35 But Western Cold War warriors were hardly inter-
ested in the plight of Islamic activists and conservative legal movements eager
to implement Shari’a law in Europe, especially since many anti-​communists
had suspicious ties to the former fascist regimes. While Islamic legal revivalists
might have seen themselves as an antidote to communism, in the postwar
European political order, they belonged to an era deep in the past, one that
European powers had been trying to eliminate for generations.

European Muslims: A Legal Minority

Larger conclusions on the evolution of a European Muslim minority can be
drawn by closely analyzing the history of the Muslims in the Balkans. Although
defined in confessional terms, by the twentieth century, Muslims had come to
constitute a distinct kind of minority in the European consciousness—​one
structured in legal terms. While language, ethnicity, culture, religion, and
race all shaped the ways that European societies conceptualized Muslims, and
all became prisms through which Muslims identified and negotiated their po-
litical belonging, it was the legal domain that most directly affected Muslim
lives, engagements with civil authorities, and understandings of citizenship.
Legal institutions structured Muslims’ lives and bound together Muslim
communities.
As in colonial lands, the social and legal system that materialized in post-​
Ottoman Europe elevated Islamic law from religious affairs to politics.36
Accordingly, a diverse set of Muslim leaders came to understand the Islamic
legal domain as the principal avenue through which they could protect the
boundaries of their community and stake a claim to the political future of
their homelands. Because of the centrality of the legal realm, Muslims who en-
gaged in matters of law—​as Islamic legal scholars, judges (mufti, qadi, Shari’a
18

18 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

court officials)—​played dominant roles in mediating Muslims’ experiences

with new polities. This had a profound effect on how Muslims organized and
the kinds of collective demands they made. Jurisdictional debates and legal
discussions, both in the Islamic legal realm and the civil one, shaped the evo-
lution of Muslim political minorities. The system of Muslim citizenship that
had emerged in the post-​Ottoman Balkans privileged legal negotiation above
other forms of diplomacy, empowering these Islamic legal authorities to serve
as the principal mediators of Muslims’ rights.37 In the era of mass politics,
muftis, qadi, and members of the ulema became prominent political voices.
By design, the history of Muslims in Europe was one of legal negotiation.
Furthermore, as historian Judith Surkis and anthropologist John Bowen
reveal, everywhere that Muslims lived, Islamic law and institutions became
interconnected with European governance and the evolution of local legal
orders.38 Shari’a law was both a tool of European governance and also in-
strumental in the development of certain European bureaucracies, schools,
constitutional frameworks, and nation-​building initiatives. State legal codes
needed to take into account distinct marital laws, such as Muslims’ right
to divorce and women’s inheritance rights, and state educational policies
needed to acknowledge Muslim cultures, social norms, and histories in the
creation of curricula. Islamic legal norms and Muslim cultures helped to de-
fine European projects of empire, and they would also shape local projects of
nation-​building.
In analyzing European history from Muslim perspectives, this book also
exposes a hierarchy of citizenship embedded in European states and societies.
From the eighteenth century, when citizenship emerged as a new form of
political belonging, to the present, the rights and status of marginalized
communities have always been subjective and challenged.39 At any given mo-
ment, communities on the margins of societies and legal systems—​women,
Jews, Muslims, Roma, colonial subjects, religious and linguistic minorities,
and property-​less men—​were excluded in distinct ways from full participa-
tion.40 The long nineteenth century was defined, in part, as an era of questions
over who would have citizenship, to what degree, and how that corresponded
with ideas of political sovereignty.41 The twentieth century shifted the cen-
tripetal forces driving these questions more squarely to nations, anchoring
notions of national sovereignty to that of state sovereignty. In analyzing the
evolution of rights, particularly minority rights in formerly imperial lands,
historical analyses have highlighted especially the experiences of Jewish
minorities, and it is the Jewish Question more than any other that has de-
fined both the study of rights discourses and thinking about the relationship
19

Introduction 19

between minorities and modernity in European history.42 Muslim experiences

offer a different lens through which we can analyze the ambiguous nature of
political belonging and the ambivalent relationship among modern law, sec-
ularism, and nation-​building. Europeans never accepted Islam as part of the
European project, even when they granted Muslims citizenship.
Finally, there is the question of agency. Muslims in Europe were certainly
victims of oppressive power structures, disingenuous negotiations, and dis-
crimination. But that did not make them passive recipients of history. Agency
came in different forms. Throughout the chapters of this book are examples
of Muslim leaders appropriating and reinventing imperial and Islamic norms
to conform to or confront new legal orders. Islamic scholars and judges
would test the limits of what constituted religious freedom and demand au-
tonomy over defining the Shari’a judiciary. They would call into question the
legal boundaries of what constituted civil and religious matters. Muftis and
intellectuals shaped how confessional protections—​a hallmark of the so-​
called premodern system—​would be reimagined in the modern liberal era as
individual or collective rights. By the twentieth century, Muslims transformed
into transnational actors, “by necessity, not by design,” as historian Amr Ryad
argues.43 They deployed specific tools of modern mass politics, such as the
press, political organizations, and grassroots activism, to organize movements
that challenged European hegemony. They absorbed global ideologies of re-
formism, pan-​Islam, and legal revivalism and adapted them for European po-
litical contexts.44 They negotiated with Nazis and communists and used these
alliances to serve Muslim interests. In so doing, Balkan Muslims fought for
the right to define the place of Islam in their states and societies, shaping the
European project itself.
20
21

PA RT I

The Long Post-​Ottoman

Transition, 1878–​1921
2
23

Muslim Rights and Political

Belonging After the Congress
of Berlin

In 1882, Abdulah, a business owner from Podgorica, fought with new

political authorities about his citizenship.1 Abdulah was one of the estimated
1 million Ottoman Muslims who found himself suddenly living in a new state
after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, his fate decided by European diplomats
mediating a peace agreement in a faraway city, drawing lines on maps of a
region they scarcely understood. The peace agreement ended a series of devas-
tating wars that had decimated the lands and peoples of Ottoman Europe and
provoked a grave humanitarian crisis. The redrawing of political boundaries
was designed to end conflict, while retaining a balance of power among
the Great Powers. Abdulah’s hometown of Podgorica had been assigned to
Montenegro, a Christian principality. Local authorities informed him and
other Muslims that they had a choice: leave or accept terms of citizenship
that would signal their loyalty to the new state—​that is, pay taxes and serve
in the army.
The restructuring of the Ottoman Empire was violent and traumatic,
a process tainted, even defined, by a desire among European powers to de-
stroy and drive out the Ottomans and their supporters. For Muslims who
stayed, the decision was not made lightly. During the wars of the 1870s,
Serbian, Bulgarian, Montenegrin, and Russian armies expelled or killed hun-
dreds of thousands of Ottoman Muslims, razed mosques, villages, and tradi-
tional Muslim neighborhoods, and desecrated cemeteries, removing signs of
the Muslim dead just as they erased the living. Every transfer of power was
accompanied by brutality toward Muslims and the systematic erasure of Islam
24

24 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

from the Balkan landscape.2 Mass expulsions and massacres drove people from
their homes. This violence followed patterns from earlier wars. Whenever
Ottoman political boundaries had been retracted and new governments took
power, Muslims had largely been expelled from their homes, pushed into the
remaining lands of the Ottoman state of which they were considered “nat-
ural” subjects. While a small number had stayed where they were, living
under Christian governments, they were considered foreign and their posi-
tion was precarious. These Muslims who stayed could suddenly be expelled at
the whim of new leadership, as Muslims in Belgrade experienced in 1842 and
Muslims in Užice experienced in 1863.3
But something was changing in the realm of international law in the 1870s,
and Muslims like Abdulah had a new option to remain in their homes with
the same rights and obligations as Christian men. At the Congress of Berlin,
states whose new boundaries included Ottoman lands came under pressure
from the Great Powers to give citizenship to all men in their territories, re-
gardless of religion. Eager for territory, sovereignty, and international legit-
imacy, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria agreed.4 Austria-​Hungary
consented to similar provisions in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, which it occupied
in 1878. Even Britain followed the Congress of Berlin protocol in its occu-
pation of Ottoman Cyprus, distinguishing the treatment of Muslims there
from other places in their vast empire. While the possibility of repatriation
remained uncertain for the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had fled
or been expelled during the wars of the 1870s, the treaty provisions offered,
on paper, political and civil rights to Ottoman Muslim men living in Serbia,
Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria, and Austria-​Hungary.5 These diplomatic
promises were soon after enshrined in state constitutions, decrees, and do-
mestic laws across the region.
In addition to having rights, Muslims acquired the same obligations of
citizenship: conscription, taxation, and participation in nation-​building, no-
tably by sending their children to school. To many Muslims, these obligations
felt repressive and unfair. Abdulah found it ludicrous that he would be
required to fight for an infidel army if he wanted to stay in his home. He
considered himself to be an Ottoman subject, even if the international com-
munity did not. Faced with an ultimatum of leaving his home or joining the
Montenegrin army, he refused to do either and was jailed. Abdulah also had
the option of paying an exemption fee for the military, which he refused to
do.6 Montenegrin officials were furious at such resistance.
Different versions of Abdulah’s story played out across southeastern
Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, as formerly Ottoman lands became integrated
25

Muslim Rights and Political Belonging 25

into new states. Local Muslims had no voice in the territorial redistribu-
tion choreographed by the Congress of Berlin, though it marked a radical
power shift in the lands where they had lived and ruled for centuries.7 Many
Ottoman Muslims, from educated bureaucrats and Islamic scholars to illit-
erate peasants and herders, refused to accept the legitimacy of new borders
and new governments. Resistance took various forms. Tens of thousands of
Muslims holed up in the mountains, “armed and lawless desperadoes,” as the
British described them, interpreting their rejection of the new political order
imposed upon them as a rejection of law itself.8 Ali of Gusi, an Ottoman
Muslim whose home was assigned to Montenegro, raised an army of 8,000
men that went to war against Prince Nikola of Montenegro. Historian Isa
Blumi argues that Ali “felt the covenant between the sultan and his subject
had been broken” in the Balkans, and thus took on the protection of Muslim
lands himself.9 Albanian-​speaking Muslims formed the League of Prizren
to fight against the transfer of their lands to Christian nationalizing states.
A group of Bulgarian-​speaking Muslims went so far as to develop their own
military and political structures, refusing to integrate into the new princi-
pality of Bulgaria. The leadership of the Tamrash Rebellion, as it became
known, went so far as to collect taxes and appoint an ambassador to a nearby
city; it survived for twelve years, from 1876 to 1888.10 Other Muslims turned
to alternative legal channels made available. For example, applications for em-
igration to the Ottoman Empire skyrocketed in Bosnia-​Herzegovina after
Austro-​ Hungarian occupation officials announced mandatory conscrip-
tion. For most Balkan Muslims, it was not the act of paying taxes, fighting
11

in the military, or sending their children to school that was the problem: it
was the Christianization associated with these processes and the abrupt end
to their lives as Muslims in an Islamic empire.
While armed insurgency and emigration presented two possible paths,
consenting to citizenship and living life as a religious minority offered a third
path. While demographics and statistics in this period are contested, this third
category of Muslims in the 1880s included an estimated 600,000 in prov-
inces that would become part of Bulgaria—​a quasi-​independent state under
Ottoman suzerainty; 600,000 in Habsburg-​occupied Bosnia-​Herzegovina;
tens of thousands in the sovereign states of Romania and Greece; about
15,000 in Serbia; and at least 12,000 in Montenegro.12 These Muslims spoke
many different languages—​Turkish, Albanian, Tatar, Romani, and various
Slavic languages; those who could write did so primarily in Ottoman Turkish,
Arabic, and Persian and were members of the elite. They included urban
communities whose members worked as craftsmen, artisans, and merchants in
26

26 Muslims an d t he M ak ing of Modern Europe

formerly Ottoman cities like Bar, Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Niš. The British would
describe these men as “orderly people,” who were “peaceable and industrious”
and got along well with their Christian neighbors.13 They stood in stark con-
trast to the lawless communities of Muslims fighting the new political order.
Muslims also comprised significant rural and mountainous populations, in-
cluding both owners of large estates and significant portions of the peasantry
working the land, herders and shepherds, and quasi-​nomadic communities
of Muslim Roma. The diversity of these Muslim communities extended to
religious practices, which included a wide range of regional variations and
customary traditions.14
While Ottoman military professionals, bureaucrats, judges (qadi),
and educators overwhelmingly left the surrendered territories in the late
1870s—​ by choice or under duress—​ small numbers of Islamic scholars
and judges remained in the main towns, overseeing a cadre of imams,
preachers, and teachers, often referred to by the regional term hodža, who
pastored communities across the Balkans. These men would become the
“intermediaries” with Muslim communities, local powerbrokers who would
be called on to manage Muslims, reinvent collective political identities,
modify Islamic laws and legal institutions, and make sense of state-​building
policies. Additionally, wealthy Muslim merchants and landowners often
worked in this capacity, negotiating directly with conquering armies and civil
authorities and becoming spokesmen for their communities, at times against
the will of the Muslims they allegedly represented.
Beginning with an overview of the complex international processes that
led to a new political and legal order in southeastern Europe, this chapter
analyzes how Muslims experienced and responded to the abrupt transition
to new states and the imposition of citizenship. It examines political repre-
sentation, property rights, and religious freedom—​three pillars of the citizen-
ship contract that would all be tested by the nation-​building agendas of new
governments. A distinct framework for Muslim citizenship emerged across
southeastern Europe in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin, one built on a
paradox of equality and discrimination. Nobody knew precisely how ideas of
political and property rights would translate into law and policy for Muslims
or how nation-​building might be squared with liberalism. Religious freedom
proved even more complicated. This was not a story of feel-​good multicultural
inclusivity, communities working together, and happy Muslims integrating
into new states on terms to which they consented. To borrow legal theorist
Dimitry Kochenov’s salient words: “The story of citizenship is as much a
story of flattering the pride of those who are proclaimed to ‘belong’—​a tale
Another random document with
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Cerebral symptoms arising in the course of ulcerative endocarditis
might be referred, with a high degree of probability, to an embolus,
but if they were distinct enough to be referred to a localized lesion,
the probability of a single embolus would be much greater than that
of a multitude of capillary ones occluding the same vascular territory.
The diagnosis of pigment embolism might be a probable, or at any
rate a possible, one if in a long-continued case of paludal fever,
where the liver and spleen were enlarged and the skin had the slaty
hue marking the deposit of pigment, there were decisive cerebral
symptoms. It could not, however, be a positive one.

Fatty embolism might be suspected in a case of diabetic coma,

though even if the condition were found it would not establish the
relation of causation.

PROGNOSIS AND TREATMENT can hardly have a definite basis in the

absence of all ground for a satisfactory diagnosis, but do not differ
essentially from those of the larger occlusions.

Thrombosis of the Cerebral Veins and Sinuses.

It has for centuries been known that coagulation of the blood might
take place in the sinuses in a way different from the ordinary post-
mortem clots, but this was looked upon rather as an anatomical
curiosity than as a fact of practical importance and clinical
significance, and it is chiefly among observers of the present century
that we find a growing knowledge of the conditions under which it
occurs and the symptoms to which it gives rise.

Thrombi in the cerebral sinuses are not essentially different from

those formed elsewhere, and the reader is referred to the account
given in the article on General Pathology for a history of their
formation, growth, appearances, and transformations. For our
purposes it is sufficient to recall that they may be white, red, or
striated, either partly or wholly obstructing, and that they may
become degenerated and partly or wholly washed away. The most
important distinction of all, however, is that into two classes, of which
the first consists of those which are simply depositions of fibrin in a
comparatively healthy vessel, and the second of those which are
dependent on a phlebitis.

In order that a thrombus may form it is necessary that there should

be, in the first place, a special condition of the walls of the veins—not
necessarily, however, inflammation, though this is one of the most
frequent and probably the most active form; second, a slackening of
the blood-current; and, third, perhaps a peculiar state of the blood,
though this latter is not certain. A thrombus tends strongly to grow,
and when already formed furnishes a most favorable point for the
deposition of more fibrin.

The cerebral veins furnish a very suitable place for the coagulation of
the blood for several reasons: they are roomy in proportion to the
amount of blood they carry; they are tortuous and abundantly
anastomosing, so that the current of blood is almost reversed at
some points, and can easily stagnate; the veins of the diploë are
held open by their bony walls, and the sinuses by their stiff
membranous ones, so that they cannot collapse and thus limit the
extension of a thrombus once formed.

The sinuses most frequently affected, though none are free from the
liability, are the cavernous, superior longitudinal, and lateral.

The results of thrombosis of the sinuses and veins are not equivalent
to those of a similar process in the arteries, and they may be said in
a general way to be more diffused, as might be expected from the
much greater freedom of anastomosis. Limited softening is rarely a
consequence of occlusion even of a considerable number of veins,
but it has been observed. A large area of softening of one
hemisphere, not involving the temporal and occipital lobes, has been
seen with thrombosis of the parietal veins58 (the internal capsule and
ganglia were not affected).
58 Gaz. des Hôp., 1880, 1066.
Passive congestion in the brain, as elsewhere, although apparently
entirely incompatible with the normal function, seems to be able to
sustain a low form of structural integrity.

Bleeding may take place from the congested veins behind the
obstruction, constituting a distinct form of cerebral hemorrhage which
does not depend upon an arteritis, although if miliary aneurisms
were present the occurrence of thrombosis would undoubtedly tend
to their rupture. The writer, however, is not aware of such a
coincidence having been actually observed. Hemorrhages are
usually diffuse, composed of or accompanied by a number of small
effusions, and situated on or near the surface of the brain or
distinctly meningeal. Punctiform hemorrhages are exceedingly
common.

Phlebitis of the cerebral veins is very likely to run into meningitis, and
the two affections are often so closely united that it is difficult to say
which was the first. Œdema is a consequence of venous obstruction
in the brain as well as elsewhere, and is seen also around some of
the peripheral veins connected with the sinuses.

ETIOLOGY.—Venous thrombosis in the brain depends chiefly on three

sets of causes, though it must be admitted that there are a few cases
where the origin cannot be distinctly traced and where no previous
disease has existed. In the marantic form, occurring chiefly in the
very old and in children, as well as in cases of wasting and
depressing diseases in adults, a simple thrombosis without
inflammation takes place. Two conditions, and sometimes three, are
combined here to produce the result—feebleness of the blood-
current from a corresponding state of the heart, diseased
endothelium of the vessels from defective nutrition, and possibly,
where profuse watery discharges have been going on for some time,
an increased tendency to coagulation from the inspissation of the
blood.

Rilliet and Barthez and Von Dusch59 give the following tables of ages
at which this form of thrombosis has been observed. The
observations of the former were made in a children's hospital, and
hence do not affect the question of its frequency in later life. Perhaps
the rules of admission may account for the absence of cases under
one year of age, of which Von Dusch collected several:

Rilliet
Von Dusch.
and Barthez.
Under 1 year ... 5
2 years 2 1
4 years 4 1
5 years 1 1
6 years 1
7 years 1
9 years 2
10 years 1
11 years 1
12 years ... 1
14 years ... 1
Adults (20, 23, unknown) ... 3
53 years ... 1
Aged women ... 2

59 Sydenham Society's translation.

The special diseases in which thrombosis is most likely to be met

with are given by Bouchut as follows. The same remark is to be
made about these as about those of Rilliet and Barthez. The table is
given as convulsions from thrombosis of sinuses:60

Chronic enteritis 5
Measles and catarrhal pneumonia 2
Chronic pneumonia 5
Phthisis 8
Anasarca without albuminuria 1
Chronic albuminuria 2
Whooping cough and pneumonia 7
 Scrofula, tubercle of bones, etc. 1
Gangrene of mouth 1
Diphtheritis 2

Von Dusch gives a number of cases of the same kind, as do many

subsequent writers, but without tabulation. Virchow61 reports a case
of congenital variola with thrombosis of the sinuses of the dura
mater, the superior and inferior cava, and vessels of the cord.
60 Gazette des Hôpitaux, 1879.

61 Arch., 1859, 367.

It is probable that simple anæmia may, here as elsewhere, either

alone or with other debilitating influences, lead to thrombosis. Von
Dusch remarks that quickly operating and debilitating influences lead
to thrombosis, and gives as an instance a case where a puerperal
peritonitis, for the cure (?) of which repeated copious abstractions of
blood were made during nine days, was supposed to be the cause.
The puerperal condition seems to have a tendency in this direction in
a way not always to be explained by the ordinary rules of the
transmission of emboli or of phlebitis. Although in those reported by
Ducrest62 phlebitis of the pelvic veins existed or was suspected, in
the first of these five cases the lesion may have been, so far as the
description goes, arterial instead of venous thrombosis; and in the
second it is possible that the succession of events was uterine
phlebitis (with the addition of a large sacral slough), lobular
pneumonia surrounded and traversed by veins which were affected
with phlebitis, emboli in the arteries of the cortex, and consequent
venous thrombosis. In the third, fourth, and fifth the connection
between the uterine phlebitis and the inflammation of the cerebral
veins (in two cases meningitis) cannot easily be made out, except by
the rather vague assumption of a general tendency to phlebitis,
which was shown in one by a similar condition in the vein of the arm
where the patient was bled. Empyema has been followed by
hemiplegia, cerebral softening, and thrombosis of the lateral sinus.
The venous thrombosis in such a case may be secondary.
 62 Archives générales, 1847, p. 1.

Marantic thromboses are more likely to occur upon one side, and
that the side upon which the patient habitually lies.

The second class of cases embraces those where a simple

obstruction, partial or complete, of the current of the blood gives the
starting-point for a thrombus in the veins. Such an obstruction may
be formed by an embolus, but in the veins this cannot be considered
an important factor, although a portion of a thrombus may be
detached and become lodged in a narrower vessel or branch farther
along. In this way the propagation of thrombosis for a short distance
toward the heart may be accounted for.

A tumor or inflammatory exudation may press upon a vein or intrude

into it, but most cases of obstruction-thrombosis are traumatic in
origin. Thromboses arising in connection with tubercular meningitis
may be looked upon as having both an obstructive and marantic
cause. In many wounds of the vertex, gunshot and other, the walls of
the superior longitudinal sinus are pressed upon by pieces of bone,
and sometimes spiculæ have directly penetrated it. This class of
injuries is also likely to cause phlebitis without any actual penetration
or compression of the sinus, simply as a result of the inflammation of
tissues in the neighborhood. The thrombi formed in these cases are
not necessarily completely occluding. Where direct injury to the sinus
or in its immediate neighborhood gives rise to phlebitis and
consequent thrombosis, we have a condition closely resembling that
of the third class, where disease of an inflammatory character in the
tissues of the skull, neck, or face sets up a phlebitis and thrombosis
which are transmitted to the intracranial veins and sinuses.

The most frequent source of this third form of inflammatory

thrombosis is the chronic inflammation of the middle ear with the
mastoid cells. The inflammation may be propagated through a
carious or necrosed portion of the temporal bone to the petrosal and
lateral sinuses, or may, without disease of the bone, be carried by
the small veins which open into the sinuses from the petrous and
mastoid portion of the temporal in this region. Abscesses in the neck
may set up a phlebitis extending up the jugular to the lateral sinuses,
to which a meningitis may possibly be added.

Carbuncles about the root of the nose, face, and so far down as the
upper lip are very prone to give rise to thrombosis propagated
through the ophthalmic vein to the cavernous sinus; and it is
probably this risk which gives to carbuncles in this situation their
well-known peculiar gravity. The divide or watershed between the
regions which drain backward through the cranium and those which
are connected with the facial vein below is apparently situated about
the level of the mouth, so that a carbuncle of the lower lip is much
less dangerous. Billroth, however, gives a case where a carbuncle in
this situation was followed rapidly by cerebral symptoms and death,
and where a thrombo-phlebitis was not improbable. He mentions
another case where a carbuncle upon the side of the head set up an
inflammation which travelled along a vein into the cellular tissue of
the orbit, and thence through the optic foramen and superior orbital
fissure into the skull.

Erysipelas of the scalp apparently causes phlebitis in some cases,

and even eczema in the same situation seems to have done so.
When the erysipelas is situated about the upper part of the face, the
path of transmission is through the ophthalmic vein; but when upon
the vertex, it may be propagated through the small veins that
penetrate the bone. This result is certainly a rare one in facial
erysipelas of the ordinary and superficial kind, which is a notoriously
benign disease for one of such apparent severity. It may, however,
be more frequent than ordinarily supposed, since cerebral symptoms
occasionally appear at a date too late to be accounted for by the
fever and too slight to be referred to extensive interference with the
cerebral circulation; the lesion to account for which, as they do not
cause death, can be only inferred, though it is not unreasonable to
suppose it to be a limited thrombosis.

Dowse63 describes the case of a robust man who fell on the back of
his head, but walked home. After a few days he had a severe
headache, chill, and total loss of vision. His temperature rose; he
had erysipelas and partial coma, but no convulsions. There was
thickening of the scalp, but no fracture of the skull and no adhesions
of the membranes. The superior longitudinal lateral sinuses were
free from thrombi, though there was a roughness about the latter, as
if there had been a fibrinous deposit. The cavernous sinuses were
almost completely occluded with adherent fibroid masses, and there
was hemorrhage in the anterior lobe. There was some degeneration
of the brain-structure, but no disease of the arteries.
63 Trans. Clin. Soc., 1876.

Ulcerations in the nasal passages and ozæna have proved starting-

points for thrombosis.64
64 Med. Times and Gaz., 1878, i. 614.

Thrombosis of the jugular veins and corresponding cavernous sinus,

with paralytic symptoms, has been observed in the horse.

The symptoms produced by venous thrombosis, as might be

supposed from their varying location and extent, and also from the
fact of their being almost invariably connected with other diseases
having marked and severe symptoms of their own, are not always
easy to pick out from among many others, but they are sometimes
very well marked and characteristic. A distinction must obviously be
made between the symptoms of simple thrombosis depending on
interruption of the cerebral circulation and those of phlebitis, which
give rise in addition to febrile phenomena common to phlebitis in any
of the large veins.

The symptoms which indicate venous obstruction, without reference

to its inflammatory or non-inflammatory character, are of two kinds:
first, those dependent upon the disturbance of the functions of the
brain; and, secondly, those which depend upon congestion and
compression of other structures.

According to the locality and completeness of the obstruction we

meet with brain symptoms.
In the marantic thrombosis of children these may be very vague, and
consist either in restlessness, followed by somnolence and coma, or,
most especially, in convulsions. The convulsions may be partial and
involve the face only; they may affect one side only, or, what is more
usually the case, be general. There is almost always strabismus.
There may be conjugate deviation. This latter phenomenon is said
by Bouchut to be of no value in children, as it may take place in
either direction, from or toward the lesion, but possibly the distinction
between the spastic and paralytic forms was not duly observed by
him. The condition of the fontanelles is spoken of as yielding and
depressed, with the edges of the bones overlapping. They may,
however, become again tense in the course of the disease from
exudation or hemorrhage taking place. Paralysis is not so marked as
in adults, but may be present.

In adults delirium takes the place of convulsions, due to a

disturbance of circulation over a considerable area, rather than to a
total suppression in a more limited one. Paralyses are not
infrequently met with, either in the form of a hemiplegia or more
localized. Hemorrhage will naturally be followed by its usual
consequences, according to its location. Headache, often very
severe, is among the early symptoms.

It is evident that none of these symptoms can be considered highly

characteristic. They can only furnish a certain amount of probability
in cases where the general course of the disease has made it likely
that thrombosis may take place.

There is another set, however, which, when present, offer the

strongest kind of confirmation: these are due to the pressure from
the veins themselves.

Œdema about the points at which the intracranial circulation is

connected with that of the face and neck may give rise to protrusion
of the eyeball, conjunctival ecchymoses, swelling of the upper lip,
and even of the upper part of the face, which sometimes becomes
slightly cyanosed from the congestion. Epistaxis has been noted.
Œdema may be noticed about the mastoid process when the
thrombosis is situated in the lateral sinuses, but it would be important
in many cases to distinguish this from inflammatory œdema directly
due to disease of the bone.

Œdema of the optic disc, as shown by obscuration of its outlines,

with large and pale vessels, has been observed by Bouchut.

Veins closely connected with those within the cranium may be

thrombosed, and felt as hard cords by the finger. This may occur in
the facial veins about the orbit, in those around the mastoid, or in the
jugulars. On the other hand, if one cavernous sinus is filled with a
coagulum which does not go down into the jugular, this vein will
naturally be empty or receive only a small amount of blood from
other veins.

When the cavernous sinuses are affected, we are likely to have a set
of phenomena due to the pressure of the clot upon the nerves which
pass through it—i.e. the third and fourth, part of the fifth and sixth—
with filaments of the sympathetic accompanying the carotid artery.
Hence dilatation of the pupil, strabismus, or ptosis, and other ocular
paralyses may be the symptoms observed.

It is possible that a headache upon the side of the affected sinus

may be due to vascular dilatation from paralysis of the sympathetic,
or to a direct pressure upon the first branch of the fifth pair.

DIAGNOSIS.—The diagnosis of venous thrombosis may be almost

entirely a conjectural one in those cases where the cerebral
symptoms are vague or mixed with others peculiar to the causative
disease. Where wasting disease has existed, the patient is much
emaciated, and profuse discharges have diminished the fluidity of
the blood, the rapid supervention of coma with slight spasms or
general convulsions will render it highly probably that thrombosis is
taking place. Unilateral symptoms would greatly increase this
probability, and if any accessible veins about the head, neck, or face
could be definitely distinguished as filled with firm coagula, the
diagnosis would approach certainty.
In cases of this kind the only condition likely to put on the
appearance of thrombosis is the simple inanition or so-called hydro-
encephaloid disease, which comes on in exactly the same sort of
cases. Localized phenomena must be the chief point of difference.
Fortunately, the distinction is practically not an important one.

In wounds of the vertex affecting the longitudinal sinus the question

likely to arise where cerebral symptoms supervene is that of
thrombosis or abscess. Here the more definite localization is likely to
be upon the side of the abscess, although, as is well known, this
may remain latent or nearly so for a considerable time, and in
general is much more chronic in its course than thrombosis.

The swelling of the external veins, epistaxis, œdema of the lid,

protrusion of the eyeball, with œdema of the optic papilla, with only
moderate fever, would favor the diagnosis of thrombosis, while optic
neuritis, if present, with chills, would render the abscess more
probable. Unless the wound were sufficiently severe to fracture a
piece of bone into the sinus, or unless the subsequent inflammation
were of an unhealthy character, the abscess in a person of middle
age and previous good health may be considered the more probable
of the two. In the case of Dowse, already mentioned, the diagnosis
between abscess and thrombus must have been very difficult, and,
as it seems to the writer, would have been more likely to rest upon
abscess or meningitis than upon the condition afterward found to
exist.

Where inflammatory diseases exist which are known to lead to

thrombosis with phlebitis, the practitioner, if on the lookout, can often
make a diagnosis with a high degree of probability in its favor. The
cerebral symptoms with the venous swelling, collateral inflammatory
œdema in the more immediate neighborhood of the lesion, and slight
œdema and congestion at more distant points, and a febrile
movement indicating a distinct inflammatory exacerbation, will point
very strongly to thrombo-phlebitis.

An absolute distinction between such a condition of the veins and a

meningitis arising under exactly the same circumstances may not
always be possible, and is the less important since the two affections
are likely to coexist and form a part of the same disease.

The localization of the thrombus is to be determined partly by the

paralytic symptoms, if such exist, but principally by the situation of
the secondary œdema and from the lesion which forms the starting-
point. It has been said that the jugular vein of the side on which
thrombosis exists is less full; and this point might be of value when
the lateral sinus is affected.

PROGNOSIS.—From the character of the lesion itself, as well as from

the diseases with which thrombosis is usually connected, it will
readily be seen that the prognosis is in general a highly unfavorable
one; but it is possibly regarded as too inevitably so, for the reason
that a positive diagnosis may be in slighter cases a matter of
considerable uncertainty, so that the practitioner, even if attempting
to make an accurate anatomical explanation of obscure cerebral
symptoms, is as likely to think that he has been mistaken as that his
patient has recovered from so serious a disease.

Cases, however, have been reported where the diagnosis seems as

clear as it can be made without an autopsy, and recovery has taken
place.

A case is reported by Voorman65 of a child aged six months who had

diarrhœa and vomiting, much prostration, sunken fontanelles,
overlapping cranial bones, trembling of the tongue, slight spasm of
the right arm and leg, head drawn back, and strabismus. The head
afterward increased in size, the temporal vein was swollen and hard,
with œdema of the skin in its neighborhood. There was gradual
improvement and recovery, though when the patient was four and a
half years old its mental development corresponded to that of a child
two years younger.
65 Centralb. f. d. Med. Wis., 1883.

In another, by Kolb,66 a child of seventeen, well nourished, had a

purulent discharge from the right ear. Besides headache, delirium,
hyperæsthesia, convulsions, and then sleepiness and loss of
consciousness, the following symptoms pointed toward thrombosis
of the sinuses: Chills, inflammatory swelling over the right mastoid,
with fulness of a cutaneous vein passing over it; a purely
œdematous swelling in the neighborhood of the internal jugular or
temporal fossa, forehead, and both upper eyelids, with
exophthalmos on the right side; photophobia, blepharospasm, and
cloudy vision; nose-bleed. There was no elevation of temperature,
and recovery took place.
66 Berl. klin. Woch., Nov. 13, 1876.

A case of thrombo-phlebitis following otitis and terminating in

recovery is reported at length by Wreden.67
67 Archives of Ophth. and Otol., 1874, lii. (translation).

The PROGNOSIS in any particular case can be based only on the

severity of the symptoms and on the character of the preceding
disease.

TREATMENT.—The prophylaxis of this affection evidently consists in

the proper treatment of the diseases upon which it depends, and
might therefore be made to embrace nearly the whole range of tonic,
roborant, antiphlogistic, and antiseptic measures, to say nothing of
surgery and obstetrics. The proper nourishment of infants and
children, the cutting short, when possible, of their acute diseases, or
preventing their debilitating effects, will reduce marantic thrombosis
to a minimum. At a later period of life the proper surgical
management of carbuncle, abscess in the neck, and of the puerperal
condition will tend to avoid this risk.

The most important point of all, however, is undoubtedly the careful

treatment of otitis media and early attention to inflammation in the
mastoid cells, with incision or trephining as may be necessary.

After a thrombus has formed there is little to be done toward its

removal.
It has been claimed68 that the preparations of ammonia are capable
of diminishing considerably the coagulability of the blood when it is
morbidly augmented. Though this cannot be considered proved, yet
since the tendency of these salts is also to quicken the blood-
current, a trial in a case where other indications are wanting is, to
say the least, justifiable.
68 Lidell, Am. Journ. Med. Sci., July, 1874, p. 101.

In a case reported by O'Hara,69 where the symptoms pointed very

strongly toward thrombosis of the cavernous sinuses, recovery took
place under mercurials, iodide of potassium, and purgatives. The
reporter was inclined to consider the cause of trouble specific.
69 N. Y. Med. Record, vol. xvii. p. 617.

Considering the fact that cases with such marked and decisive
symptoms as those last recorded have recovered, it is certainly the
duty of the physician to prolong the life of his patient to the utmost,
that absorption and condensation may go on as long as possible and
collateral circulation be developed. Probably most physicians can
recall cases of obscure cerebral disease going on to recovery
contrary to all expectation, in which thrombosis furnishes an
explanation quite as plausible as any other.

Softening of the Brain

is a name which it is yet too early to omit altogether from a

systematic work, although in treating of it we have more to do with
nomenclature and classification than with pathological anatomy. The
phrase may be said to have both an anatomical and a clinical
signification, which do not coincide at all points. Clinically and among
the laity it is used to express various symptoms and groups of
symptoms more or less referable to the brain, some of them
connected with one and some with another lesion, and many purely
functional—if the word may be used—or at any rate unconnected
with any known or definite lesion.

Vertigo, dull headache, sleeplessness, or, on the other hand,

drowsiness, failure of memory, failure of power of concentration, of
steady application, mental depression, fatigue, and even slight
aphasia or actual slight hemiplegia, may any of them be considered
symptoms or forerunners of softening of the brain. As nearly as
anything, the popular notion of this affection corresponds to general
paralysis of the insane or senile dementia, or even mere exhaustion.
Many of these symptoms may, of course, be connected with the real
softening described as the result of embolism or thrombosis, but it is
hardly necessary to say that a symptomatology based on these
elements alone is either too vague or else too much like that of
diseases already described to be considered useful as a separate
clinical grouping.

On the anatomical side softening of the brain has had a definite

meaning, and for many years a part of its pathology has been well
known. A general softening of the whole brain, such as seems to be
the condition supposed when the phrase is used, does not and
cannot exist, since a vascular lesion sufficient to cause anæmic
necrosis of the whole brain must cause death long before softening
would have time to take place. Nearly all the works and reports on
softening have been based upon cases such as are now referred to
definite lesions of the blood-vessels; and a good idea of the change
in nomenclature and pathological views may be obtained by noticing
the dates given in the extensive literature of the subject in the Index
Catalogue of the Surgeon-General's library, which are nearly all
previous to 1860 or 1865.

Localized softening has already been described under the heads of

hemorrhage, embolism, and thrombosis, venous and arterial.
Whether it may occur from diseases of the cerebral vessels without
actual occlusion is not certain, but, remembering the difficulty of
detecting thrombi in minute vessels, and also the fact that it is not a
great many years that occlusions have been systematically sought
for at autopsies, it is better for the present to assume, in cases
where softening is found in the usual form and the usual situations
for the results of thrombosis and embolism, that one of these
accidents is the cause, even if the actual point of occlusion is not
found.

Softening may take place secondarily from tumors in the brain, and
the name is also sometimes applied to a local encephalitis, which is
an early stage of abscess. When, however, these various forms of
disease are removed from the general heading of softening and
referred to their proper pathological classes, there is a residuum in
which the softening seems to be the primary affection, so far as the
brain is concerned, though depending on other constitutional
conditions.

In new-born infants softening of the brain, besides the rare cases in

which it may be dependent on the same conditions which may cause
it in the adult, is observed in two forms, as described by Parrot:70 A.
White softening in multiple foci, dependent upon fatty degeneration,
of which it constitutes the last stage, is found almost exclusively in
the centres of the hemispheres. B. Red softening, which affects the
same region, but more extensively, and is accompanied by
hemorrhage into the lymphatic sheaths with rupture.
70 Arch. de Phys., 1873, p. 302.

These two forms may exist with each other, and with other
intracranial lesions, such as thrombi of the sinuses and exudation
under the arachnoid and around the veins.

Parrot compares this form of softening to that occurring in the other

extreme of life, dependent on vascular lesions; but although he
supposes the method of production to be unlike in the two cases, it is
by no means so certain, either from his conclusions or his cases,
that it is always so. In some of his cases the vessels are said not to
be abnormal, but in others old thrombi are distinctly mentioned. As
secondary consequences may be observed intracranial dropsy, with
perhaps hydrocephalic cranium and degeneration of the pons, bulb,
and medulla.

Two cases of red softening of the cerebellum have been reported.71

In one of them the pia was adherent, in the other thickened and
covered with exudation. The microscopic details are not given nor
the state of vessels mentioned. They are probably not strictly
analogous to those described by Parrot.
71 Jahrbuch. f. Kinderheilkunde, 1877.

The occurrence of granular corpuscles in the brain of the new-born is

described by Virchow, and it is thought by him to be pathological and
of an irritative character (encephalitis congenita). It is somewhat
doubtful if this process is characterized by any distinct symptoms.

The ETIOLOGY is impaired nutrition, deficient or improper feeding, and

depressing diseases, frequently tubercle.

The SYMPTOMS and DIGNOSIS of this form of softening are even more
obscure than those of venous thrombosis in the same class of
cases. Vague cerebral symptoms arising in an infant poorly
nourished and suffering from acute disease may be due to this
condition, but a positive diagnosis is out of the question. In the two
cases of softening of the cerebellum just mentioned, in one, aged
five, there was dilatation of the pupil, difficulty of hearing, and
vertigo; in the other, aged six, vertigo, inclination to vomit, and clonic
spasm of the left facial muscles. Parrot says that in the greater
number of patients the encephalopathic troubles observed during life
cannot be referred to it (softening), and in no case can it be
diagnosticated.

Under these circumstances it is obvious that remarks upon the

PROGNOSIS and TREATMENT must be purely works of the imagination.

Atheroma of the Cerebral Arteries

has already been spoken of as one of the most important factors in
thrombosis, and perhaps of considerable consequence in embolism
and hemorrhage. Its symptoms, when one of these accidents has
taken place, are hardly to be separately considered; and if atheroma
have produced complete occlusion, even without the assistance of a
clot, the symptoms could not be distinguished from those of an
ordinary thrombosis, and would follow the same course.

In some cases, however, the thickening of the artery may interfere

with, without completely interrupting, the circulation in the part to
which it is distributed, and the degree of the interference may vary
from time to time. If, then, in a person whose age and general
physical condition, as shown by the state of the tangible arteries,
arcus senilis, complexion, and so forth, render the existence of
atheromatous arteries in the brain probable, cerebral symptoms of
an ill-defined character arise, it is very probable that they are the
result of irregularities in the circulation dependent on atheroma.

This state of things is to be distinguished from the more clearly

marked conditions which have already been described, partly by the
incompleteness of the attack, and partly by its changes in severity
and character from time to time—a paralysis undergoing alternations
of improvement and the reverse from day to day, delirium appearing
and disappearing in correspondence with the general health, the
vigor of the heart, and the state of the digestive organs.

The diagnosis between these incomplete anæmias and an almost

precisely similar result of syphilitic endarteritis is to be made chiefly
by the history and age. In middle-aged persons general paralysis
might present a not very different set of phenomena. A tolerably
distinct, but not severe, hemiplegia in an old person, subsiding in a
few hours under the influence of a cathartic, and perhaps returning
more than once, may often be due to a local and temporary anæmia
from atheroma, as well as to slight hemorrhage or a not completely
occluding thrombus.

On the other hand, extensive atheroma may exist without serious

impairment of the cerebral functions, provided it be evenly distributed
and do not interfere with the passage of blood in any one vessel.

The prophylaxis of atheroma has already been considered. We do

not know of any drug that can change the nature or extent of the
processes going on in the arterial walls, but if any influence can be
exerted it is through dietetic and hygienic means.

The consequences of rigidity of the arterial walls, as productive of

resistance to the passage of blood, can be warded off to some
extent by promoting the vigor of the heart. Treatment should
therefore be directed to the improvement of the nutrition of the body
in general and the heart in particular. Heart tonics and laxatives are
the classes of medicaments most likely to be useful. Perhaps it is to
its effect in increasing the force of the heart contractions, like
digitalis, that coffee owes its reputation as a preservative from
apoplexy.

ATROPHY AND HYPERTROPHY OF THE BRAIN.

 BY H. D. SCHMIDT, M.D.

ATROPHY OF THE BRAIN.

INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION.—Atrophy of the brain may originate

during intra-uterine life or by defective development during the early
periods of childhood, or it may occur during adult life, when the
organ is fully developed. The atrophy is characterized by a
diminution of the normal bulk of the brain-substance, in consequence
of which the latter does not entirely fill the cavity of the cranium, but
leaves a greater or less space to be occupied by a serous fluid.
Generally, the atrophy affects, in a symmetrical or asymmetrical
manner, larger or smaller portions of the brain; an atrophy
symmetrically affecting all parts of the brain has never been
observed, even in microcephalia. Nevertheless, when the atrophy
affects both hemispheres of the cerebrum, it is generally called total,
whilst it is designated partial when it is limited to only one
hemisphere or to other individual parts of the brain, such as the
cerebellum, the large cerebral ganglia, etc.

For the sake of convenience we shall treat the atrophy of the brain
occurring during childhood, when the organ is still developing,
separately from that of the fully-developed brain of the adult.

1. Atrophy of the Brain during Childhood.

When congenital or originating during infancy the atrophy is either

primarily due to certain pathological processes taking place in the
substance of the brain, or secondary, being due to lesions of the
skull, such as premature ossification of the sutures. Total atrophy of