The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia posed challenges for the universal concept of the Yugoslav Muslim nation for which several development paths were imaginable under the new circumstances. The concept of Bosniakdom, which was initially developed to address the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, gradually grew to become a new and coherent national program to include all the Muslims of former Yugoslavia, primarily due to its new pan-Bosniak orientation. The present article traces the conceptual history of the national ideas of Muslimdom versus Bosniakdom within the former Yugoslav states, as well as the conceptual and institutional history of the pan-Bosniak idea and movement during the 1990s and 2000s. It does this by emphasizing the decisive role the Official Muslim Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina played in their development and divulgence. This article claims that, contrary to some expectations, the strategy of internationalization and universalization of the hitherto territorial concept of Bosniakdom toward Muslims in neighboring countries during the second half of 1990s and 2000s was closely linked to the idea of the construction of the Bosniak national state. It also proposes that the evolution of Bosniakdom into pan-Bosniakdom during that time primarily followed concerns related to that goal.

It is generally assumed that the European Muslim brothers derive their concepts of state and society primarily from the traditional Islamic political theory that originated in the historical context of the Muslim Middle East. In contrast, this article asserts the hitherto scantily analyzed influence of liberal political theory, especially its idea of civil society, in the evolution of the political and social theory of the European Muslim Brotherhood within the context of the Muslim minority position in Europe. The article identifies the tendency of the European Muslim brotherhood towards the multiculturalist communitarian model of political and social accommodation, and does this by tracing the history of the conceptual interconnectedness between modern Islamic and liberal concepts of civil society as a privileged space of political action in the absence of realistic prospects for the seizure of state power.

Between 1880 and 1912 Austrian Empire issued several legal Acts regarding the terms by which the Muslims of the newly adjunct territories in Bosnia and Herzegovina were to settle their religious and community-related affairs within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These Acts laid fundaments for the establishment of the first autonomous Islamic religious institutions in the Austrian Empire. The present article argues that institutions established during that time remained the most conspicuous legacy of the Austrian juristic regulation of Islamic affairs, not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina but in all successor states of the former Yugoslavia as well as in present time Austria itself.

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