Croat nationalists embraced Muslims as purest Croats to claim Bosnia’s territory.

Evidence

Ante Starčević, the father of integral Croat nationalism, viewed the Bosnian Muslims as the racially purest Croats. He said that of all religions, ‘only the Turkish is worth something; all the others absolutely nothing’. To Starčević, ‘The Mohammedans of Bosnia-Hercegovina have nothing in common with the Turkish, Mohammedan breed; they are of Croat breed; they are the oldest and cleanest nobility that Europe has.’ According to the tradition he established, the Bosnian Muslims were the ‘flower of the Croat nation’. This was possible for Croat nationalists because, unlike the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans, Croatia had not been ruled and oppressed by the Ottomans. The Islamophile character of integral Croat nationalism was, of course, a way for it to lay claim to Bosnia, where the Catholics were only a small minority. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1060

Categorization

• SEED: A striking reversal of the usual Islamophobic nationalism — an essay angle on how nationalists instrumentalize religious others as ‘true’ members when it serves territorial claims.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece in that both show how dress and religious markers are instrumentalized for political/identity ends rather than taken at face value — here the fez and Muslim identity are claimed as ‘Croat’ for territorial purposes.