Religious Diversity and Equality in Interwar Yugoslavia

Building a Religiously Diverse Democratic State

Interwar Yugoslavia, ¹ established in 1918 in the wake of the First World War, embraced a territory with an extremely diverse population in terms of its ethnic and religious composition, ² as well as regional, socio-economic, and historical legacies. Built on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, with the victorious Kingdom of Serbia providing the legal basis, the new state was imagined and established on the premise that it embraced the principles of democratic politics and Wilsonian national self-determination (Djokić, 2019; Falina, 2019). The principle of religious equality was accepted and internalized as part of this premise from the early stages of state-building. Paragraph Seven of the foundational Corfu Declaration—the document codifying the agreed-upon principles of unification—guaranteed the freedom and equality of the three main religious traditions: Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Islam. It also introduced a second key principle—the leading role of the state as the regulator of religious diversity and the guarantor of peace. According to the Declaration, the Legislature was to “preserve and protect the confessional peace in conformity with the spirit and tradition of our entire nation” ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 6). Religious equality was in line with the expectations of the European Great Powers, and both Croat and Serb representatives believed it was central to the overall stability of the new state. At the same time, most political actors saw guaranteeing religious equality as a less daunting task in comparison with managing national and ethnic diversity. This was, perhaps, because the political leaders believed that religious equality was important and worth protecting insofar as it benefitted the state, not the religious communities. By extension, this meant that religious communities and institutions and their leaders were not expected to have political agency of their own.

The president of the Yugoslav Council, Croat Ante Trumbić, argued that a secular and neutral state was essential to achieving religious equality. For example, Yugoslavia could not keep Orthodox Christianity as the state religion, as was the case in the Kingdom of Serbia, because this would violate the principle of religious equality ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 25). His preferred solution was for the Yugoslav state to be a-confessional and completely secular, with a strict separation of church and state, thus removing religion entirely from the public sphere. The question of state religion as well as the matter of the confessional belonging of the ruler stood for a bigger issue: the degree to which the new state was an extension of the Serbian political tradition. Nikola Pašić, the leader of the Serbian delegation and the longstanding leader of the Serbian Radical Party, defended the special status of Orthodox Christianity based on its long history as a defender of the Serbian national character and identity as well as on its important work of inspiring the Serbian army during the First World War ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 30). Without disputing the historical and political roles of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and in some ways precisely because of its roles, Trumbić insisted on its equal status in a religiously diverse state. In Trumbić’s view, the interests of the state must come before any of the interests of religious communities in order to achieve and keep religious equality. Trumbić argued that to accommodate the demands of religious actors, however well-reasoned, would only damage the Yugoslav state. Trumbić’s position, therefore, was generally secularist rather than anti-Orthodox. He was equally critical of the Vatican, arguing that it had been a natural ally of both the Habsburgs and Italy—the long-term rivals of the South Slavs. The Catholic Church did not respect political borders, and it was “imminently autocratic” and hence no friend of Yugoslavs ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 32).

The majority of Yugoslav political actors at the time, regardless of their ideological views and national preferences, regarded religion as a function of politics that did not have much meaning on its own. This allowed them to argue for a secular state at a time when the population throughout the Balkans continued to be fairly religious and when traditional ways of life prevailed in rural areas. In their view, a secular Yugoslavia would allow for easier national unification. By downplaying the importance of religion, Trumbić and others removed a potential factor of destabilization. It was this understanding that prompted Jovan Skerlić, a great Serbian literary scholar, politician, and public intellectual, to argue at the turn of the century that a common Yugoslav identity was possible only under the condition of the universal and total religious indifference of the people (Bakić, 2004: 73). In the early 1920s, Jovan Djaja, one of the leaders of the Serbian Radical Party, called for an absolute ban on religion from public politics because religion and politics were, in his opinion, irreconcilable.

However, there did exist a tradition of Yugoslavism compatible with religion. In 1877, one of the “founding fathers” of Yugoslavism, the Archbishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, underlined that by its very nature Christianity should draw Serbian and Croatian nations together and not estrange them; such a separation would be against the essence of the religious teachings of love and mutual understanding. Strossmayer argued that “religion which would be able to sow discord between brothers would not be religion, but rather a sheer superstition; it would not be the God’s truth, but a human delusion” (1877). However appealing this utopian vision of unity, Strossmayer articulated this very liberal, ecumenical understanding of religion and religious difference when the creation of the common Yugoslav state was more a matter of a dream than a realistic political prospect. The other obvious drawback of this approach was its explicitly Christian character. The interwar period would see elements of both approaches—secular and Christian—combined to create a system that disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and organizations who advocated for religious interests, in particular the interests of non-Christian groups.

The Yugoslav Muslim minority, as the largest non-Christian religious community, presents an interesting case, one that illustrates the limits of religious equality. The language of minority rights, which was prominent during the discussion in Paris and elsewhere in East Central Europe, did not appear out of the blue; rather, it built upon decades of thinking and talking about the “nationality question”, minorities, and the problem of organizing a highly heterogeneous population (Manela, 2007; Weitz, 2008; on the framing of the nationalities question in the nineteenth century, see Case, 2018; Trencsényi et al., 2016: 281–316). The League of Nations was charged with the protection of minorities in the newly established states, and legislation was passed, but the mechanisms of control over its implementation had limited power (Mazower, 1997). A series of treaties on the protection of minorities was meant to guarantee the equal rights of all citizens regardless of their race, nationality, religion, or language. Some treaties included special provisions for specific minorities, e.g., Jews in Poland and Romania, or Muslims in Yugoslavia (Fink, 2000: 389). These treaties were imposed upon generally reluctant governments that presented themselves as already democratic and that therefore did not see the need for any special provisions and protections. Thus, Yugoslav Prime Minister Pašić argued that “the Serb-Croat-Slovene State, composed of a single people with three names, three religions and two alphabets, by its very nature is called to practice the broadest tolerance,” and that, consequently, special minority protections would be superfluous (Robinson et al., 1943: 154–157). However, European leaders, as Carole Fink observed, “never doubted their power to create this new system despite their limited understanding of the issues, lack of physical presence in the area and the differences among themselves” (2000: 390).

According to the Saint-Germain Agreement on the Protection of Minorities (1919), the Yugoslav government guaranteed religious equality to all its citizens. The position and status of Muslims was discussed separately in Article 10, according to which they kept religious autonomy. The state was to protect any Muslim religious properties, educational institutions, and charities already in place; creation of any “new religious and charitable establishments” was to be regulated in the same way as for other religious groups (The American Journal of International Law, 1920: 339). The continuous operation of the Shari’a courts was guaranteed again in the 1921 Constitution, because it was one of the important conditions required to secure Muslim support for the new Yugoslav state. In the nineteenth century, Bosnian Muslims had agreed to accept non-Muslim rule as long as the functioning of the Shari’a courts was guaranteed, as indeed was the case in the Habsburg Empire. ³

In theory, minority status guaranteed equal civic and political rights, but it did not mean that the voices of minorities would be heard in the discussions about the organization of the state and the nation-building process. In some ways, acceptance of the protection of minorities allowed the majority Christian establishment to marginalize non-Christians. One of the side-effects of this approach was the continuous attempt of the state to group all Muslims into a single religious community with little recognition of their linguistic and historical diversity. Bosnian Muslims benefitted from this because they were numerically strong, while Muslim Albanians in the South and Muslim Slavs in Sandžak, as well as Turks, Roma, and other smaller groups, struggled to have their demands recognized.

Despite the declared acceptance of unconditional religious equality, a religious community had to justify its claims by underlining its historical and recent contributions to the Yugoslav “national cause”. This put Yugoslav Muslims at a disadvantage and reinforced Yugoslavia’s Christian character. When Trumbić acknowledged the importance of religion in the history and everyday life of Yugoslavia, he suggested that Christianity should have an elevated position, given that “our people are deeply Christian.” To achieve real balance between Islamic and Christian traditions was neither possible nor desirable: “I believe that politically it would be a mistake to establish a full equality between Islam and Christianity,” he said ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 31–34). His scepticism of the possibility of religious harmony only reinforced his conviction that secularism was necessary.

In a slightly divergent approach, Slovenian Bogumil Vošnjak described the proposed system as “the system of religious parity.” In this system, the state regulates the relationship between religious communities while remaining above them. He also suggested that such a system should not necessarily result in an a-confessional state. He argued that the United States allowed freedom of worship to its many sects, yet it remained in essence a Christian state. Applying this model to the Yugoslav case, he believed that “Muslims will accept that this is a Christian state as [a part] of social reality. They will be our equal friends” ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 42; Janković, 1967: 274–275). In his eyes, this did not violate any democratic rights, and it made the Yugoslav state better than the British or French Empires, which did not treat their religious minorities and other colonial subjects equally anyway.

Yugoslav statesmen liked to claim that the tradition of the peaceful coexistence of various religions was part of Yugoslav history. Indeed, it was an important aspect of Balkan history, but it was characteristic of the Imperial Ottoman and Habsburg contexts rather than of the new independent nation-states. For a very long time, Muslims have been one of the “historical others” in Europe. Much Balkan historical mythology and many narratives of nation-building, especially that of the “struggle for national liberation,” are based on the juxtaposition of Islam and Christianity (Kolstø, 2005). Resistance to Ottoman oppression formed the core of the historical narratives of the Ottoman successor states, and thus was in direct contradiction to the declared intent of the Yugoslav government to build upon the tradition of tolerance and coexistence. When this is taken together with the limited role that Muslims played in fostering the Yugoslav idea, it is easy to understand why the tendency to marginalize them was characteristic of many of Trumbić’s contemporaries.

The official reaction of the Bosnian Muslim community to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was one of horror paired with a sense of an imminent disaster. The ulema expressed its regrets and assured the Viennese authorities that all the Muslims of Bosnia were very sorry that they could not “with their [own] lives protect the precious lives of the eminent members of our high ruling house” (Duranović, 2010: 178). Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević, appointed as Reis-ul-ulema for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Grand Mufti of Bosnia) just before the war, underlined the loyalty of Bosnian Muslims to the Austrian empire during the July crisis and in the early months of the war. He called on the Muslims of Bosnia to be ready to defend Austria and drew their attention to the fact that in the Habsburg Empire they enjoyed rights and privileges unavailable to many Muslims living in other non-Muslim states. He especially underlined Austria’s alliance with Germany at a time when German generals and specialists were advising on reforms in Istanbul that helped make the Ottoman Empire stronger (Duranović, 2010: 180). Once the Sultan proclaimed jihad in November 1914, the Bosnian Muslim authorities had extra impetus for their patriotic drive in support of the Austrian military effort. Čaušević changed his mind towards the end of the war and mentioned the possibility of accepting the idea of a South Slav state, provided that Bosnian Sabor was given the opportunity to discuss the matter and make an informed, independent, and responsible decision.

The younger generation of Muslim intelligentsia was more accepting of the Yugoslav idea. In early 1918, Mehmed Spaho, who would become the leader of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (JMO) and one of the most loyal supporters of royal Yugoslavia, stated somewhat overenthusiastically that “Muslim intelligentsia, and the majority of the general public perceive their salvation [to be] in accord and unity between all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” (Šišić, 1920: 94). While Spaho may have exaggerated the popularity of the Yugoslav idea, there was a certain shift in the overall attitude. Thus, in November 1918 Čaušević called Serbian soldiers and officers “the pioneers and defenders of our young freedom” who fought for the freedom of “their brothers in blood and language in the Slavic south” (Kamberović, 2009: 103). Sakib Korbut, one of the leaders of the JMO, argued in 1921 that Yugoslavism was acceptable for South Slav Muslims because it was not linked to religion (Troch, 2015: 182). Muslims could keep and develop their religious identity while simultaneously belonging to the Yugoslav nation. This presupposition, however, did not take into account the Christian character of Yugoslavia. In the nationalist Serbian interpretation, the essence of the Bosnian Muslims’ position during the First World War was its extreme anti-Serbian character, and this was used to deny Yugoslav Muslims a say in high-level political conversation (Mikić, 1997).

Čaušević and other Yugoslav Muslims recognized and tried to problematize, if not refute, the Christian character of the state. In November 1919, Čaušević wrote to the Minister for Religious Affairs complaining about underfunding and his requests for financial help being ignored. He drew his attention to the overtly Christian and non-inclusive language used by the authorities that refers to “church elders and districts,” which presumably include the head of the Muslim community as well. “True, this is nothing harsh,” he writes, “but let’s say that once an order was issued in the opposite sense, i.e. when it was addressed to ‘All muftis and reis-ul-ulema in the Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes’, would their Graces and bishops take note of it?” (AJ 69-53-86)

Numerous teachers complained about the presence of Christian symbols, references, poems, etc., in textbooks. One of the points in the Resolution of the Congress of Muslim Intellectuals (held in 1928 in Sarajevo) read: “Not only out of reasons of religious sensitivity, but also out of reasons of national and cultural unity and culture in general, we most energetically demand that all elements which could affect the religious sentiment of Muslims be deleted from school textbooks” ( Gajret 1928: 349). Some suggested publication of uniform textbooks without any references to religion at all, i.e., totally secularized. This followed the same line of argument that Čaušević put forward when he argued that it was necessary to divorce “tribal” identities from religion:

There are in our state Croats and Serbs who are closely following their Islamic faith, and this has to be taken into account. I am firmly convinced that the most accurate solution is that neither the Catholics nor the Orthodox link their Croat or Serb identity with their religious feelings, since it causes a great confusion among those Croats who are not Catholics and those Serbs who are not Orthodox. (Karić and Demirović, 2002: 192)

Regulation of Religious Diversity at the National Level

In 1919, Regent Aleksandar issued a special proclamation that granted equality to all religions; the 1921 and 1931 Constitutions guaranteed freedom of conscience and ensured that all legally recognized religions would enjoy equal rights. Apart from the Christian confessions (Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran), Islam and Judaism were among these “recognized” religions. State law provided for complete freedom with regards to various religious communities’ internal affairs and forbade all confessions and their representatives from meddling in politics (Radić, 2002: 21). The latter point was heavily debated between 1918 and 1921, and the regulation was adopted against the wishes of the majority of the representatives of the religious communities. However, even after the regulation was included in the Constitution, it remained unexecuted in practical terms, for there was no special law detailing legal procedures should anyone violate it. With the introduction of King Aleksandar’s dictatorship in 1929, the autonomy of religious institutions was limited further. The royal dictatorship reconfigured the political landscape. All parties, press, and political organizations based on “tribal,” religious, or regional affiliations were banned. The ban on political organization based on religious principle revealed that, in the eyes of the authorities, the threat of religious diversity to fragile national unity was greater than the service the religious leaders could offer. The degree of suspicion and attempted control and subjugation varied by territory and confession, but it applied even to the otherwise preferred Serbian Orthodox Church.

The ideal of a well-regulated and frictionless religiously diverse society was hard to achieve. And yet, it was essential for the survival of the new and vulnerable Yugoslav state. From the authorities’ point of view, religious diversity could cause at least two types of problems that had potential to destabilize the state. First, the competition for resources between religious communities could threaten their peaceful co-existence, lead to conflict, and exacerbate social tensions. Second, a strong link between religion and pre-Yugoslav national (“tribal”) identities and the political groups that represented them could be harnessed to undermine Yugoslav unity. Inter-communal conflict was perceived as a nuisance that could be solved by state regulation of religious life. This expectation turned out to be false, but this aspect of state policy will not be discussed in this article. The second threat was meant to be mitigated on the one hand by the limitations put on the political activities of religious actors, which resulted in significant resources being allocated to the surveillance of suspected religious activists, most notably in Croatia and “Southern Serbia;” and on the other hand by the creation and promotion of specifically Yugoslav religious communities that would embrace and support the Yugoslav state and Yugoslav national identity.

Legal regulation of religious life proved more complex than the statesmen anticipated in 1917, exemplified by the failure to swiftly pass a law on religious communities and their relationship to the state. Work on drafting the law started as early as 1919, but a decade later there was still no result. The main reason for the delay was the lack of understanding of how exactly to harmonize the demands of the three main religions, especially in regards to access to resources and the symbolic presence of religion in the public sphere. It took the introduction of royal dictatorship and the suspension of parliament in January 1929 to overcome this. The original plan to have a single law regulating all religions was abandoned in favour of separate laws pertaining to different religions. In 1929, two laws regulating Orthodox and Muslim communities were passed. The law regulating the Catholic Church was also prepared at that time but that law did not make it to parliament until 1937, when it resulted in a scandal and the so-called Concordat crisis, which in turn led to governmental collapse (Novaković, 2012).

While there was little success in terms of legislation in the 1920s, the government did establish an administrative body charged with the task of overseeing (and, to an extent, controlling) the life of religious communities: the Ministry for Religious Affairs. However, after two key pieces of legislation were passed in 1929, it was abolished, and the Department for Religious Affairs was established within the Justice Ministry. The original plan suggested that the Ministry for Religious Affairs would serve as an impartial arbiter in any potential inter-religious conflict. Absence of up-to-date legislation made the job of the Minister a nightmare, as technically his actions were to follow the 1921 Constitution as well as all separate legislations that governed religious communities prior to unification.

The underlying principle behind regulation was that religion and religious institutions needed to be subjugated to the interests of the Yugoslav state. If the original plan of complete secularization as it was vaguely presented in 1917 was impossible to achieve, then the next best thing was for religion to be “nationalized” instead and made to serve the interests of the state—and, by extension, the interests of the single Yugoslav nation. A Serbian delegate explained in 1917 that in the kingdom of Serbia the Orthodox Church had been defeated and successfully nationalized to serve the interests of the nation-state; the same model, he then advised, should be reproduced in Yugoslavia ( Krfska konferencija, 1924: 45). Throughout the interwar period, religious institutions and their leaders were required to actively support the national unification and state-building process.

One of the proposed avenues focused on institutional development and suggested that the three religious communities should have single national institutions. One of the authors proposed that the Roman Catholic Church should emulate the autocephalous character of the Serbian Orthodox Church and establish a Yugoslav Catholic Church, independent from the Vatican (Jakšić, 1923). This essentially became the core of the government’s approach and resulted in the unification of all Orthodox communities into an enlarged Serbian Orthodox Church, while Muslims formed the Yugoslav Muslim community, and all Catholics were regulated by the same rules under the new Concordat.

The creation of a Yugoslav national structure for each of the main religions was meant to provide a legal basis for the implementation of religious equality, but, more importantly, it was meant to harness the political, cultural, and symbolic capital of religion. In the words of Dragiša Cvetković, the then-Minister for Religious Affairs,

it was the patriotic duty of all religions in the Kingdom to unite all their spiritual and wise strengths towards the quick consolidation of the state, to assist the unification process of soul and heart, to spread peace and love between citizens and to make even and fill all gaps, which centuries have created between brethren of the same blood and language. (Dimić et al., 2002: 50)

The Yugoslav Muslim Community (Islamska Vjerska Zajednica, IVZ) created in 1929 was even more of an artificial construction. Until 1929, all Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina (and other ex-Habsburg territories) were placed under the supreme authority of the reis-ul-ulema in Sarajevo, while the Muslims of Serbia and Montenegro were headed by the supreme mufti in Belgrade; Shari’a courts in Bosnia were regulated by the model inherited from the Habsburg Empire, whereas those in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Sandžak were regulated according to Ottoman law. The newly established IVZ was based on the Bosnian model and was in general dominated by Bosnian Muslims (Karčić, 2008: 261). At the same time, the new law limited the autonomy and authority of religious leaders and made them directly accountable to the Justice Ministry. Nielsen analyzes in detail how the IVZ was used to undermine the political power of Spaho’s JMO, which, in the eyes of Belgrade, placed too much emphasis on Bosnian regional identity. He argues that the authorities in Belgrade showed a propensity to regard Islam as an obstacle to state integration (Nielsen, 2014: 157–164). While there were numerous instances of the marginalization of Yugoslav Muslims, and they were often subjected to abuses on the local level, this was not a new phenomenon. Rather, by implementing the ideology of integral Yugoslavism, the dictatorship intensified the already present tendency to treat Muslims as second-class citizens.

The most challenging task was to reach a new agreement with the Vatican. Previous legislation—including the Concordats signed between the Vatican and Serbia and Montenegro, respectively, and the laws of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy—ceased to be valid as international regulations, and the sections detailing the internal organization of religious life served in lieu of absent national legislation. The 1914 Concordat with Serbia now applied to all Yugoslav Catholics, but it did not adequately reflect post-1918 circumstances. The first draft of the new agreement was ready in 1922, but the negotiations with the Vatican started only in 1925 and got stuck over the issue of the use of Slavonic language. The talks were suspended due to political opposition in parliament and were resumed only after the imposition of the royal dictatorship. In 1933, at the king’s initiative, the issue was put back on the agenda, more in the context of Yugoslavia’s relations with Mussolini’s Italy. Complex negotiations were under way, but the king’s assassination caused another interruption. Finally, in 1937 the agreement was submitted to parliament for ratification. The Concordat fixed the position of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia as equal to all other “recognized religions:” The bishops, after entering their positions, were supposed to take an oath to the king; the state, in its turn, secured financial help for the Catholic Church to the same (in relative terms) extent as it did for other religious communities; the Catholic Church received financial compensation for the lands taken away during the agrarian reform; and, finally, religious education in schools was made compulsory under the supervision of a respective religious institution (Biondich, 2007). However, a heated public debate followed, spearheaded by the Serbian Orthodox Church, which vehemently opposed the proposal, as it saw the Concordat as a means to elevate the Catholic Church to a superior position (Mišović, 1983). Patriarch Varnava summarized the objections in an open letter to Prime Minister Milan Stojadinović (1937). He underlined the implied violation of the constitutional principle of religious equality and pointed out that, according to the Concordat, the state surrendered part of its power to an exterritorial institution—that is, the Roman Catholic Church. The debate turned into a political crisis (exacerbated by the sudden death of Varnava) and led to the collapse of Stojadinović’s government (Radić, 2003).

It is interesting that the Serbian Church presented itself as a defender of the principle of equality and of state unity. The Serbian clergy who opposed the Concordat argued that it would damage religious peace in the country ( Glansik Srpske Pravoslavne Patrijaršije, 1937a). One of the assumed dangers was seen in Roman Catholic missionary activities, which according to the new Concordat were to be allowed without restraint throughout Yugoslavia. The Catholic Croatian clergy did not exactly embrace the proposed agreement either, although for different reasons. Part of the Croatian Catholic hierarchy was unhappy with the division of dioceses (some of the Croatian dioceses were to be under the rule of the Archbishop of Ljubljana), and a feeling that the Roman Catholic Church conceded too much to the demands of the state was also present, although not widespread. On the other hand, Vlatko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, was reported to say that among Croatian peasants the Concordat was met with certain distrust, as it gave priority to the Catholic Church in matters regarding land disputes ( Glasnik Srpske Pravoslavne Patrijaršije, 1937b).

In all cases, the reform increased state control over the internal affairs of religious communities. The Ministry had more say in the election of the new Patriarch and could more closely control all appointments within the Muslim community as well (Slijepčević, 1991, volume 2: 565). Čaušević did not accept this increased state control over the internal affairs of Muslims, and as such he rejected his appointment as Yugoslav Reis-ul-ulema and was pensioned off. The basic reason for the disagreement lay in divergent interpretations of the separation of church and state. While religious scholars and legal experts emphasized the autonomy of religious communities, the state focused on the limitation of the religious institutions’ sphere of influence and the equality of religions, which was understood as equal subordination to the state. A good example is the debate over education and school curriculum, with the government’s characteristic assertion that it would not yield to the demands of religious communities because it would mean that “the state denies its sovereign functions and that that would prove the capitulation of the state in front of the Church” (Dimić at al., 2002: 134).

Religion and the Public Sphere: The Problem of Yugoslav Nationalism

Despite the fact that many Yugoslav statesmen expected—or at the very least wished—religion to play a lesser role in public affairs, the Yugoslav governments in some situations relied on religious leaders and institutions to facilitate government policies. One such task was the promotion of Yugoslav unity during the celebration of national holidays. In the summer of 1921, the Ministry of Interior requested the Ministry for Religious Affairs to regulate the display of flags and the singing of anthems in all religious establishments, asking that only the official state flag be displayed. This was not the first nor the last piece of correspondence on this issue between the two ministries. The request strongly indicates that at least some Yugoslav state officials regarded religious institutions to be extensions of the state that needed to be regulated accordingly and held accountable:

This provision could be justified not only by the fact that a different procedure is suitable to cause various disagreements, but also by the fact that in our country church institutions largely perform functions of public-legal significance, so it is justified that [the buildings] are governed by the same regulations as those that apply to government buildings. (AJ 69-143, 1921)

At the suggestion of the Ministry for Religious Affairs, in March 1922 the cabinet mandated that during state and national celebrations all places of worship of all religions should display the national flag and may also display an official flag of said religion (even if it is the same as the “tribal” flag, which would otherwise be banned). Even so, already in December 1922 reports flooded in from Croatia indicating that in mixed Catholic-Orthodox towns national flags were not displayed as prescribed and instead only “tribal” flags were visible. One report makes the point that this was due to a local dynamic according to which one community follows the rules until they notice that the other does not (AJ 69-143, 1922).

The government issued specific rules on the wording used in ceremonies (especially for the king’s birthday), the display of national symbols, and the performance of the national anthem. The latter turned out to be particularly problematic. The problem stemmed from the fact that a new Yugoslav national anthem did not exist. The official anthem was composed of parts of the Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian national pre-unification anthems, similarly to how Yugoslavia was composed of the historical constituent parts. The authorities requested that all parts of the new anthem be sung during/after religious services held to mark key state holidays. Almost immediately, numerous reports indicated an ongoing issue with the already familiar dynamic at play: One religious community accuses another of being anti-national for not singing the correct version of the anthem. Sometimes, as was the case in Mostar, one group (in this case the Catholics) stopped singing altogether and then was accused of being anti-national for ignoring the anthem. When asked to explain themselves, the Mostar Catholics reported that they could not bear that the Serbs continued to sing only the Serbian part, so they decided to stop singing the anthem altogether, as they were prohibited by their archbishop from singing only the Croatian part (AJ 69-182, 1921). A different report described Slovenian priests being so unhappy with the prescribed singing of the national anthem after the liturgy that they staged a walk-out (AJ 69-280, 1921).

It appears that the chaos was triggered by the stance of the Serbian Orthodox Church that the singing of any anthem cannot be made mandatory; rather, the choice has to be made by the priest (this is very much in line with Bauer’s response regarding the display of flags). However, unlike the Catholics, who grudgingly agreed to comply, the Orthodox Synod declared that if any anthem is to be sung at all, it can only be the Serbian national anthem “Bože pravde” [God of Justice] “because it is in essence a prayer” (AJ 69-280). Wherever Catholic and Orthodox communities lived side by side, this position inevitably led to conflict and mutual accusations. Eventually, the Ministry of Education suggested that “tribal” anthems should be banned from religious services, citing that it left Bosnia and Vojvodina without representation and that it strengthened regional and “tribal” identities instead of fostering Yugoslav unity. The cabinet decided that in the absence of a new official anthem a uniform prayer would be said for “the King and his House, fatherland and nation” (AJ 69-280).

The reluctance of both the Catholic and the Orthodox clergy to follow the new rules was interpreted by the authorities as a sign of their lack of loyalty and commitment to the new state. In fact, the problem appeared only when engagement with the symbols of another community was required—Orthodox Serbs refused to sing “Ljepa Naša domovina,” while Catholics in Slovenia and Croatia were reluctant to sing “Bože Pravde.” In 1924, multiple reports confirmed that in majority-Orthodox churches only the Serbian part of the anthem was sung (as per the Synod’s instructions). Practice in Croatian Catholic churches differed; sometimes only the Croatian part was performed, and sometimes it was followed by the Serbian (AJ 69-280). More importantly, leaders of all three religious communities voiced their uneasiness over the fact that secular authorities, in particular the Ministry of Interior, thought it appropriate to issue directives as to what should happen during liturgy with no consideration for confessional rules and regulations. These complaints inevitably fell on deaf ears.

Religious diversity presented itself as an issue even before any celebrations could take place, during the stage when the new holidays were still being set up. A good and successful national celebration involved at least two decisions: a smart choice of an appropriate date to mark or a person to remember, and a convincing public representation. The Yugoslav authorities hoped to rely on the Yugoslav religious communities in both aspects—when picking what to celebrate and when deciding how to do it. With limited resources at hand, government officials did not want to waste any opportunity and hoped to employ priests, imams, and rabbis to celebrate public holidays. They also hoped to “re-appropriate” already established religious holidays for a new cause—celebration of the new state.

After a decade of debates, four national holidays were established: the day when Yugoslavia officially came into existence (December 1st), the birthday of the ruling king, St. Vitus Day (June 28th), and Sts. Cyril and Methodius Day (May 11th/24th). The latter two, clearly Christian holidays, were to be celebrated only by Christians, but all public offices were closed for two hours across the country—for the duration of the religious service. St. Vitus Day was the most problematic one due to its combined religious and Serbian national character. An important and well established Serbian national holiday commemorated the medieval Kosovo Polje battle (1389), when the Ottomans defeated Prince Lazar. The holiday was the key point of the idea of Heavenly Serbia, which was central to the Serbian national imagination. The date of this holiday (June 28th) had acquired additional meanings over the years: It was the date of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and, importantly, the date that the first Yugoslav constitution was signed in 1921. The government tried to reshape this traditional Serbian celebration into an all-Yugoslav one and began to refer to it as “a day when we commemorate all those who died fighting for their faith and fatherland” in order to tie together the medieval Serbian battle, the First Word War, and the “liberation and unification” struggle. The Ministry for Religious Affairs insisted that both Orthodox and Catholic communities, and potentially Muslim communities, hold memorial services for the fallen (AJ 69-143, 1924). Curiously, this was met with hostility by the minority Evangelical church, which stated that it was impossible to hold a memorial service for the dead because it was not part of their religious ceremonies in the same way as it was for Catholicism and Orthodoxy (AJ 69-143, 1924), demonstrating once again that religious communities did not appreciate meddling into their internal affairs. Eventually, the Muslim community was exempt from the celebrations. The 1930 Law on Muslim Community stated that Muslim school students are not obliged to participate in the religious festivities of other confessions, but that law did not ban their participation in such festivities. Although this primarily referred to the celebrations of St. Sava Day, which was not an official state holiday but was celebrated widely in all Orthodox areas, it also applied to other occasions. This attempt to reinvent a Serbian Orthodox holiday into a Yugoslav one and to make it more inclusive did not convince the Catholics and Muslims, who clearly perceived this to be an imposition of a “foreign” holiday on them and did not accept its supposed Yugoslav nature.

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Day, the other of the older holidays elevated to the national level, encountered a different set of challenges. As an employee of the Ministry for Religions pointed out, the aim should be to “select only such bright moments from our public life which are of equal importance for all regions, tribes and confessions of our nation of the same blood” (AJ, 69-143, 1927). Clearly, the celebration of two Christian saints excluded Muslims, yet it could be argued that they were celebrated as the creators of the first Slavic alphabet and, by extension, of the Slavic culture, which served as a foundation of Yugoslavia. It excluded non-Slavic-speaking groups, but at the time very few people registered that as a concern. However, it appears that the most important cause for debate was in the exact date of the celebration. The government fixed it according to the Julian calendar used by the Serbian Orthodox Church. This led Croatian Catholic clergy to protest and to ask how they were supposed to justify to their parishioners a different date for what was a well-established and popular celebration.

The celebration of major religious holidays posed a number of problems on its own. The first and very obvious issue originated from the fact that Christians and Muslims celebrated different holidays. The question thus appeared, what to do in a mixed area? Was Christmas to be celebrated as a public holiday? By everybody or only by those who believe in it? Did the same apply to Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of the Holy Month of Ramadan? It was eventually decided that each community was to celebrate its own holidays and people could have days off. The overall number of days off was more or less the same for each community, but the dates differed. The exact number of days off varied over time, averaging eight days per year. Together with the four state holidays, that amounted to twelve days off. The chamber of commerce stated that too many public holidays impacted the economy negatively (AJ 69-143).

The number of days off for celebrating religious festivities was a point of debate between the government and the religious authorities. The Serbian Orthodox Church, for example, was unhappy with only eight holidays; it argued that this was not enough to maintain the religious consciousness of population, and that the failure to do so would inevitably result in the decline of the public morale. The Catholics and Muslims agreed. If the government wanted to use its authority to consolidate the state and strengthen the nation, then it should respect the demands of the communities, whose leaders referred to their respective institutions as “the most positive state-forming factor.” As we have seen, consecutive governments refused to do so.

Education was another domain in which the Yugoslav authorities faced the challenge of accommodating religious diversity. Like most modern nation-states, the Yugoslav government considered nation-building to be one of the primary functions of education; all other considerations had to be subjugated to this overarching goal (Troch, 2015). On the surface, it appeared that the principle of religious equality and tolerance was implemented in education. Both the 1921 and 1931 constitutions stated that “schools should provide moral education and develop civic consciousness in the spirit of national unity and religious tolerance” (Troch, 2013: 243). However, the two stated goals of “national unity” and “religious tolerance” did not necessarily align. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Religious Affairs often held contradictory views: The former focused on streamlining the curriculum and making sure all educational activities supported the new state; the latter was more concerned with keeping the fragile balance between religious groups. This was a particularly daunting task in religiously mixed areas. In case of a conflict, the Ministry of Education repeatedly demonstrated that it valued “the spirit of national unity” over any genuine concern for religious tolerance and equality. It interpreted tolerance primarily in a sense that religious communities should tolerate the religious symbols of other confessions if they happened to be used by state authorities to promote national unity. As the discussion of national holidays demonstrated, these symbols tended to be Christian—Serbian Orthodox in particular. Pieter Troch discussed in detail the controversy over the celebrations of St. Sava in non-Orthodox schools (2013).

A decade after the debates on the possible benefits of secularization and in response to frequent crises in schools, more suggestions were made to exclude religious education from the curriculum and to replace it with a secular course in the history of religions. Dr. Kirilović, an archivist and educational historian from Novi Sad, and others believed that confession-based religious education in Yugoslav state-run schools was unacceptable in a religiously diverse society because it encouraged the disintegration rather than the strengthening of national unity. Secularism was to take the place of tolerance as an answer to the challenge of diversity. A typical defensive response by the religious communities was to first emphasize that religion was perfectly compatible with support of Yugoslav unity, sometimes with the caveat that not all differences between the Yugoslav “tribes” had to be erased in order to secure stability (Živanović, 1926: 344). This ceased to be an acceptable argument after the imposition of Integral Yugoslavism under dictatorship. The second common argument against the secularization of education was that religious education could help raise conscientious youth who knew the difference between good and evil. Sometimes, echoing the ideas of Strossmyer, an argument was made that instead of silencing religious differences by imposing secularism, a more thorough religious education was necessary so that students would reach a level of knowledge and understanding capable of overcoming confessional differences, thus making hate, defiance, and intolerance impossible (Turić, 1924).

To come back to the position of the Muslims vis-à-vis their Christian compatriots, the Yugoslav authorities believed that it was essential to educate Muslim youth to become loyal citizens, and to that purpose their teachers also had to be (re)trained. Staff appointments became intricate political decisions. One of the instances of these negotiations between the interests of the new state, its nation-building agenda, and the interests of religious communities was the case of the Sharia Gymnasium in Sarajevo, established in November 1918 by a decision of the National Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina. ⁵ It continued to operate throughout the interwar period to train Muslim students and to prepare them for further education at the Muslim theological faculty. The main issue underlying multiple requests for hires and transfers was the sense that some of the faculty appointed in 1918/19 were not suitable to teach because of their weak loyalty to the new state.

The first director of the gymnasium, Muhammed Emin Dizdar (1882–1939) combined the directorship with his previous job as the director of the Sharia Judicial School, and he left his position at the gymnasium in 1922. The authorities now faced the problem of finding a suitable replacement. In 1924, the Ministry of Religions unsuccessfully tried to make a case to appoint Salih Safvet Bašić, at the time a professor at the Sharia Judicial School. Bašić was known for his opposition to Austro-Hungarian rule and did not take up any teaching post under the Austrian regime until 1914, when he was forced to do so to avoid being drafted into the army. Yet, the Ministry for Education continuously displayed a lack of sensitivity and used the position in Sarajevo to find a home for a former director of the gymnasium in Mostar, Antun Figurić, for a year until his retirement; this was followed by the appointment of Dušan Tamindžić, former director of the Trebinje Gymnasium. Both men were Christian and were in many ways ill-suited to serve as directors of a Muslim religious school. The gymnasium saw five different directors in the period between 1922–1924, after which finally Djordje Vasković was appointed in December 1924 and stayed in this position until 1928. All these changes were met with regular yet fruitless protests by Reis-ul-ulema Čaušević to religious authorities despite his citing the interests of the state and harmony between the Muslim community and the new state (Jahić, 2011).

It appears that the Ministry for Religious Affaris had a much better understanding of the sensitive nature of these appointments and tried to satisfy at least the minor demands of the Muslim community. Thus, at the request of the Muslim department, the philologist Andrija Šmalcelj was to be replaced by a Muslim professor, and Antun Figurić to be moved to a different school. During his short term, Tamindžić attempted to reassign Professor Muhamed Pašić to the Second Sarajevo Gymnasium, which did not cater exclusively to Muslim students. His rationale for the transfer was that due to his “limited views” and lack of acceptance of the new national goals, Pašić was better suited to work in a school where national education did not have the same sense of urgency (AJ 63-52, 1924). Interestingly, Muslim youth learned very quickly the new language of national unification and were willing to employ it when addressing the authorities in Belgrade. Thus, in April 1924, a group of students asked for financial assistance for a field trip to visit the capital. The Ministry for Religious Affairs, being constantly short on funds, redirected the request to the Ministry of Finance and made a strong case for the strengthening of the national consciousness of Muslim youth, emphasizing that some of them would go on to become teachers themselves (AJ 63-52, 1924). Such an attitude stands in stark contrast to the position of the Ministry of Education, which generally was less prone to accommodate requests by religious communities or even to consider them seriously.

Another factor in education was the rights of minorities guaranteed by international treaties and the League of Nations. For instance, in Southern Serbia, Turkish primary schools could not be closed easily, as this could have been perceived as an infringement on minority rights. The Ministry for Religious Affairs specifically underlined that if a local Muslim school was closed, the children were to attend public school where their religious education classes would be taught by a hadža and not by a Christian priest (AJ 69-53-86). The changes had to be incremental: Of the 90 Turkish primary schools (which also accepted Albanian students), there were 73 left by 1927, but only five remained in the 1930s following educational reforms during which a network of state schools managed from Belgrade was gradually built (Jovanović, 2008: 58). ⁶

Conclusion

By and large, Yugoslav authorities based the management of religious life on the idea that a secular state would be best equipped to deal with the undermining effect of religious diversity. While subscribing in theory to the principle of religious equality, the government generally overlooked the sizeable Muslim community and conceptualized Yugoslavia primarily as a Christian state. When faced with the demands of the League of Nations to guarantee the protection of all minorities, the Yugoslav government stated that all structures to ensure religious equality were in place. Yet, the importance of a given religious community and its right to equality continued to be dependent on its perceived contribution to the Yugoslav cause. Authorities interpreted religious equality as the equal support by all religious communities of the Yugoslav state and the Yugoslav nation. While Catholic and Orthodox communities were subject to the same expectations, for them, especially for the Serbian Orthodox Church, it was much easier to meet these demands due to the growing importance of the Serbian element.

As time passed and problems of day-to-day religious regulation mounted, the initial support provided by the religious communities to the Yugoslav project started to fade away. The watershed in the process was the period of the Royal Dictatorship, when, among other changes, King Aleksandar introduced new legislation establishing the legal framework in which religious communities were moulded into specifically Yugoslav units and their autonomy vis-à-vis secular authorities was curtailed. This built upon earlier policies that reflected general suspicion towards religious actors despite the latter’s sincere attempts to engage. Towards the late 1930s, all three main religious communities were engaged in developing new forms of fusion between religious and “tribal” identities to counteract the increased pressure from the state to impose Yugoslav identity on their flocks. Svetosavlje in the Serbian Orthodox Church (Falina, 2007) and radical Catholicism in Croatia (Biondich, 2007; Nielsen, 2014: 221–228) sought to reshape society and move it away from the failed democratic experiment and modern liberal values but also away from the Yugoslav state, and by this process they found that they had more mutual understanding with those who advocated distinct non-Yugoslav national identities. Religious leaders were unhappy with the increased state control, the lack of consultation, and what they perceived as a non-reciprocal commitment on the part of the secular authorities. To varying degrees, all three communities questioned the policy of limiting the public presence of religion when it did not directly serve the interests of the state. The creation of Yugoslav religious communities was meant to ease regulation and minimize the potential destabilizing effect of religious diversity; however, the higher goal of promoting Yugoslav national identity took over, resulting in the opposite outcome.

Interwar Yugoslavia was not unique in its strategy of creating nationally cohesive religious units and employing religion to help strengthen national identity. Similar policies were employed, for instance, in interwar Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Similarly to how nation-states strived to homogenize their ethnically diverse populations (often by violent means) to create “demographics that would serve the good of the nation-state” (Korb, 2016: 384), they also wanted to simplify the religious landscape. The Muslim minority in Bulgaria, the Protestant and neo-Protestant communities in Romania, and Greek Muslims all were subject to policies of national homogenization (Dragostinova and Hashamova, 2016; Davis, 2019). However, Yugoslavia was unique in that no religious community constituted a clear majority, which forced the government to at least nominally embrace religious diversity and to agree to guarantee religious equality and apply it to the regulation of religious life. It was also unique in its attempt to create and impose a completely new national identity and to employ religious communities to help in that process. While centralization and nationalization policies may have had comparable effects on smaller minority groups across the region, in other cases they did not lead to the alienation of the dominant religious community and the state because of their mutual agreement in regards to the national foundations of the state.