Abstract
After WWII, the Yugoslav government set out to remake women in general, and Muslim women in particular, into modern citizens detached from religious traditions. The liberation of 'oppressed' Muslim women through unveiling, which served as their symbolic transformation into equal and active citizens, was part and parcel of this modernisation project.
This paper explores how communist discourses drew on earlier intellectual work of Bosnian Muslim modernists, who were in turn influenced by the Habsburg colonial experience of the late 19th and early 20th century as well as Muslim modernists in Turkey, the Arab world and Russia. Muslim modernists believed that Muslims were lagging behind Western Europe because of their backward traditions and argued that Islamic practices should be adapted to modern times.
Many understood women as central to this transformation. While they had opposing views on the role of religion in society, Muslim modernists and communists alike advocated unveiling and the education of women not as an end in its own right, but as a means of transforming society.
The paper discusses similarities and differences between Muslim modernist and communist approaches as well as traces some of the ways in which the former came to influence the latter.