The Sandzak

In September 2014 hundreds of Slavic Muslim men wearing old fashioned red fezzes and matching green uniforms with insignia featuring the Bosnian lily, marched military-style through the streets of Novipazar, Serbia, alarming officials and politicians alike. A hostile Serbian media drew comparisons with Aćif Hadžiahmetović, the town mayor who had collaborated with the Germans during World War II. But in fact they were parading thus for Mufti Muamer Zukorlić, a local Islamic cleric of Albanian heritage. The episode bewildered many outside observers. Nearly five hundred years after the region was incorporated into an expanding Ottoman empire, a history book in the English language finally addresses one of the more obscure but fascinating corners of Eastern Europe. The Sandžak: A History is a bold undertaking and long overdue. The land borders Bosnia, Kosova, Montenegro and Serbia, and is currently divided politically between the last two countries. However, as the authors neatly illustrate, the territory and population is a fluctuating mixture of faiths, races and identities and, at various points in history, the region has been variously autonomous or attached to one or another larger states, including Austria at one point. Propaganda and myth has also often obscured Western comprehensions of the territory and as the authors explain from the start ‘the Sandžak remain something of an enigma arcane even to scholars of Yugoslav history and post-Yugoslav politics’ (p.1).