ABSTRACT
The Muslims are Serbo-Croatian speaking Slavs of the Islamic faith, descendants of those Bosnians who converted after the Ottoman invasion of the fifteenth century. All that many prospective voters knew about them was that they were Serb, Croat, Muslim, or non-national in orientation. Sarajevo’s town centre boasts a mixture of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and twentieth century architecture and is a domain in which Muslim, Serb and Catholic meet and interact at work, at school and in the shops, markets and cafes. Urbanisation throughout Yugoslavia has meant that the town’s population has grown steadily over the past thirty years and the area known as ‘New Sarajevo’, a wasteland of dreary apartment blocks, is ever-expanding. At one level Islamic activity was spreading and uniting the Muslim population, yet underlying this unity of purpose lay the ‘mixed motives’ of the title.
