ABSTRACT
Drakulic examines the socio-historical grounding of Christian Slavs' prejudices against their Muslim ethno-linguistic kin in the Balkans, manifested in attempts at the latter's eradication in the region. His focus is on former Yugoslav republics, and his main argument is that Slav Muslims were ostracized due to a coalescence of ethnic and religious identities that transformed them from indigenous Slavs to quasi-Turks, repugnant to their Christian neighbours, and to political reversals that demoted them from ethno-religious majority to a regional minority. Their association with the Ottoman theocracy—perceived as oppressive, discriminatory and intolerable by the Balkan Christians—thus made them appear as ethno-religious quislings, to be eradicated in the struggle for liberation from Turkish rule.
