ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter Two, debating the Muslim woman question during the Habsburg period essentially meant discussing the contents, limits and spaces for an appropriate female education. The Great War, and the establishment of the first Yugoslav state, brought deep changes in this state of affairs, lending new words and themes to the debate. While, as we have seen in Chapter Three, voluntary associations were inviting Muslim women into their ranks, associational journals and printing houses became sites for the elaboration of new discourses on women, Islam and modernity. This chapter will focus on the three largely uncontested discursive threads that developed in the aftermath of the Great War, and dominated the Bosnian and Yugoslav public sphere until at least the early 1930s: secular progressive, Islamic progressive, and feminist. Special attention will be devoted to the exceptional cases of Muslim women who entered into the debate, to the specificities of their public words, but also to the possible explanations for their overwhelming silence. Drawing in particular from the work of Deniz Kandiyoti, this chapter will try to show how the Muslim woman question, in Bosnia as elsewhere, provided a vocabulary to discuss concepts such as cultural and national integrity, order and disorder, indigenous and alien; that it became, in other words, a terrain for confrontation between competing political projects. 1
