Ademaga Mešić i hrvatska nacionalna ideja 1895. – 1918. godine
ADEMAGA MEŠIĆ AND THE CROATIAN NATIONAL IDEA, 1895-1918

Summary/Abstract: This article is concerned with the political activities of Ademaga Mešić between 1895 and 1918 in order to show him as a man who experienced himself through multiple layers of inter-penetrating identity. He considered himself Croatian by mother tongue and homeland, and Muslim by religion and immediate experience. Islam according to Mešić was a dynamic and enabling religion, consequently he believes that the precepts of Muslim life must be taken from the present and not the past. Mešić's concept of nation, which he put forward in the 1890s, won him more opponents than supporters among the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The polarity between Mešić and the Muslims of his day can be understood as a polarity between the experience of an individual and the experience of the collective which based its identity on following and preserving Islam. Mešić's views on nation, language, and homeland had difficulty in penetrating the Muslim community whose sense of identity was tied primarily to the Islamic faith. If we consider Mešić's generation, Croatian nationalism among Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina was exclusively a matter of individual choice and not group orientation. The concept of nation so totally occupied Mešić's that it influenced his attitude toward the Muslim movement for religious autonomy. Namely, he considered joint Muslim- Serb action toward the attainment of autonomy as inexpedient believing that this bloc was a type of precursor to the attachment of Bosnia and Hercegovina to Serbia. Undoubtedly, the historical situation that came into being led to the strengthening of Mešić's Islamic identity, and, for instance, at the time of the formation of the MNS the party programme did not make mention of the concept of nation.

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