The collapse of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the birth of new nation states in the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans" explores the effects of the Ottoman reform era upon Balkan societies in order to shed much-needed light on the history of this region during the early nation-state period. Focusing on developments which go beyond the over-researched dimension of political or elite discourse, this book offers insights into the complex ways in which Balkan societies were transformed from different regional viewpoints -- focusing on the interplay between Great Power politics, state reforms and social dynamics on the ground. A thorough investigation of the conflicting loyalties which has shaped the political framework of the post-Ottoman Balkans, this is an important and fascinating insight into the logic and contradictions of daily life in a crucial period of Balkan and Ottoman history.

There are roughly eight million Muslims in south-east Europe, among them Albanians, Bosniaks, Turks and Roma -- descendants of converts or settlers in the Ottoman period. This new history of the social, political and religious transformations that this population experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- a period marked by the collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires and by the creation of the modern Balkan states -- will shed new light on the European Muslim experience. Southeast Europe's Muslims have experienced a slow and complex crystallisation of their respective national identities, which accelerated after 1945 as a result of the authoritarian modernisation of communist regimes and, in the late twentieth century, ended in nationalist mobilisations that precipitated the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo during the break-up of Milosevic's Yugoslavia. At a religious level, these populations have re--mained connected to the institutions established by the Ottoman Empire, as well as to various educational, intellectual and Sufi (mystic) networks. With the fall of communism, new transnational networks appeared, especially neo-Salafist and neo- Sufi ones, although Europe's Balkan Muslims have not escaped the wider processes of secularisation.

The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, came to power in 1923 with a radical and wide-ranging programme of reforms, known collectively as Kemalism. This philosophy - which included adopting a western alphabet and securing a secular state apparatus - has since the early 1930s, when the Turkish state endeavored to impose a monolithic definition of the term, been connected to the development of the personality cult of Mustafa Kemal himself. This book argues that in fact Kemalism can only be fully understood from a transnational perspective: just as a uniquely national frame is not the only appropriate scale of analysis for shedding light on the process of the nationalization of societies and nationalism itself, the Turkish national lens is not necessarily the most adequate one for understanding the genesis and evolution of what Kemalism stood for from the early 1920s onward. Featuring case studies from across the former Ottoman Empire and using new primary source research, each chapter examines the different ways in which national borders refracted and transformed Kemalist ideology. Across the Balkans and the Middle East Kemalism influenced the development of language and the alphabet, the life of women, the law, and everyday dress. A particular focus on the interwar period in Turkey, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Egypt reveals how, as a practical tool, Kemalism must be relocated as a global movement, whose influence is still felt today.