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.