The Habsburg takeover of Ottoman Bosnia Herzegovina (1878–1918) is conventionally considered the entry of this province into the European realm and the onset of its modernization. Treating the transition from one empire to another not as a radical break, but as in many respects continuity, reveals that the imperial context provided for the existence of overlapping affiliations that shaped the means by which modernity was mediated and embodied in the local experience. Drawing on Bosnian and Ottoman sources, this article analyzes Bosnian intellectuals’ conceptions of their particular Muslim modernity in a European context. It comparatively evaluates the ways in which they integrated the modernist discourse that developed in the Ottoman Empire and the broader Muslim world, and how they also contributed to that discourse. I show that their concern with modernity was not abstract but rather focused on concrete solutions that the Muslim modernists developed to challenges in transforming their societies. I argue that we must incorporate Islamic intellectual history, and cross-regional exchanges within it, to understand southeastern Europe's past and present, and that studies of Europe and the Middle East need to look beyond geohistorical and disciplinary divisions.

This study analyzes transformations of historiography and identity discourses by focusing on the Memory House of Ali Rıza Efendi (the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) as a “site of historical consciousness” which was reconstructed in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. The House, referred to by the villagers as the “Memory House of Atatürk,” was opened in 2014 in a Muslim village, Kocacık, with the support of the Turkish state. Through material and textual representations of Atatürk's life, the House speaks to the Turkishness and Turkish presence in the Balkans. The Turkishness, however, is imagined through the neo-Ottoman and Islamic prisms. The House thus becomes the locus of alternative interpretations of the past, and, consequently, narratives of Muslims’ identity and origin in the region. Moreover, as it is reconstructed at the nexus of the local and the transnational, the House is also called a symbol of the “politics of brotherhood” between Macedonia and Turkey. In this way, the institution embodies the reconstruction of the past not only at the local and national levels, but also at the international level.