[johnteriz]

I've always seen Muslim Balkan people as the product of a rather funny historical twist, just like Anglicans in the UK. They descend from people who had a greater intimacy with Ottoman power. Nothing wrong with that IMO : it's better being in power than being a martyr for centuries even though one can truly admire the peoples who maintained their ancestral faith in spite of repression.

Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, our perception of Islam would be different. It'd just be that one monotheistic sect of the "East". A fact is that Islam has replaced communism as the new International. As a consequence, anecdotical people who had converted to Islam some centuries ago such as the Albanians or the Bosniaks (the case of Muslim Greeks was more harshly ended) became objects of sedition. Hence the many wars in the Balkans.

One can only miss the times when the presence of Muslim communities in Europe was anecdotical. In a way, we are paying the destruction of the Ottoman Empire : despite Kemal's ideals, it cannot be denied that modern Turkish identity was based on the Muslim faith. Islam united Anatolians and some Balkanic people under a common identity named Turkish. The creation of a Turkish ethnic identity out of numerous Muslim Anatolian and Balkanic peoples induced the creation of other ethnic identities such as the Bosniaks. Note that the Serbs and the Croats also lately defined themselves on religious issues.

To sum up, Muslim Slavs should have remained an anecdotical twist of History, a remnant of centuries of Ottoman rule. The creation of modern Turkey, the massive exchange of population in post-Sèvres SE Europe, the fall of communism as an international ideology have reinforced the distinctive ethnic character of Muslim Slavs and one can fear that pan-slavism or the EU won't be enough to put a stop to a newly formed ethnic pride.