It is interesting and informative to compare Europeโs two predominantly Muslim peoples: Bosniaks and Albanians.
Bosniaks today often retain a strong sense of Muslim identity and have a feeling of solidarity with the wider Muslim world. Albanians, by contrast, tend to have a much weaker attachment to Islam as a marker of collective identity, with both Albania and Kosovo operating more clearly as secular European nation-states.
A large part of the difference can be traced to divergent historical experiences in the late 20th century. The Yugoslav wars hardened Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniak national identities, crystallizing them into distinct peoples in ways that obscured how closely integrated they had become by the late Yugoslav period.
It is easy to forget that these three groups shared a common language and a broadly similar culture, while decades of socialist rule had significantly reduced the public salience of religion. In many respects, the differences between them were arguably less pronounced than those between Lebanonโs Christian and Muslim communities, or between Syriaโs Sunnis, Alawites, and Druze.
For Bosniaks in particular, the smallest and most vulnerable of the three groups, the experience of mass violence and ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, targeted solely for their religious identity by Serbian nationalist forces, must have been deeply traumatic. It transformed that identity into a central reference point for their survival and later political self-definition. This is why they tend to identify closely with their Ottoman legacy today and chant for Palestine.
Albanians, on the other hand, followed a different trajectory. They entered the modern era as a clearly distinct ethnolinguistic group, separate from the South Slavs around them. Even in Kosovo, Serbian repression was directed primarily at Albanians as an ethnic group rather than at Muslims as such. Both Muslim and Catholic Albanians were affected, and this shared experience of being targeted as Albanians reinforced national identity over religious identity.