Harun Buljina

This article examines the intensifying efforts of Bosnian Muslim scholars to promote and standardize a modified Arabic script for their native language over the long 19th century. A local variant of aljamiado literature, this Arebica script has received considerable scholarly attention since then, but broadly as a folkloric and literary phenomenon. I argue instead that it developed during this period as a sustained project of communal reform in the context of changing relations between Bosnian Muslims and the Ottoman state. Starting in the late 18th century, Bosnian scholars affiliated with the Naqshbandi Sufi order increasingly experimented with vernacular religious instruction in the Arabic script as part of a broader engagement with questions of dynastic loyalty and local autonomy on the Ottoman frontier. With the curbing of this autonomy through the mid-19th century, more rebellious figures such as Abdulvehab Ilhamija gave way to successors who entered into a collaborative relationship with the imperial center – an arrangement that would persist through both the Tanzimat and the subsequent Austro-Hungarian occupation. Members of this reformist network continued their experiments with Arebica under both regimes, adapting to the new technological opportunities of the ‘Age of Steam and Print’ and ultimately feeding into Bosnia’s vibrant Pan-Islamist reform movement of the early 20th century. While never achieving the status envisioned by its most prominent advocates, the development of Arebica therefore nevertheless highlights the dynamic interplay between provincial Muslims and state reforms in the late Ottoman period.