Muslims (ethnic group)

"Muslims" (Serbo-Croatian Latin and Muslimani, Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic and Муслимани) is a designation for the ethnoreligious group of Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims and people of Muslim heritage, inhabiting mostly the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The term, adopted in the 1971 Constitution of Yugoslavia, groups together a number of distinct South Slavic communities of Islamic ethnocultural tradition. Prior to 1993, a vast majority of present-day Bosniaks self-identified as ethnic Muslims, along with some smaller groups of different ethnicity, such as Gorani and Torbeši. This designation did not include Yugoslav non-Slavic Muslims, such as Turks, some Romani people and majority of Albanians. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, a majority of the Slavic Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the Bosniak ethnic designation, and they are today constitutionally recognized as one of three constituent peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Approximately 100,000 people across the rest of the former Yugoslavia consider themselves to be Slavic Muslims, mostly in Serbia. They are constitutionally recognized as a distinct ethnic minority in Montenegro. The Ottoman conquests led to many autochthonous inhabitants converting to Islam. Although nationalist ideologies appeared among South Slavs as early as the 19th century, as with the First and Second Serbian Uprising and the Illyrian movement, national identification was a foreign concept to the general population, which primarily identified itself by denomination and province. The emergence of modern nation-states forced the ethnically and religiously diverse Ottoman Empire to modernise, which resulted in the adoption of several reforms. The most significant of these were the Edict of Gülhane of 1839 and Imperial Reform Edict of 1856. These gave non-Muslim subjects of the Empire equal status and strengthen their autonomous Millet communities. There was a strong rivalry between South Slavic nationalisms.