Abstract
In this paper, I explore how Muslim men were targeted by a series of interventions aimed to change gender relations within the Muslim communities. Yugoslav communists were led by stereotypes about Muslim men, Muslim families, and Muslim communities, driven by socialist modernity notions.
Heavily influenced by Soviet models from Central Asia, Yugoslav communists aimed to create a homogenous and mobile population that would participate in the socialist project. Some policies that affected Muslim communities were universal for all, whilst some targeted Muslims explicitly.
Namely a series of interventions into Muslim communities started by introducing mandatory elementary education for girls, a ban on underage marriage, and the replacement of the Sharia law with the universal Yugoslav family law. However, In 1951 the Yugoslav Communist Party launched an aggressive veil lifting campaign introducing severe punishment for women, and men who by any means pressured women to wear the veil.
The Party's activists entered houses and forced women to appear in public unveiled. During all these years, Muslim men were presented as those preventing women from enjoying the benefits of socialism, often keeping backward traditions so as to preserve their privileged positions.
However, as this research shows, Muslim women often fought against unveiling, whilst Muslim men, particularly those close to the Party, attempted to adhere to the Party policies for personal gains. Furthermore, Yugoslav communists relied on the support of the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia, and its strong modernist tradition, which supported all Party policies regarding equal education, civil laws, marriage, divorce, or unveiling.
Muslim men were targeted and blamed for years for any failure of the communist modernising process, although interests of Muslim men were often fragmented - some eagerly supported new gender policies, some just wanted to be left in peace to their lives, and some found ways to resist the changes. Finally, this paper argues that gender policies towards Muslim women and men were utilised to exert influence over Muslim communities for state-building purposes.
It shows how ideas about Muslim women and men, family and gender relations informed aggressive policies, and questions the broader consequences of the authoritarian state's attempt to change cultural norms aggressively and to what extent these policies contributed to Islamophobia.