Balkan Wars Annexation & 20th-Century Upheaval

1878 - 1912

The Congress of Berlin (1878) ceded Plav and Gusinje to Montenegro, triggering armed resistance led by Ali Pasha Shabanagaj—a landowner, Ottoman official, and military commander of the League of Prizren—who defeated Montenegrin forces at the Battle of Novšiće on 4 December 1879. Ali Pasha's legacy remains contested: celebrated in the Albanian epic Lahuta e Malcís as a national hero, remembered by Bosniak congregations as a local Muslim defender, and marked in the landscape by Ali-pašini izvori (Ali Pasha Springs) near Gusinje—a toponymic anchor that survives beyond ideological frames. Austro-Hungarian troops occupied the wider Sandžak as a garrison from 1878 to 1909. The Sultanija Mosque (1907–1909, built under Sultan Abdul Hamid II) and the New Mosque Radončića in Gusinje (1899) were the last major Ottoman-period religious buildings, closing an era of mosque construction that had shaped the region's spiritual architecture for over four centuries. The Hijri-governed Bayram calendar continued as the primary communal gathering rhythm, but the political order that had sustained it was unraveling.

1945 - 1991

Under socialist Yugoslavia, the region's Muslim communities were officially recategorized as ethnic 'Muslims' (from 1974), a supranational label that delayed but did not erase Bosniak self-identification. Mosque life continued—daily prayers, Bayram, Ramadan—though under state constraint; the Islamic Council reconstructed the Sultan Murat II Mosque in 1967, and the Emperor's Mosque in Plav was also renovated during this period. The Ćekića Mosque was renovated in 1971. Bihor carpet weaving was reclassified as secular 'folk craft,' severing its documented connections to bridal dowry rituals and seasonal pastoral rhythms—motifs depicting herds returning from mountain pastures at summer's end were preserved in technique but stripped of ritual context. Petnjica held municipality status from 1945 to 1957 before being merged into Berane, a loss of local governance that mirrored the suppression of distinctive communal institutions. A powerful earthquake in 1979 damaged historical buildings across Plav, adding a physical rupture to the cultural one. The Hijri calendar survived as the community's hidden temporal framework, with Meshihat timetables circulating through mosque networks even as public events shifted to the Gregorian calendar.

1680 - 1878

As Ottoman governance matured, local Muslim elites—the Redžepagić family (arriving ~1650, converting to Islam), the Shabanagaj commanders of Gusinje fortress (from ~1690), and the Bushati Pashas of Shkodra—replaced direct imperial administration with semi-autonomous frontier lordships. The Redžepagić Tower (1671) and the Vezir's Mosque (1765, built by Kara Mahmud Bushati) survive as material witnesses to this feudal layer. By 1852, Gusinje had 1,500 households, 350 shops, 8 madrasas, and 5 mosques; Islamization was largely complete by the mid-18th century, attributed by sources to a combination of legal privileges, social pressure, and community dynamics. Tribal mahallas—Kelmendi, Kuči, Triepshi, Shala—formed neighborhood units that still carry those names today, preserving Albanian-tribal genealogical layers beneath later Bosniak self-identification. The Ćekića Mosque (1687, oldest preserved in Gusinje) and the Kučanska Mosque in Rožaje (1830) anchored congregational life in these mahallas, and their Bayram and Jumu'ah cycles have continued without interruption, forming the ritual continuity that underpins all later festival traditions.

1991 - 2006

The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the end of the 'Muslim' ethnic category (replaced by 'Bosniak' after 1993) opened space for explicit ethnonational self-identification. In Montenegro, this took a civic-integration path rather than the autonomy referendum pursued on the Serbian side of Sandžak in 1991. The Bosniak Party (founded 26 February 2006, headquartered in Rožaje) formalized political representation for Bosniak minority interests within Montenegro's parliamentary framework. Mosque congregations became sites where the shift from 'Muslim' to 'Bosniak' identity was enacted in daily practice—through language choice in sermons, the display of Bosniak national symbols alongside Islamic ritual, and the reassertion of the Meshihat's authority over the Hijri calendar. The Vezir's Mosque in Gusinje, which had maintained continuous prayer life through Ottoman, socialist, and transitional periods, stood as a symbol of this ritual continuity now coupled with renamed identity. Montenegro's independence referendum of 2006 completed the transition, placing the region's Bosniak communities within a newly sovereign state.