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Bosniaks (natively: Bošnjaci), previously known as Ethnic Muslims of Yugoslavia, are Slavs who converted to Islam during the Ottoman period (15th-19th century). Bosniaks are named after Bosnia, the westernmost Balkan region held by the Turks. Most Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina identify themselves as ethnically Bosniak, as do some Muslims of Serbia and Montenegro (in the Sandžak region). It is important to note that not all of the Muslims of the Balkans are Bosniaks; Muslim Albanians, Turks, and Roma and Sinti also live on the Balkan Peninsula.
There are conflicting claims on how the population in Bosnia was converted to Islam. In the late middle ages, a large segment of Bosnian population were members of an indigenous Bosnian Church (krstjani, "Christians"), and were considered heretics by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, and they are said to have willingly embraced Islam. Some of the converts may have been Bogomils or Patarenes.
Many Christian children became Muslims through the devsirme system, whereby Christian boys were gathered from the Ottoman lands and were sent to Istanbul to converted to Islam and trained as janičari troops, servants of the sultan, or Ottoman officials. The system had ceased to operate by the middle of the Seventeenth Century. Janissaries had no right to marry until 1566, and served throughout the Ottoman Empire, and many settled outside of the Balkans upon their retirement; their descendants live throughout the former Ottoman Empire, and do not comprise a majority of Bosniak population.
By the end of the Ottoman period, a majority of the landowners in Bosnia were Muslims, and most Christians were peasants or serfs (raya). This may have been caused by conversion being concentrated in towns rather than villages, leading to a longer term division between urban and rural areas.
Being part of Europe and influenced not only by the oriental but also by the occidental culture, Bosnian Muslims are considered to be some of the most advanced Islamic peoples of the world. The nation takes pride in the melancholic folk songs sevdalinke, the precious medieval filigree manufactured by old Sarajevo craftsmen, and a wide array of traditional wisdoms that are carried down to newer generations by word of mouth, and in recent years written down in numerous books.
1968 saw the first identification of the Yugoslav Muslims as a unique nationality. The term "Muslim as a nationality" (Muslimani u smislu narodnosti) was officially adopted.
In September 1993 Congress of Bosnian Muslim Intellectuals adopted the term Bosniak instead of the previously used Muslim. Some Serbs objected to the name as a ploy to monopolize the history of Bosnia and make them seem to be foreign invaders (see History of Bosnia and Herzegovina). The term in itself means Bosnian and is an archaic term that once used for all inhabitants of Bosnia regardless of faith. Since the 1990s, the name has been projected outside of Bosnia itself, onto Serbia's and Macedonia's Slav Muslim population. It allows a Bosniak/Bosnian distinction to match the Serb/Serbian and Croat/Croatian distinctions between ethnicity and residence.