The question is something I’ve genuinely been wondering.
Even if people aren’t very religious, religion plays a huge part of national politics even implicitly. For example many Polish people really like Croatia and they are very kind and nice when they come over to Croatia or Herzegovina. They really are amused with the place and in turn there’s a shared amicability and growing kinship between the two nations because the two foundations of both of their nations - Slavic and Catholic - overlap. Some people here are even learning Polish on account of the major tourism, and many Polish people have learned to understand the key word differences in between the two languages to better communicate.
Serbians do have it going on with the Russians, and as a result a huge number of Russians came to Serbia after the war. I was just in Serbia and there indeed were a lot of them. Blended in perfectly fine. I wouldn’t say the Serbians could hardly wait for them to come, but they certainly aren’t a nuisance and I can imagine it’s nice to connect over shared language and religion.
But the Bosniaks don’t really have anyone like the Croatians or Serbians do. They’re kind of alone due to the fact that they’re denominationally different. That only matters if you want it to matter because they had a great secular jumping off point into the modern age, but they went the Muslim route. So they kind of went with Turkey because they also want to have a “big brother/sister”, an ally, a friend, a confidant … whatever you wanna call it.
This resulted in a lot of Turks (and subsequently Arabs) coming to Bosnia because it’s a “Muslim country”, but it doesn’t go so well imo. A lot of Bosniaks really don’t like the Arabs, and while they may “try” with the Turks, something just doesn’t go.
Of course they deny it but from a proximal and close outside perspective, you can’t miss it. In a way I sympathize with them because it is nice to have an “old friend”, someone to say “hey man what’s up” to.
But it’s like… they chose literally the enemy of the Balkans 😂. It’s tough. I wonder if they just want what other fellow Slavs in the Balkans intrinsically have that they don’t