The second half of the 19th century was a period of significant change for Bosnian Muslims on multiple levels (political, social, cultural) that has attracted intense scholarly attention throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. However, while numerous studies dealt with religious changes and ruptures from a sociohistorical perspective, there have been surprisingly few studies on the way Islam and Hajj were conceptualized by Bosnian Muslim intellectuals in the late Ottoman and early Austro-Hungarian period. This paper will look at the way Islam featured in the Bosnian Muslim public sphere through analysis of writings about Hajj in the period from 1850-1910. It will observe the changes related to how ritual was conceived and depicted from a critical practice to a political act. This took place in correlation with apologetic rhetoric that emerged from the mid-19th century onwards. The emergence of this new Hajj discourse was related to intellectual and religious reshaping of the public sphere at the crossroads of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Thus, the paper will look at writings of Bosnian authors in Bosnian, Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, as well as all the other elements that influenced the development of ideas of Hajj as a ritual that represents a religion. Namely, the way Hajj was conceived both in reaction to the Orientalist imagery and as a result of Muslim reformist rethinking, implies a more complicated relationship with the role Islam was to play in the wider postimperial Bosnian society.