Yusuf Islam visiting the graves of Muslim victims in Bosnia.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad writes: 

‘One of the most disturbing features of the war which devastated Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 was the widespread refusal of Western politicians, churchmen and newsmen, to acknowledge the role which religion was playing in the conflict. It was only mentioned, indeed, during periodic denunciations of the risks of Islamic extremism – a phenomenon that, when pressed, journalists working in Bosnia conceded was rather elusive. The reality, which was frequently one of militant Christian extremism, was never, to my knowledge, frankly discussed. The war was, we were told, a contest between ‘ethnic factions’; and the fact that its protagonists were divided primarily by religion, and shared a race and a language, was deemed insignificant. Anti-Muslim prejudice was no doubt at work here: one may assume that if the Serbs and Catholics had been Muslims, and their victims Christians, then the Western mind would immediately have characterised the war as a case of violent Muslims murdering secular, integrated, democratic Christians. Since in Bosnia the favoured stereotypes were reversed, the memory has largely been dismissed, censored and forgotten as an annoying anomaly.

That official characterisation, by and large, persists. Generally it is the case that the European and American popular consciousness has forgotten about Bosnia although only ten years have elapsed since almost eight thousand Muslims were pushed into mass graves at Srebrenica, while the local UN commander accepted a glass of champagne from the victorious Serbian general, who then went off to church. [1] And where Bosnia is still remembered, there is a dogged resistance to defining it as what it was: a war which, at least for its Christian participants, was an intensely religious experience.

However among Balkan cognoscenti, and a small but significant public around the world that uneasily recognises that the crime of Srebrenica was far worse than that of 9/11, this comforting amnesia is rejected as the unacceptable whitewashing of crimes whose religious foundations must never be ignored. War crimes investigators have consistently found that the Serbian forces placed religion at the very centre of their hardline national vision, and that many of the most characteristic atrocities bore a strongly religious aspect.’

Categories: Islam