Qunfuz

I visited Bosnia in September 2024 to write the following essay for the Genocide issue of the Critical Muslim. I discovered that the genocide of the Bosniaks by Serb fascists in the 1990s was only the latest of a cycle of genocides.

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In the enthusiasm of arrival, I nearly forget what has brought me here.

Sarajevo is a city in a low valley between tree-clad mountain slopes. The architecture is a mix of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, and a series of elegant bridges arch over a central river. It’s a city, therefore, lying somewhere between Prague and Isfahan, connecting those distant cultures. It has a café scene, based around the distinctive Bosnian coffee, which betrays a Middle Eastern approach to time. Its cuisine merges Turkish, Slavic, and central European influences.

It looks like a multicultural success story. A few steps from my hotel room there are several mosques, a Catholic church, an Orthodox church, and a synagogue. And a few steps from the nearest mosque is a café serving alcohol. Some of the Muslims leave the mosque after prayer and greet their friends who are sitting drinking beer. Between a quarter and a third of the women wear some kind or other of hijab. Sometimes the religiously-dressed women are accompanied by men in shorts and T-shirt. That’s a scene that can be seen anywhere in the Muslim world. But there are also religious-looking men, long-bearded, in sober, spacious dress, accompanied by women in shorts and T-shirt. You could say that a “secular” sort of Islam is practised here, if you were to use only one, positive signification of that troublesome word. Better, perhaps, to say that there’s an easy interplay of the secular and religious. A variety of beliefs and levels of belief, of different ways of living, jostle against each other not just politely but brightly and warmly. So it seems.

There are Turkish and Arab tourists, and Muslim visitors from Germany, England and France, no doubt feeling safer, more respected, and more comfortable here than they would in most European destinations.

I am visiting in the eleventh month of the full-scale Zionist genocide of Palestinians. The banners in support of Palestine are ubiquitous – in shop windows, car windscreens, or draped from the bridges. Not just flags, but the remembered dates of specific massacres. But beyond that, when you bring up “Syria”, the Bosniaks don’t immediately regurgitate conspiracy theories, nor squint in confusion, but demonstrate political understanding and Muslim and human solidarity. This provides another good reason for me to feel at home, or at least among friends. I remember the large protest demonstration in Sarajevo in 2016 when Aleppo was being destroyed by Assad, Russia and the Iranian militias. Other capitals ignored the disaster, but Sarajevo knows fascism when it sees it. It understands genocide.

This line of thought brings me back to my purpose. If it hadn’t, I’d have been reminded by the bullet holes and larger shell damage still visible on many of the walls. So now I recall an earlier mental image of the city, one formed by news reports in the early 1990s. It shunts my sunny euphoria to the side, imposing itself over my vision. This older version of Sarajevo is grey, snow-cursed, painted with pain-scarred faces, puddles of blood, and smouldering tower blocks. This is what has brought me here. My purpose is to write about the genocide of the Bosniaks.

And that makes everything look and feel different. Even the beautiful, green mountain sides, from which Serb big guns and snipers once terrorized the city below. When I walk out of town to the Kozija ćuprija bridge, then upwards on a path towards Mount Trebević, I find a different flag displayed. Nobody stops me to ask for my passport, but I am now, very suddenly, in the territory of a different administration – the Republika Srpska. The officials of this entity don’t recognize that a genocide of Bosniaks took place, or if they do, they believe it was necessary. They believe the Serbs, the genocidaires, were the real victims of the war, and are today the victims of the peace. Which makes the peace merely temporary. Nothing here has been resolved, only frozen. Inconvenient facts have been forgotten, while genocidal narratives have been carefully remembered. Sarajevo is surrounded, locally and globally, by immensely powerful interests that don’t believe in the happy jostling together of different ways of life. The city is besieged by forces of history currently paralyzed from motion but ready to fall, like axes or hammers, as soon as the spell of peace passes.

How then did this multicultural Muslim society in the Balkans come to be, and why is it so dangerously surrounded?

A mountainous land rising from the Adriatic Sea up into and beyond the Dinaric Alps, Bosnia and Herzegovina (or BiH for short – Herzegovina is the drier, warmer southern third) was known as Illyria before the slow Roman conquest. Slavic tribes settled in the sixth and seventh centuries, amongst them a tribe called Croat and another called Serb. But the area between today’s Croatian and Serbian states has had its own distinct political identity at least since the medieval Banate of Bosnia and the Bosnian kingdom that followed. Ottoman forces first arrived in 1414. It took them the next 150 years to absorb the entire country into the empire. Then the Bosniaks gradually converted to Islam. By the early seventeenth century, Muslims formed a majority of the population.

Why did so many of the Bosniaks convert? Why them, as opposed to other communities under Ottoman rule in the Balkan peninsula, such as Serbs, Croats or Greeks? The answer surely has something to do with Bosnia’s position in the borderlands between western (Catholic) and eastern (Orthodox) Christianity. Most Bosniaks rejected both. In the early medieval period they had their own Bosnian Church, and were charged with heresy by the larger churches as a result. The two related theories presented by historians to explain the Islamic conversion are both connected to medieval Bosnia’s alienation from official Christendom. The first theory is that membership in the Bosnian Church – a less hierarchical version of Christianity – facilitated the passage to anti-hierarchical Sunni Islam. The second is that most medieval Bosniaks still lived in mountain hamlets and thus had no strong connection to any organized form of religion before the arrival of Islam. By this reading, the Bosnian Church was an elite affair, known to only a tiny minority.