In less than a week’s time, on July 11, I’ll be in Bosnia where, sixteen years earlier, Serbian paramilitaries stormed Srebrenica and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys—a city the U.N. had previously declared a safe haven.
This past May, I led a group of nearly fifty people on a tour of Spain’s Muslim heritage. The experience was wonderful—Spaniards were warm and their country was breathtakingly beautiful. But it was unnerving to see centuries of an Iberian history dismissed largely because it was guilty of sharing my faith.
Take, for example, Cordoba’s fantastic Mezquita. As we entered one of the world’s most famous (former) mosques, I picked up an “official” pamphlet for tourists, which told visitors that the magnificent structure they were about to see dated back to “the Islamic interruption.” What a nice form of denial.
Having studied medieval Spain in preparation for our trip, I found uncomfortable echoes with Serbian propaganda. Spain expelled its Jewish population in 1492 followed by Muslims, though ethnically speaking, Spanish Muslims, Christians, and Jews were largely the same people. And right-wing Serbs argued that Bosnian Muslims were Ottoman leftovers; with Turkish rule long since undone, overdoing the offspring of that “interruption” was long since overdue.
Choice Words From a Post-Ottoman World
So I’ll be in Bosnia for the anniversary of the Srebrenican genocide. I have no idea what I’ll find or what I’ll feel. I have no idea how visiting Srebrenica, coming upon the war memorial and praying for the thousands of deceased, might affect me. That’s why I want to share my immediate, unpolished dispatches from all the places my travels will take me, to offer a sense of how religion and identity are remembered at some of their greatest fracture points in recent memory.
My journey will start in Istanbul, the booming alpha city of Turkey, the planet’s 16th largest economy, a secular democracy aiming for the European Union under a center-right, allegedly Islamist government, a Muslim nation that’s been a member of NATO longer than Germany or Spain. Many question whether Turkey has now “abandoned” the West; I wonder whether the question itself is more revealing than any presumed answer. Then I’ll head to Bosnia, where America came to the rescue of a Muslim people who resemble puddles left by a receded tide, stranded in a new Europe that has little room in its imagination for them.
My journey is deeply personal, and urgently universal. The 1990s war over Bosnia had global effects: it gave ammunition to radicals and it challenged the project of European unity; but it also hit very close to home, forcing Muslims like myself (I was twelve when the war started) to confront an assumed compatibility of the West and Islam.
Where Do White Muslims Go?
As Yugoslavia dissolved, the most diverse of its constituent republics fractured along religious lines. The Catholic Bosnians identified as Croats, the Orthodox Bosnians as Serbs, and the Muslim Bosnians didn’t know where to go (otherwise, religion aside, Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats are the same people). Soon the war revealed gaunt prisoners behind barbed wire and rape camps, suggesting that Europe was retracing the Second World War.
But the Serbian paramilitaries weren’t Nazis or Soviets. They had no mighty army behind them. And yet UN peacekeepers stepped aside, allowing Serb forces to enter Srebrenica and do their dirty work. For many Muslims, it was a horrifying confirmation of an unfortunate (but, given historical experience, understandable) worldview. Many were convinced that the only reason nobody stopped the genocide was because the Bosnians were Muslims.
We might forget how important this war, coming after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent implosion, was for radical Islam’s vile narrative. When bin Laden issued his first statement after we went to war with the Taliban in 2001, he drew a line connecting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Serbian war on Bosnia, and then connected the latter with the United Nations in a vast conspiracy against Muslims—that was why, he said, UN peacekeepers didn’t stop the Serbs from entering Srebrenica.
Earlier, in his 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden said the war in Bosnia was a moment of awakening for the Muslim world. Of course, we’ve recently seen quite an awakening, which reveals how irrelevant bin Laden has been to the deeper trajectory of Muslim politics. But the enduring impression of clashing civilizations continues to inform our analyses, something a visit to Turkey and Bosnia might help undo. It might also nuance our picture of the Muslim world.
A land of mosque-going, blond-haired, blue-eyed Slavs seems a bit too fantastic for me to believe except without seeing it. Muslims too have a tendency to racialize themselves: We’re brown and black, Asian and African, but rarely white—and European only with difficulty. Many Muslims view the Middle East, sometimes defined generously to include Berbers, Turks, or South Asians, as a kind of Islamic heartland, where the “real Islam” exists; those from outside the region are assumed to be more recently converted, and thus less authentically Muslim.
This frame’s even used by those who consider it charitable: Indonesia’s Islam is often described as syncretic, which means moderate, implying that “real Islam” is 1) not to be found in Indonesia, but 2) found instead in Saudi Arabia or Iran, where it’s magically “unadulterated,” 3) therefore revealing real Islam as irredeemably toxic. Muslims themselves deploy a similar language, tying Arabness and Islam or Pakistani-ness and Islam, judging any other experience inferior and derivative.
But Islam has been in Bosnia for as long as it’s been in much of India, where my family’s from. It’s possible that many South Asians have been Muslim for less time than many European Muslims. The same goes for Istanbul, which came under Ottoman rule after parts of the Balkans.
When we travel, we find such assumptions challenged, and we find that the ways in which the world works right now did not necessarily hold true in the past—in bad ways, but also good ways. Ultimately, out of a brief journey, perhaps these dispatches can muck up some boundaries.
Dispatches from the Clash of Civilizations
The shared ancestries of modern Islam and the modern West are a wonder to behold. Take the Greco-Roman heritage that so many Europeans reached back to during the Renaissance—it’s the same heritage that was engaged by the foundational thinkers of Islam’s law and philosophy. When the Ottomans entered Constantinople, they too took on the title of Romans, seeing themselves as successors to that empire’s tremendous heritage. They named their wealthiest province “Rumelia”—but their place in the Roman legacy, which nobody minds invoking in America’s lineage (look at our capital), is rarely acknowledged.
We’ve forced interlinked parts of the world apart, and we suffer for it. There’s a lot of what we call the West in the Muslim world, from the Greek philosophy that was an important part of the earliest conversations in Islamic law, to hip-hop culture informing Arab and Muslim aesthetics and resistance narratives. Likewise, there’s a lot of Islam in the West, from the European Muslim pirates who roamed the Atlantic and birthed corsair republics, to the influence of black Muslims on the Civil Rights Movement.
Here’s to making a little island of white Muslims part of that common history, which for all its uglier chapters nevertheless saw different parts of the world contribute to our present realities. That is to say, to understand modern Islam, where it’s coming from, what it’s worried about, and how it defines itself, we must go to Europe.
