The State Religion

by Gojko Beric
April 1996

The Sarajevo weekly Ljiljan, a Muslim nationalist publication,
recently provoked an eruption of religious anger. The offending
text was an open letter addressed by a Muslim to President Alija
Izetbegovic, accusing the leader of misusing religion for
political purposes.

The letter was from a man who, together with his son, had
been a soldier in the Bosnian Army. He had been badly injured and
evacuated to Denmark, while his son had been killed. Neither of
them was a member of any political party. The father argued that
Izetbegovic did not have the right to apply to his son the
religious term for a soldier killed in battle, shehid—a word
frequently on the president's lips. "My son is not a shehid, and
I will not allow anyone to refer to his death in such a way,"
wrote this disappointed fighter. He asked Izetbegovic: "Why do
you greet soldiers on parade with the religious greeting 'Selam
Alejkum'? Why do you, as a president of multinational Bosnia,
publicly preach Fatiha [a prayer] on dead ones when this is not
the language of Bosnia.

The letter provoked strong reactions. The amateur author
may not have suffered the punishment allotted to Salman Rushdie,
but his name was publicly reviled for weeks. Verdicts passed on
behalf of religion are rarely gentle.

Shehid means "fighter for the faith" and has provoked
controversy since the beginning of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Islam keeps watch on the living and the dead. Shehid status has
became a prestige matter for many Bosnian families. A family
containing a shehid may expect help and privileges from the
state. Even parents whose dead sons were atheists call them
shehids. Men who have been killed on the street by shell or
sniper fire, and even suicides, have been claimed as shehids.

This is only one of many issues that have sparked strong
emotional conflict between religion and politics among Bosnian
Muslims. Bosnia is clearly a tragic example of the use of
religion for political purposes. For Islam, the apparent link
between the two gave a stamp of legitimacy to the war, as
occurred in the cases of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. But hatred
and brutality have found particularly savage expression in the
destruction of places of worship and the plowing up of entire
graveyards, above all those of Muslims. Such acts of vandalism
were committed with passion by warriors who wore religious
symbols and claimed to be acting in God's name.

But were they true believers? Religious symbols were very
often used in the war but this does not mean that a religious war
occurred here.There is no substantial evidence that the conflict
was really driven by religion. However, this does not mean that
religious institutions do not bear responsibility for this
enormous human tragedy. With the demise of communism in former
Yugoslavia, they stepped into the resulting social and political
vacuum in full force. But of all the former Yugoslav republics,
only Bosnia in all its long history was never established as a
state based on religion. The principle of cuius regio ilius
religio (whoever reigns, so does his religion) was never
practised in Bosnia.

Now, multi-ethnic and multicultural Bosnia is being eroded
under the weight of the four-year-long war. Religion is playing
an energetic role in this process. The religious differences
which existed due to everyone's tolerance are now being
transformed into divisions, and overall life is being constituted
on this basis.

The Bosnian Muslims were probably the chief victims of the
communist utopia in the former Yugoslavia because they identified
with it more than the other peoples. When the regime collapsed,
they were left without a political identity. They possessed
neither a religious nor a political leader. From relative
anonymity, Alija Izetbegovic came to the surface. Under the
communist regime, Izetbegovic had twice been jailed, for a total
of nine years. At the beginning of the 1980s he was tried for
writing an "Islamic Declaration" in which he expressed his
political philosophy. This document reveals Izetbegovic to be a
nationalist with strong religious beliefs. This is not a
chauvinistic nationalism like the Serbian or Croatian, but in its
strong religiosity it is entirely atypical of most Bosnian
Muslims.

A solicitor by profession, Izetbegovic established the
Party of Democratic Action (SDA) and won the first parliamentary
elections in 1990. Under his influence, the new party began to
take shape as a religious movement. The party adopted as its own
the green Islamic flag with the half moon and star. It proclaimed
a vision of growing religiosity amongst Bosnian Muslims. To a
degree this did occur, but more because the new believers were
seeking a replacement for the lost communist ideology than
because of the inherent proselytising abilities of the movement.

However, the war radicalised religious institutions and
increased their influence on overall public life. Two
circumstances played a key role in this—the increasingly close
relations with Islamic countries, especially Iran, and the
changes at the top of the Bosnian Islamic Community. In a
desperate fight for survival, and abandoned by the West to the
mercy of the Serbs, and later the Croats, Izetbegovic played his
cards on the Iranian connection. Iran sent money, weapons and
volunteers. But the assistance was contingent upon the
establishment of an Islamic state in Bosnia. This connection and
the necessary Islamisation were not favoured by many Bosnian
Muslims, but Izetbegovic did not hide his emotions when meeting
Iranian officials.

As undisputed leader, Izetbegovic took the step, in the
middle of the war, of changing the religious leadership. Ousting
Jakub Selimoski, a Macedonian, he appointed Mustafa Ceric, a
theologian who had studied in Cairo and also lived in Malaysia.
With Ceric's arrival, the Islamisation of most public
institutions, including the police and the army, began in
earnest. Educated, distinguished and relatively young, the new
reis-ul-ulema suited the believers. At first, his initiatives had
a positive effect on the psychological stabilisation of the
Muslims, the main victims of the war. While helping to forge a
unifying identity, Islam also served a moderating purpose by
opposing collective retaliation against the aggressors.

Misunderstandings began when Ceric started to assume the
role of arbiter in all spheres of life. He demanded the
introduction of religious education in schools, and said that
Muslims had to reject "European trash"—alcohol, drugs and
prostitution. He launched a campaign against ethnically mixed
marriages. He prohibited the sale of pork in Sarajevo—an order
taken by the Western media as proof that Islamic fundamentalism
was penetrating the heart of Europe. After the fall of
Srebrenica—a Muslim enclave officially under the protection of
the UN—Ceric accused the West of slaughtering Muslims: "We are
being killed by those who claim to be Christians." He has
suggested that Bosnian Muslims should follow the example of the
world's 1 billion Muslims and reject western secular society.

Nevertheless, many Muslims, especially those living in big
cities, are continuing to resist the brand of Islam Ceric is
imposing. They see it as foreign to their mentality and their
instincts. Most of them, among other things, drink alcohol. As
photographs even from the beginning of this century show, Muslims
in Bosnia have long-since worn European-style clothes. Now the
covering of women in accordance with Islamic religious rules,
something never before seen in Sarajevo, has become a part of
every day life.

But the relationship of the ruling party to its Islamic
ideology is a two-way one, reminiscent of that of the Communist
Party to its Marxist ideology. No one who is not a member of the
SDA can get a management post in an enterprise, an educational
institution, the military or the police. Top party leaders,
besides being politicians, are also generals, police chiefs and
top religious officials. Just as communists were expected to
attend party meetings, so now SDA members who do not attend the
dzuma (the Friday prayer) are regarded with disapproval.

The Iranian connection further complicates the position of
the Bosnian Muslims in the eyes of the US, which is their only
ally in the West. The US tolerated that connection until its own
troops arrived in Bosnia. But now, because of its fear of Iranian
terrorism, the US is demanding the severance of the connection.
This poses a serious dilemma for the Muslim leadership. The
ruling party is taking knocks at home. Former Prime Minister
Haris Silajdzic, son of the chief imam of Begova
Dzamija—Sarajevo's main mosque—recently left the party, citing,
in part the party's misuse of religion for political purposes.
Izetbegovic's illness, which may lead to his withdrawal from the
political scene, has brought additional confusion to the party.
But the extreme wing remains strongly in favour of a complete
symbiosis with religious institutions, an aspiration which those
institutions share.

The West assessed Izetbegovic's politics in the light of
his strong religiosity, believing that his ultimate aim was to
create a Muslim state in Bosnia. That was a politically wrong
approach to the Bosnian Muslims. In this regard, Izetbegovic's
1994 statement to The Times deserves attention: "I am for a
unified Bosnia. Because it is multinational, it cannot by
definition be a Muslim state. That could only mean a divided
Bosnia, and some European governments are working for just such a
division. This is where the paradox lies—Europe is creating an
Islamic state in Bosnia". Time will show what kind of Bosnia
Izetbegovic really envisages.

Gojko Beric is a columnist for the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje
and weekly Svijet.