Muslim Heretics Conference

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful

By Dan Bilefsky

Friday, December 26, 2008

SARAJEVO: As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd Mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama’s image on the cover.

“Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?” the headline asked, using Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.

Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is experiencing an Islamic revival.

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling ?20 million, or $28 million, complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are commonplace.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half of the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in a fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others, while they chanted “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were hurt.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly the outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the Grand Mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers. We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”

Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia. It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion - Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic - rather than as Bosnian, Serb or Croat.

In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become even stronger.

In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, hold to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.

Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodjenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences. Analysts say Saudi-funded organizations have invested ?500 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.

Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.

Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said that 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.

Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.

Nonetheless, Grand Mufti Ceric said Wahhabism had no future in Bosnia, even if more people were embracing religion.

“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”

Some critics of the mufti argue that he has allowed religion to encroach on civic life.

Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, said Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, adding that the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.

She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy.

“I do not want to explain to my 14-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”

But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and had received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said.

Mustafa Effendi Spahic, a prominent liberal Muslim intellectual and professor at the Gazri Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo, went further, calling the introduction of religious education in kindergarten “a crime against children.”

“The prophet says to teach children to kneel as Muslims, only after the age of 7,” said Saphic, who had been imprisoned under communism for Islamic activism. “No one has any right to do that before then because it is an affront to freedom, the imagination and fun of the child’s world.”

Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new “Tehran,” and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”

But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Simon Freeman, European Correspondent

• Last Updated: December 27. 2008 12:26AM UAE / GMT

The recently opened Duisberg-Marxloh mosque is conservative in comparison to some of Bohm’s designs. Wolfgang von Brauchitsch for The National

The German architect who designed an ambitious, if controversial, mosque in Cologne cannot wait for construction to begin in the new year so that he can watch his dream take physical shape.
Paul Bohm, a 49-year-old non-practising Catholic, admits to being nervous, but proud of what he has envisioned. He has good reason. His is a daring design of swirling columns and glass, alongside squat structures and minarets, which has excited and appalled in equal measure.

Traditionalists are unhappy with its modernity, while many non-Muslims say the mosque is further evidence of “creeping Islamisation” in Europe. Thousands protested in the German city.
Apart from a few fundamentals – such as the fact that the congregation must face Mecca when they pray and the call to prayer is inappropriate in western secular societies – Muslim activists, scholars and architects argue continually about how the new generation of mosques in Europe should look.

Some insist minarets and domes are essential because Muslim and non-Muslims expect them, though there is no theological imperative to have either. Some say mosques must be self-effacing to avoid upsetting non-Muslim communities. Others say mosques must be brash to show that Muslims are confident.
Despite pressure from local politicians, the public and even the church to make the mosque less imposing, Mr Bohm said his designs have remained largely unchanged.

“I only agreed to make the prayer hall more open, more inviting,” he said. “People kept saying, ‘Oh, make the minarets lower’, and I said, ‘No’. It would have been a big mistake to make the building quiet.” The minarets will be 55 metres tall, a third of the height of the spires of Cologne’s famous cathedral, just three kilometres away.
“I did not study Islam before I designed it. But I have many Turkish friends and know the kind of places they must pray in. I told them always, it is not right to be praying in these buildings. It makes you seem ashamed. With the new mosque it shows they are proud to be Muslim. It gives them an identity.”

Costing €25 million (Dh128m), the mosque will be built on the site of a factory where Muslims had previously worshipped. When it is opened in 2011, it will accommodate up to 4,000 worshippers, compared to the 600 who cram into the current factory. It will serve Cologne’s 120,000 Muslims – just over 10 per cent of the total population.
There is no central registry of mosque building in Europe but it is estimated that 184 new mosques are being built in Germany alone, which would more than double the number serving the country’s Muslim population of 3.2 million.

Many Muslims in Germany, the majority of Turkish origin, have had to make do with garages, former works canteens and ordinary houses. Now, thanks to money from the Turkish government – acting through its agency, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs – and the prosperity of local Muslims, the days of praying in buildings where cars were once repaired are over. Mosques are also being built in Holland, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and England, sparking concern among some that it will create greater division in communities.

“No one has anything against a mosque, but the large projects are Islamic centres that also do social work and child education on the basis of the Sharia. These centres don’t help to integrate people, they foster parallel societies,” Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-born expert on Islam at Berlin’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences, told a news agency.
The protests against the mosque in Cologne were partly caused by its size and the drama of the design. But they owed much, too, to the fact Cologne is proud of its Christian heritage.

There was no such backlash in Duisburg, an industrial town in the Ruhr valley, when plans were announced to build a mosque in the working class suburb of Marxloh.
Though it would be large – able to accommodate 1,200 people – its design was low-key. The budget was €7.5m, around half from the EU and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, half raised by local Muslims. The architects could have been more adventurous had they not been under instructions to avoid the showiness of Cologne.

The mosque, which opened last month, is a simple building which could pass as a community centre or a sport hall. The minaret is 34 metres high, a third of the height of the steeple of a nearby church. The windows are plain glass, the minaret just 23 metres high.
Inside, the art – designed by a Turkish specialist – is restrained, with the only opulent touch the golden chandelier, with its 99 lamps paying homage to Allah’s qualities.

But more than its humble design, there were social reasons for the mosque’s immediate acceptance: Marxloh’s people, non-Muslims and Muslim, worked, and died, together in mines and in factories. Though those industries have long since faded there is a social cohesion that is absent in Cologne.
Wilfried van Winden, 53, a respected Dutch architect who designed a mosque in the south of Rotterdam, a city with 300,000 immigrants, many of them from Turkey and Morocco, living with 300,000 ethnic Dutch, said the role of the mosque was to provide a visible link to the Muslim faith. “It is impossible to give a European identity to a mosque.”

For Iqbal Sacranie, the 56-year-old former head of the Muslim Council of Britain, the argument about domes and minarets is irrelevant. “A mosque must be sensitive to the community it is in. It must not create unnecessary commotion. It must teach Muslims to be good neighbours.”

Debating the shape of Islam in Europe - The National Newspaper

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful

By Dan Bilefsky

Friday, December 26, 2008

SARAJEVO: As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd Mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama’s image on the cover.

“Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?” the headline asked, using Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.

Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is experiencing an Islamic revival.

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling ?20 million, or $28 million, complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are commonplace.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half of the population. But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in a fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others, while they chanted “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were hurt.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly the outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the Grand Mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers. We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”

Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia. It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion - Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic - rather than as Bosnian, Serb or Croat.

In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become even stronger.

In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, hold to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.

Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodjenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences. Analysts say Saudi-funded organizations have invested ?500 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.

Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.

Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said that 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.

Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultra-conservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.

Nonetheless, Grand Mufti Ceric said Wahhabism had no future in Bosnia, even if more people were embracing religion.

“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”

Some critics of the mufti argue that he has allowed religion to encroach on civic life.

Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, said Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, adding that the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.

She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy.

“I do not want to explain to my 14-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”

But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and had received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said.

Mustafa Effendi Spahic, a prominent liberal Muslim intellectual and professor at the Gazri Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo, went further, calling the introduction of religious education in kindergarten “a crime against children.”

“The prophet says to teach children to kneel as Muslims, only after the age of 7,” said Saphic, who had been imprisoned under communism for Islamic activism. “No one has any right to do that before then because it is an affront to freedom, the imagination and fun of the child’s world.”

Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new “Tehran,” and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”

But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.

As Bosnia revives, so do Muslim faithful - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Channel 4’s decision to invite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver its “alternative” Christmas message may have been offensive to many people, but no one can say the station is neglecting its obligation to cater for minorities. Muslim fundamentalists were thrilled by the broadcast.

By Damian Thompson
Last Updated: 7:04PM GMT 26 Dec 2008

 

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain: the number of Muslims has grown from 1.6 million to two million since 2000. Moreover, every major public institution has changed its policies to accommodate the demands of Islamic “community leaders”. The Government, the Opposition, the police, schools, the Church of England, the BBC and now Channel 4 are all helping Muslims construct a parallel Islamic state.

Early next year, the think tank Civitas will publish a survey of 100 British Muslim schools. Entitled When Worlds Collide, it will argue that some of them are pushing pupils into ghettos. Young women, in particular, are forbidden to pursue career opportunities. “Every year, an incalculable number of Muslim young women are lost to the wider world,” says the report. One school website links to al-Qaeda; another directs pupils to a scholar who advocates the murder of Jews.

Until recently, these radical mullahs were blamed for turning disaffected youths into bombers. But, in August, a leaked MI5 report revealed that Islamist terrorists tend not to be obvious religious extremists. The Muslim community usually knows nothing about them.

For years, the Government has offered Muslim leaders self-governance in return for information about “dangerous” elements. But if terrorists cannot be accurately identified, this is a waste of time. Unelected community leaders extend control over Muslims, yet society is no safer.

Self-censorship is crucial to this growing separatism. The BBC’s director-general, Mark Thompson, says that Muslims should be treated more sensitively than Christians.

In America, Random House cancelled publication of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, about Mohammed’s six-year-old bride Ayisha. But Martin Ryna of Gibson Square in London did agree to publish. Three men were subsequently charged with conspiring to damage his home. Islamic groups have threatened Borders bookshops with violence if they sell the novel.

Although most Muslims do not condone such attacks, many support the proposal that Islam should enjoy privileged status. After the 7/7 terrorist murders, the Home Office commissioned reports from Muslim working parties. Their recommendations included “Muslim teacher accreditation” to ensure special treatment for Muslim children; Muslim oversight of policing methods; and a new verbal etiquette in which Islamist terrorism should be referred to as “criminal” rather than religiously inspired. There were also hints that British Muslims should be allowed an unofficial veto over foreign policy.

In the event, the Government backed away from the more extreme demands. Others have been quietly met. A National Association of Muslim Police was set up in 2007 and is regularly consulted by senior officers.

Government ministers rarely put the words “Islam” and “terrorism” in the same sentence. Conservative front benchers follow the same practice, except when addressing the Conservative Friends of Israel. “I have been told off by three members of the shadow cabinet for using the phrase ‘Islamist terrorism’ when I have appeared with them,” says Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.

The major development, however, has been the encroachment of Sharia law into public life. Last February, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, declared that British Sharia was “inevitable.” In fact, instruments for expanding it already exist. A network of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals (MATs) has been set up with Home Office support. In theory, these bodies are just a form of “alternative dispute resolution”. They are “unable to deal with criminal offences”, says the MAT website. Yet it also confirms that they can “assist” the police with domestic violence, sometimes “with a view to reconsidering criminal charges”.

MATs also deal with wills, where Sharia discriminates against females. The Government is also anxious to attract Muslim investment by regulating British Islamic banking; the only way to do that is to grant legal recognition to Sharia.

According to Murray, “what we are seeing is the state deferring to a seventh-century Arabian tradesman as a source for secular law”. He was speaking on Christmas Eve. The next day, Ahmadinejad spoke to the nation. Yesterday it was reported that Baroness Butler-Sloss, one of Britain’s most senior legal figures, wants Sharia divorces to be enshrined in law. For the first time in decades, religion is moulding public life in this country; but that religion is not Christianity.

Indulgence of Islam is harming society - Telegraph