THE ARRIVAL OF SALAFISM
It has been said that the Bosniak tragedy of the 1990s lies in the fact that they were too Muslim for the West and not Muslim enough for the Islamic world.[1420] Surfacing amongst the crumbling communist chaos, much of the population had, over the course of Tito’s reign, come to see their religion more like an ethnicity, something which separated them from the Serbs, Slovenes and Croats.
They would have felt more at home in the secular societies of Western Europe as opposed to the Islamic Middle East, having spent over 100 years mixing with European institutions. Yet the West continued to regard these peoples’ plight with suspicion. The delay in international intervention in their ethnic-religious civil war, between March 1992 and December 1995, reinforced this feeling of abandonment by Europe. With its hand forced, Bosnia and Hercegovina opened up to a new wave of assistance.While Turkey preferred to play a financial footnote in the affair of its former province, support for Bosnia and Hercegovina came willingly from the Middle East in the form of troops and aid. Men like Khalid Suliman al-Jhari became involved when they ‘saw footage of the Bosnian war and felt impelled to help [their] fellow Muslims’.[1421] However, the troops, known as the mujahidin, found the post-socialist Bosnian community to be clasping on to un-Islamic practices brought about following decades of repressive rule. With little direction in their Islamic faith, there are reports that the ordinary Bosniak had begun to smoke, drink and even consume pork.[1422] This was in stark contrast to the faith that the mujahidin had nurtured in their homelands and consequently they began to encourage what they termed the country’s ‘re-Islamisation’. In fact, a report from the Bosnian Army Centre for Analytics and Security stated that the ‘El-Mujahid commanders and soldiers [were] showing less interest in combat but instead increased their activity in persuading Bosnian Muslims in central Bosnia to practice radical Islam’.[1423] Originally this met staunch opposition within the Balkan community.
However, the poor economic and unemployment situation following the war seems to have promoted some disenfranchised sections towards the more conservative theology.[1424]In addition to the presence of the mujahidin, re-Islamisation came in the form of financial aid. Saudi Arabia, in particular, offered governmental support through the Saudi High Committee for Assistance to Bosnia and Hercegovina.[1425] This assistance included the translation and dissemination of Islamic texts and scholarships to study at Saudi Arabian universities. Through both these avenues the traditional Salafism fostered in the Middle East found its way into Eastern Europe. With Islamic institutions in the doldrums following the war of succession, graduates of Middle Eastern universities, who promoted the Salafi views of conservatism and a discontinuity with modern Islamic developments, were accepted into the Bosniak community as a beacon around which to found the revival of Balkan Islam.[1426]
Salafism is a movement within Sunni Islam initiated by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and developed in the mid to late nineteenth century by intellectuals at the al-Azhar University in Egypt.[1427] It is closely associated with the Hanbali Madhhab and based upon patriarchal and exclusionary foundations.[1428] Followers of Salafism blame the demise of the Islamic Empire throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on innovations within the faith (bidah), a result of the new technological and cultural frontiers encountered by the Ottomans and Western-colonised Islamic communities. To counter this, Salafism rejects many of the rational and mystic concepts of Islamic religion and aims to realise the return to the ‘essential values’ of the faith as they were practiced originally by the Prophet and the al-salaf al-salih, or righteous predecessors (Salaf). While the Salafi movement is in no means monolithic, generally participants retain a romanticised vision of life in the seventh- and eighth-century Arabian Peninsula of which they aspire to somewhat recreate through very literal interpretations of the Qur’an and the Sunnah.[1429] Professor Adis Duderija explains that adherents to Salafism consider revelation to be the ‘first source of human knowledge and the indisputable complete final source in which human beings are torn between two extremes, command and prohibition’.[1430] This excludes the rational approach of the Hanafi School and will be shown below to create friction between the distinct communities within Bosnia and Hercegovina.
As mentioned, much of the Salafi view arose in a response to liberating Muslim communities from Western colonialism or intervention and the un-Islamic practices that they had subsequently acquired.[1431] This made Bosnia, which has existed now for over a century outside the guidance of the Ottoman Islamic Empire, a prime target for Salafi preachers.IV.