Bosnia’s Islamic Revival

The four women chatting at an outdoor restaurant in an old cobblestone courtyard would draw little notice in Tehran, perhaps, or Beirut or Amman. But with their heads wrapped in tight scarves, concealing every strand of hair, they stand out against the secular traditions of modern Sarajevo. Friends since childhood, the four women, all 23, laugh when asked how their mothers reacted after they became intensely religious and began wearing head scarves. “It was very strange for them,” says Saudina Husic, a student of Arabic and Persian, her legs covered by a pea-green robe that matches her veil. “But they are getting used to it.”

Many other Bosnians are growing accustomed to the resurgent Islamic faith around them. Nearly 15 years after the country’s vicious war — in which an estimated 100,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed — its capital, Sarajevo, is experiencing a religious revival. The city’s physical scars have mostly healed since the siege of the 1990s. Its shell-blasted walls have been replastered and the infamous Sniper Alley — named for the Serb gunmen who shot at those crossing the street — is now clogged with traffic. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world.)

Yet while the war has begun to seem like far-off history, the city’s spiritual renewal is happening every day. There are now hundreds of women dressed like Husic and her friends in Sarajevo, where such styles had long since yielded to Western fashion. Last year Sarajevo’s city council launched an option of religious education for children in kindergarten; so far only Islam is on offer. The city’s mosques are packed, including the huge King Fahd Mosque and cultural center, which Saudi Arabia built in 2000 — at a cost of about $12 million — and still maintains. And in April, investors from the Gulf opened a $55 million upmarket shopping center, which bans alcohol and gambling and has a worship room. “We spent the morning shopping, and prayed together there,” says Husic the day I share coffee with her and her friends.

Though there is little talk of the war in Sarajevo today, religious leaders trace Bosnia’s Islamic revival directly to the horrors people witnessed in the 1990s, when they were children. “This generation grew up overnight,” says the country’s Grand Mufti, Mustafa Efendi Ceric. “We had an entire generation asking, ‘Does God exist?’ And now we have a generation that is very religious.” Husic and her friends bear that out. As young girls, they watched their hometown of Mostar become ripped apart as lifelong neighbors turned against each other in a spiral of ethnic enmity; two of the four women lost their fathers, while another watched as an uncle was dragged away to his death. As rockets pummeled the city, the girls huddled in the makeshift basement that served as their classroom. Deeply shaken, all four opted to study in Egypt after the war under a religious sponsorship. They returned at 18 in hijabs — a sharp break from their families’ traditions. Their transformation was hardly unique. Aida Begic, 33, a director whose first feature film Snow has won numerous awards, says her teen years in besieged Sarajevo shook her to the core. “Every minute you wonder what will happen after you die,” she says. “You cannot postpone those questions until old age.” After years of dabbling in Buddhism and Judaism, and a phase as a punk rocker with blue hair, four years ago Begic adopted the Islamic head scarf and long dress and became deeply religious. She says the decision “caused an earthquake” among her family and friends, who are still uncomfortable with her devotion.

The new mood is leading to social tension in the city. Last September, men chanting “Allahu akbar” attacked people as they were leaving the city’s first gay festival; several were badly beaten. Human-rights activists in Bosnia argue that the city’s multiethnic tradition has been undermined not just by the war, but also by the 1995 U.S.-brokered Bosnian peace deal, which established two separate administrations, one for Croats and Muslims, the other for Serbs. Although no official census has been taken since 1991, Sarajevo presents an increasingly Muslim face to the world. Thousands of Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats fled the city during the war and have not returned. “The ethnic division has been really successfully done,” says Srdan Dizdarevic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Kids are going to a mono-ethnic school, living in a mono-ethnic neighborhood and when they start work they’ll be in mono-ethnic companies.”

Ask locals about Sarajevo’s Islamic resurgence and most rush to point out that the city is still mainly secular. People continue to pack its many bars, and plenty of women wear revealing outfits. At the King Fahd mosque, Nezim Halilovic, a former war commander who delivers the Friday sermons to thousands of worshippers, says that the city is simply experiencing the kind of religious feeling that was impossible under the communist rule of the former Yugoslavia’s leader, Josip Broz Tito. Like others in Sarajevo, Halilovic also accuses Serb politicians of falsely portraying Sarajevo as a hub of militant Islam in order to win over Western sympathies, and says Western journalists have engaged in “Islamophobia.” “You can see more Islam in Paris and London,” he says. “So why should people returning to Islam be a problem?”

See pictures of Islam’s soft revolution.

Will Bosnia Test the Obama Administration?.

Indeed, for many Bosnians the religious awakening simply enriches the old city, restoring a taste of Islamic traditions rooted in more than four centuries of Ottoman rule. Yet Western and Bosnian intelligence agencies tell Time they are nonetheless concerned by a small group of local Muslim militants, who they say could have more sinister plans. That’s led to a series of arrests. Rijad Rustempasic, 34, was raised in a small town in Bosnia and now lives in Sarajevo’s old town. During the war he converted to Salafi Islam, a rigidly conservative branch of the religion, and joined a unit composed mostly of Arab foreign fighters, between 500 and 1,500 of whom had gone to Bosnia to support their fellow Muslims. Rustempasic says he has been arrested six times since Sept. 11, 2001. “It’s always the same scenario,” he says, sporting a long russet beard and a ponytail, while his wife wears a full black chador. “The police barge into the house early in the morning and accuse me of having al-Qaeda connections.” Last year police netted a cache of antitank mines in Rustempasic’s family house, and imprisoned him for two months; Rustempasic and three others were arrested on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities, but they were released due to a lack of evidence. Rustempasic says the weaponry was wartime trash from the 1990s, and claims he is being hounded for his Salafi beliefs. Still, his talk is disquieting. “There is a religious thought that Muslims are one body,” he says. “As far as I know no Bosnian has been captured in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it is always within the domain of possibilities.”

In 2005, a police raid found more damaging evidence after raiding another Salafist group in Sarajevo. In one apartment the cops found about 44 lb. (20 kg) of explosives, and a training video of how to construct suicide-bomb belts. In Sarajevo I met Bajro Ikanovic, 32, one of the four men arrested for plotting terrorist attacks as a result of that raid. Sitting in a café during a four-day furlough from prison, he told me he has converted several young men to militant Islam, and has pressed them to consider fighting to defend their religion. “Muslims who do not preach jihad are cowards, or just too comfortable with their lives,” he says. Asked if young militants should fight in the Afghanistan or Iraq wars, he says, “Why not? If my Muslim brother is fighting in Pakistan, his enemy is my enemy.” Still, he says, “we need fighters more here than there.”

Intelligence officers dismiss such fiery talk as bluster, saying it would be difficult to conceal a terrorist plot in a country as small as Bosnia. “Word spreads fast,” says Aner Hadzimahmutovic, antiterrorism chief at the State Investigation and Protection Agency. “If 15 people with beards meet in the bush, someone will report them to us.” The one Bosnian who repeatedly claims to have trained and fought with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan — citing gory details of how he supposedly slit the throat of an Australian soldier — remains free. Nihad Cosic was arrested in a 2007 police raid in Pakistan, but released for lack of evidence and flown home to Sarajevo. In April he offered his most recent description of his years fighting with al-Qaeda to Austrian and German journalists visiting Sarajevo. Yet Bosnian police have not sought to arrest him for terrorism, and last year an intelligence official told a Sarajevo publication that Cosic posed no threat to Bosnia and had dropped “very low on the list of priorities.”

For Bosnia’s antiterrorist chief Hadzimahmutovic, the idea of a homegrown Islamic threat is a fabrication of Serb politicians. Washington is less certain. The U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2008, released on April 30, says competing intelligence agencies in Bosnia are failing to share information. As a result, the report states, Bosnia is “vulnerable to exploitation as a potential staging ground for terrorist operations in Europe.”

By and large, in Sarajevo that potential still seems remote. The city’s residents remain wary of militants. Rustempasic says he doubts any company will ever employ him, and when three Algerian-born Bosnian citizens returned to Sarajevo after six years’ detention in Guantánamo, they were shunned by those who feared they would spread militant Islam. “They have no opportunity to get jobs,” says human-rights activist Dizdarevic. More typical of Sarajevo’s new religious fervor are young professionals like Begic and Husic, whose faith has instilled meaning and order into their once tumultuous lives. Husic says she has learned to ignore the jeers that her head scarf attracts in Catholic neighborhoods. And Begic says her next movie, titled Bait, tackles growing prejudice, including against women in hijab. “They think we are backward,” says Begic bitterly. “It is racist.” For her war-weary generation, another era of murderous discord is an unbearable prospect.

See pictures of Islam’s soft revolution.

Will Bosnia Test the Obama Administration?.