The curse below was revived with a vengeance at the 600th anniversary commemoration of the death of Serb Prince Lazar at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. Religious nationalists in Serbia accuse not only the Ottoman Turks who fought Lazar, but also the Balkan Muslims of today of being stained with the blood of Christ-prince Lazar

Sells, M.

Leiden University Scholary Publications

Regional issuesI S I M  N E W S L E T T E R  3 / 9 9 31Michael Sells, author of The Bridge Betrayed:Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University ofCalifornia Press, second edition, 1998) is professoro f Comparative Religions at Haverford College, USA.N o t e s1 . The full argument and documentation for thefollowing remarks are found in Michael Sells,T h e Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2n dedition, 1998) and at the Bridge Betrayed WarCrimes and Human Rights documentary page athttp://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports.html 2 . Translated by Milorad Ekmecic, ‘The Emergence ofSt. Vitus Day’, in Wayne Vucinich and ThomasEmmert, eds., Kosovo: Legacy of a Medieval Battle(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991),p. 335. 3 . Bishop Petar Petrovic II (Njegoš), The MountainW r e a t h, translated by Vasa Mihailovich (1986). 4 . This essentialist view of Islam has been adoptedby the popular writer Bat Ye’or, who bases manyof her generalizations on the writings of Serbiannationalists. Bat Ye’or, The Decline of EasternChristianity under Islam (Madison: FarleighDickenson University Press, 1996), p. 239.5 . See Andras Riedlmayer, ‘Bosnia’s Cultural Heritageand Its Destruction’ (Philadelphia, 1994),videocassette, and the photo essays ont h e Community of Bosnia Web page:h t t p : / / w w w . s t u d e n t s . h a v e r f o r d . e d u / v f i l i p o v6 . Biljana Plavšic, S v e t , Novi Sad, September 1993,cited and translated by Slobodan Inic, ‘BiljanaP l a všic: Geneticist in the Service of a Great Crime’,Bosnia Report: Newsletter of the Alliance to DefendB o s n i a - H e r z e g o v i n a 19 (June-August 1997),translated from H e l s i nš ka povelja ( H e l s i n k iCharter), Belgrade, November 1996.The Ba l ka nsM I C H A E L  S E L L SThe curse below was revived with a vengeance at the6 0 0t h anniversary commemoration of the death ofSerb Prince Lazar at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. Re-ligious nationalists in Serbia accuse not only the Ot-toman Turks who fought Lazar, but also the BalkanMuslims of today of being stained with the blood ofChrist-prince Lazar.1Whoever is a Serb of Serbian bloodWhoever shares with me this heritage,And he comes not to fight at Kosovo,May he never have the progenyHis heart desires, neither son nor daughter;Beneath his hand let nothing decent growNeither purple grapes nor wholesome wheat;Let him rust away like dripping ironUntil his name be extinguished.2 Balkan Islam andthe Mythologyo f K o s o v oIn a Passion play, the actors who kill themartyr (Jesus, for example, or Imam Hus-sein) exit the stage quickly to avoid beingpummelled by the audience. When an excit-ed crowd rushes the stage to beat the actor,time is collapsed. The crowd reacts not as anaudience watching a representation of apast event, but as if they were actually livingthe original event. While stage re-enact-ment was not an important part of the Koso-vo pageant of 1989, a similar collapse oftime was evident. The relics of Lazar weretransported around Serbia, arriving at themonastery nearest the battle site on thefeast day of Lazar (Vidovdan). There theywere ceremonially unveiled for the first timein history. Slobodan Miloše v ić then mount-ed a stage on the battle site and, with abackdrop of Kosovo symbolism and beforean excited audience of more than a millionpeople (some of them waving his picturealongside images of Lazar) boasted of hisplan to revoke Kosovo’s autonomy. This time collapse was tied to other pow-erful symbols: 1) the sacred space of the‘Serb Jerusalem’ – as Kosovo, with its mag-nificent monasteries of the medieval Serbkingdoms, is called by Serb nationalists; 2)the historical memory of atrocities sufferedby Serbs in World War II – a memory height-ened by ritual disinterment in the late 1980sof remains of Serb victims amidst calls forrevenge and the stereotyping of all Bosni-ans, Albanians, and Croats as genocidal; and3) false claims by Serbian bishops and acad-emics that Albanians in Kosovo were en-gaged in mass rape, systematic annihilationof Serb sacral heritage, and genocide. Reli-gious nationalists exploited the mythologyof Kosovo throughout the ‘ethnic cleans-ing’. Paramilitaries wore shoulder patchesdepicting the battle of Kosovo, sang songsabout the Kosovo battle, forced their cap-tives to sing songs, and decorated them-selves with medals named after heroes ofthe Kosovo battle.The nexus of primordial time, historicalmemory, sacred space, and accusations ofpresent genocide – all brought togetheraround the 1989 Kosovo commemoration –was inflamed further by a particularly viru-lent form of Orientalism. In the 19t h c e n t u r y ,Serbian nationalists made explicit the por-trayal of Prince Lazar as a Christ-figure: aLast Supper with twelve knight-disciples, in-cluding one traitor, and a Mary Magdalenefigure. The most important work of 19t h c e n-tury Serb nationalism was T h e M o u n t a i nW r e a t h , a verse drama published in 1857 bythe Montenegrin Orthodox bishop knownas Njegoš. It opens with Serb bishops andknights deciding to ‘cleanse’ Montenegro ofnon-Christians. The Vlad (Prince-Bishop)summons the Slavic Muslims and offersthem a last chance to convert. The Muslimsreply that Orthodox and Muslims are onepeople and request a ‘godfather’ (K u m) cer-emony through which blood feuds werehealed. When Serb elders reply that the cer-emony requires baptism, the Muslims sug-gest baptism for the Christian child and ritu-al tonsure for the Muslim child. The inter-re-ligious K u m ceremony is rejected and theMuslims are driven away as ‘Turkifiers’ and‘spitters on the cross’. The play ends with aglorification of the Christmas exterminationof the Muslims, the annihilation of all tracesof their existence, followed by ritual com-munion (without the confession obligatoryafter all killings) for the Serb knights. In theview of the Njegoš, the antagonism be-tween Christian and Muslim is not only age-old: it is eternal, built into the very structureof the cosmos. The Mountain Wreath w a sreprinted and disseminated in 1989. Later,Serb nationalists celebrated the ‘cleansing’of villages in Bosnia by posting on the Inter-net verses from The Mountain Wreath c e l e-brating ‘the extermination of the Turkifiers’.3This concept of ‘Turkifier’ reflects Chris-toslavism, the notion that a Slav who con-verts from Christianity is transformed ethni-cally into a Turk. Twentieth-century writers(both Catholic and Orthodox) combinedChristoslavism with racial ideas. Conversionwas simultaneously a race-betrayal andrace-transformation that left one perpetual-ly outside of the ‘people’ and placed onealongside those with the blood of theChrist-prince Lazar on their hands. Ottomanrule was portrayed as one of unremittingsavagery in which the Ottomans ‘stole theblood’ of Serbs and Serb culture and de-stroyed the great monasteries of Kosovo.Ironically, the latter claim is often made ontours of the monasteries that in fact sur-vived very well the five centuries of Ot-toman rule.4The monasteries also survived centuriessurrounded by Kosovar Albanians. Yet, mo-tivated by repeated false claims that the‘Turks’ (i.e. the Albanians) were destroyingthe monasteries, Serbian militias destroyedthousands of Islamic monuments in areas ofBosnia they controlled, including majormasterworks of the 16t h century such as theFerhadiya in Banja Luka and the ColouredMosque of Foc̆a. In Sarajevo, the Serb armyburned the National Library (more than amillion volumes and a hundred thousandrare books) and the Oriental Institute (withover 5,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian,Turkish, Slavic, and Aljamiado). One goal ofdestroying the evidence of shared civiliza-tion was to help establish as fact the Serbiannationalist myth, which holds that Muslimsand Christians never were ‘one people’ andare doomed to repeat age-old antagonisms.Tragically, Western policy makers and espe-cially UN commanders adopted the aggres-sor mythology of inevitable age-old hatredsto excuse their refusal to protect the victimsof ‘ethnic cleansing’ or to allow them to de-fend themselves. In Kosovo, Serbian reli-gious nationalists have been equally me-thodical in effacing identity – from librariesand mosques to wedding rings and identityc a r d s .5Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavšić, a bi-ologist and former head of the Academy ofNatural Sciences in Sarajevo, announced in1994 that:[…] it was genetically deformed materialthat embraced Islam. And now, of course,with each successive generation this genesimply becomes concentrated. It gets worseand worse. It simply expresses itself anddictates their style of thinking and behaving,which is rooted in their genes.6As shown by Plavšic´ and her formerly sec-ularist and communist colleagues, the effec-tiveness of the Kosovo nexus of religiousand historical mythologies is not dependentupon self-conscious beliefs or sincerity. Forleaders like Plavšic´ and their followers, itprovides an alternative system of logic thatmakes plausible their sudden conversionsand justifies their acts to themselves andtheir audience.A Bosnian refugee told me the followingstory: When her Serb neighbours protestedagainst their participating in ‘cleansing’ theMuslims, Serb paramilitaries shot them deadin front of their son and then forced the soninto the army. The Muslim woman’s husbandwas the K u m (godfather) of the Serb son.Break the inter-religious K u m bond, whichpresupposes that Christians and Muslims are‘one people’, is the currently the goal, just asit was in The Mountain Wreath. Proposals tovalidate that goal and partition the Balkansalong religious lines, placing Balkan Muslimsin economically and politically untenableenclaves (landlocked equivalents of Gaza)would lead to further violence or – if the con-sistent history of non-Christian ghettos inEurope since 1096 is any guide – to an evenworse outcome. Meanwhile, the BosnianMuslim family has preserved the home oftheir Serb friends for the return of the son,for whom they are now searching. After years of propaganda, Njegoš- s t y l emythology, and complicity in genocide, Ser-bian society has been radicalized. Serbia’smost popular politician is Vojislav Šešelj, anopen proponent of annihilation of KosovarAlbanians, and its most popular celebrity isthe indicted war criminal Arkan. Even so,when the radical elements in a society aredefeated, a society can turn quickly to itsbetter values (witness the transformation offormerly fascist states after WWII). The inter-national community can support the manywho still refuse the ideology of religiousapartheid or it can betray them by ratifying‘ethnic cleansing’. The stakes are high, bothfor the moral universe we will inhabit andfor the already delicate relations betweenthe Islamic world and the West. ♦Burning of theNational Libraryin Sarajevo bySerb shelling inlate August 1992.

Balkan Islam and the Mythology of Kosovo

https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2722707/download

Balkan Islam and the Mythology of Kosovo

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Leiden University Scholary Publications