uetd brussels symposium multiculturality ottoman experience, dzemaludin latic
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8/9/2019 UETD Brussels Symposium Multiculturality Ottoman Experience, Dzemaludin Latic
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INTERETHNIC RELATIONS IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
DURING THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
(The Sarajevo Beacon)
By: Professor Demaludin Lati, Sarajevo
Introductory remarks
There is a general view that the crisis in Bosnia started in the early 1990s and
that its root-cause was the break-up of the Communist system. This view is only
partially true because the crisis in Bosnia has been going on ever since the
break-up of the two great empires which, like two umbrellas, used to cast their
shadow over the country: one which we may call eastern, that is to say, the
Ottoman Empire, whose presence in Bosnia ended in 1878, and the other,
western, that is to say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed in the
First World War. Both empires ushered a relatively long periods of peace in
Bosnia and in the Balkans inhabited by peoples of different nationalities and the
followers of four major religions: Islam, Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Judaism.
Socialist Yugoslavia brought a "peace of military barracks": the government of
one Communist party and the suppression of religious, national and political
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freedoms. Bosnia , with its single largest population of Muslim Bosniaks and
with its Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic population, was made an equal
federal republic within Yugoslavia only after the passing of the 1974
constitution but without "granting" the Bosnian Muslims the right to restore
their historical national name (Bosniaks); thus, the "construction fault in
Yugoslavia's edifice objectively paved the ground for the realization of the
centuries old dream of Greater Serbia and of Greater Croatia for a while by
carrying out a genocide on the territory of the Bosnian state.
I will talk about the conditions of the present day Bosnian state and its
perspectives later on. For now, I would like to present a point that, in Bosnia and
throughout most of the Balkan peninsula, we are now witnessing the break up of
the Ottoman Empire and its millet system. My second point is that the so-called
international community has been giving in increasingly to the surging Serb and
Croat ethnonationalisms which undermine future survival of an indigenous
European Muslim community in Bosnia clinched between the jaws of those two
ethnonationalisms and that, precisely because this is a non-Christian, Muslim
community, there is a silent discriminatory policy being applied on the part of
Europe and America towards Bosnian state and its citizens. Sarajevo is the
beacon of European civilization, but also its contradiction. In the bloody history
of this continent which reached its lowest points during the two world wars there
has always been the light of one multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural
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country with a long tradition of co-existence of peoples who belong to religions
and ethnicities. Bosnian society had one extra quality above the European
achievements in tolerance: in Bosnia the other was not simply tolerated, but was
respected and protected. Today Sarajevo represents a contradiction to a Europe,
which on the one hand pays lip service to the state of equal citizens in full
celebration of their harmonized identities, and on the other, confers legality on a
state or a quasi-state entity forged in the sword and fire of genocide against an
ethnic group, just as it supports ethnonationalist political projects. European
Union is a project of self-deliverance of this continent in the face of lethal ideas
of ethnonationalism, xenophobia and totalitarianism; therefore, the "Sarajevo
beacon" deserves support of the analysts, political scientists and diplomats of the
West.
We can thank the very Ottoman millet system for the fact that different religious
and ethnic groups used to live in the Balkan peninsula for centuries. That
system, although not a reflection of a fully Islamic concept of state and society,
grew out of Qur'anic teachings about people, language, race and religion and on
the Prophet's s.a.w.s. practice and here one thinks especially of the Constitution
of Medina (Sahifetul-Medina). In the language of the Qur'an, millet designates
not only a particular religion, but also a religious culture. This is how
contemporary Swiss sociologist and historian Urs Altermatt views this term in
his study entitledEthnonationalism in Europe: the Sarajevo Beacon: "In
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Ottoman language, it was precisely the term millet that designated both a
community of people and a community of religion. Numerous millets had
separate churches and languages. As religious communities, they came under the
protection of the supreme Muslim government. As a rule, they ran their internal
affairs according to their own laws."1 The crux of my point is that a millet did
not have its exclusive territory within the Ottoman Empire; belonging to a millet
was determined on the basis of religious affiliation. "Members of a millet
enjoyed freedom of movement in the whole empire, but remained members of
their religious community. This background", as Altermatt emphaises "explains
why all ethnic, cultural and religious maps in the former Ottoman south eastern
Europe look so colourful."2
The millet system determined not only relations between community and state,
but also among various communities.3 All Muslims represented millet-i islam
regardless of their race, language, origins, or mezheb. In Sarajevo as in the
whole of Bosnia there existed for centuries, together with a Muslim millet, a
Latin or Catholic millet, an Orthodox millet, and, following their expulsion from
the Iberian peninsula and central Europe, the Sefardim and Ashkenazim who
first found refuge in Istanbul and Thessaloniki, and from the mid-16th century,
in Bosnia. The Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo has the longest continuity in the
1 Urs Altermatt. Ethnonationalism in Europe: the Sarajevo Beacon, Sarajevo, 1995, p. 79.
2 Ibid., p. 79.3 For more on Ottoman pluarlism see a study by the current OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin IhsanoluACulture of Peaceful Coexistence (Kultura suivota), Sarajevo, bilingual, 2006.
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history of this people's migrations and persecutions. The non-Muslims of the
Ottoman Empire were treated as ahl al-kitab ordhimmis. Here is not the time or
place to elaborate these terms derived from the Qur'an and Sunna, but at a time
of heightened Islamophobia in the West in which these two terms seem to have
been especially singled out for attack, let me quote from Culture of Islam by
Isma'il R. Farouqi and his wife Lamya: "The honor with which Islam regards
Judaism and Christianity, their founders and scriptures, is not merely courtesy
but acknowledgment of religious truth. Islam sees them not as other ways
which it has to tolerate but as standing de jure, as truly revealed religions from
God. Moreover, their legitimate status is neither socio-political nor cultural nor
civilizational but religious. In this, Islam is unique for no religion in the world
has yet made belief in the truth of other religions a necessary condition of its
own faith and witness Islam does not see itself as coming to the religious
scene ex nihilo, but as a reaffirmation of the same truth presented by all the
preceding prophets of Judaism and Christianity."4
When it comes to the millet system in Bosnia, one cannot avoid quoting from
Ahd-Nama, a royal decree issued by the founder of the millet system, sultan
Mehmed Fatih on 28 May 1463 to the Franciscan order which reads as follows:
"Mehmet the son of Murat-Khan always victorious! The mandate of the
honourable, sublime sultans sign and the shining seal of the conqueror of the
4 Culture of Islam, Macmillan, London, 1986, p. 191.
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world reads as follows: I, Sultan Mehmet Khan, inform all the world that those
who possess this imperial edict, the Bosnian Franciscans, are in my good graces
and do hereby command: Let nobody bother or disturb those mentioned in their
churches. Let them dwell in peace in my empire. And let those who have
become refugees be allowed to do so and be safe. Let them return and let them
settle in their monasteries without fear in all countries of my empire. Neither my
royal highness, nor my viziers or my employees, nor my servants, nor any
citizen of my empire shall insult or disturb them. Let nobody attack, insult or
endanger either their life or their property, nor the property of their church. And
should they bring somebody from abroad into my country, let them do so
without let or hindrance. And as I graciously issue this imperial edict, I hereby
call on you to take my great oath."
Ladies and Gentlemen,
With the downfall of the Ottoman Empire fell the millet system in Bosnia too.
By the mid-19th century, riding on the late wave of national romanticism, the
Orthodox millet in Bosnia began its transformation into Serbian nationality,
while a decade or so later the Catholic millet became Croat in nationality, that is,
part of the wider Croatian nationality. For about half a century, the millet-i
islam, deeply shaped by Islam, lived in a particular historical hiatus, that is,
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unfavourably inclined to the idea of nation. Then, with the launch of the political
organizations based on nationality on the eve of the World War One and in its
aftermath, the Muslim community in Bosnia tried to emphasize its national
identity, while the new states the Yugoslav Kingdom, the Independent State of
Croatia and the Socialist Yugoslavia all tried to suppress by force any national
movement among the Bosniaks.
During the Ottoman Empire, 75% of the Bosnian pashalik population belonged
to the Islamic millet. Today, having been decimated in the two world wars and
especially during the genocide of 1992-1995, Bosniaks live in four enclaves in
the Balkans. Their state of Bosnia is divided into two entities. In the entity
known as Republika Srpska, Bosniaks together with Croats used to constitute
more than 50% percent of population before the aggression; today they are less
than 10%. Thus the Bosniaks are paying a price because of the former millet
system; they are unable to become an organized national group, nor can they,
together with smaller sections of Serb and Croat peoples loyal to the idea of
Bosnia as a state of its citizens, restore the destroyed humane concept of the
millet system. The constitution which is being imposed on them by the USA and
leading European powers gives preference to ethnonational partition of this
country and to ethnonational projects. "I am fighting against all vestiges of the
Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, is how the war-time leader of Bosnian Serbs
and war criminal Radovan Karadi used to boast. When prosecutor asked
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Momilo Krajinik, Karadi's close collaborator and chairman of the self-styled
Republika Srpska parliament, why he sought to divide Bosnia into the so-called
autonomous Serb regions, he said that he did so in order to stop a demographic
growth not only among Muslims of Bosnia, but of former Yugoslavia as a
whole. And when during the siege of Sarajevo Dr Haris Silajdi asked him how
long would Serb forces continue shelling the city, he replied: "As long as
Muslims continue talking that they want a multiethnic Bosnia, as long as they
want to live with the Serbs!"
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