Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia is the one place in Europe where Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have coexisted as comparable communities for centuries in the same towns, speaking the same language. The three national names in use, Bosniak, Serb and Croat, are religious categories doing the work of national ones, applied to people whose ancestors made different confessional choices under different empires.

Ottoman rule from 1463 brought Islam and produced a distinctive urban civilisation: the mosque complexes with their endowed schools, libraries, kitchens and bridges, funded by the vakuf endowment system; the tekkes of the Naqshbandi and Mevlevi orders; and a legal and scholarly culture conducted in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian alongside Bosnian. Conversion was gradual and voluntary over generations rather than forced, and the reasons for it are still argued over, including a long standing but now largely discounted theory tying it to the medieval Bosnian Church.

That medieval church is a genuine puzzle. It existed, it was independent of both Rome and Constantinople, it was condemned as heretical by Rome, and what it actually taught cannot be established from the surviving evidence. The dualist Bogomil identification popularised in the twentieth century is not supported by the primary sources, and the honest position is that the doctrine of the Crkva bosanska is unresolved.

The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, headed by a Reis ul ulema, has been an organised, state recognised body since Austro Hungarian rule, and it remains the model for institutional European Islam that other countries study.

In the war of 1992 to 1995 religious buildings in Bosnia were not damaged incidentally. They were destroyed deliberately, as a method, and the pattern is well documented: a community was expelled and then the physical evidence that it had ever been there was removed, so that no return could be argued for on the basis of a standing mosque or church.

The Ferhat Pasha mosque in Banja Luka, built in 1579, was dynamited in May 1993 and the rubble carted away to a landfill. The Aladza mosque in Foca, from 1550, was destroyed the same year. Sixteen mosques in Banja Luka were levelled. Orthodox and Catholic churches were destroyed in areas where those communities were the target. The term architectural cleansing was coined for this, and the destruction of cultural property was prosecuted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Old Bridge at Mostar, built in 1566 and not a religious building at all, was shelled into the river in November 1993 and became the emblem of the whole campaign precisely because it connected two banks.

What followed is unusual. Both the bridge and several of the mosques were rebuilt using recovered original material. Divers raised stones from the Neretva for the bridge, which reopened in 2004. Fragments of the Ferhadija were located, catalogued and reincorporated, and the rebuilt mosque was opened in 2016 after twenty years of legal and physical work.

Reconstruction of that kind is a statement, and it is understood as one by everybody involved. It does not restore what was lost. It refuses the claim the destruction was making.