STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
Islamic Fundamentalism In the Balkans
T
HE JEWISH WOMAN STOOD in the office of Bosnian president
Alija Izetbegovic. She was distraught. She placed a handful of
broken tiles on the desk in front of her and told the president's
adviser, "It's a crime, a crime against culture. They are destroying a holy
place, a place that is of incalculable value to Sarajevo."
"There's nothing we can do," the adviser replied sorrowfully. "They
have the money and they are going to do what they want."
The most interesting aspect of this incident, which took place after
the end of the Bosnian war in
1995,
is that the temple the Jewish
woman, an art expert named Zoja Finci, was attempting to protect was
neither, as one might expect, a synagogue, nor a Serbian church. Rather,
it was the Begova or Governor's mosque, the largest in the former
Yugoslavia, and the main Islamic structure in Sarajevo.
Further, the presumptive vandals against whom Zoja Finci sought to
protect the mosque were neither Serb extremists nor commercial devel–
opers. They were, in fact, just the sort of people one might have thought
would target a synagogue or a Serb structure: Islamic officials backed
by Saudi Arabia, engaged in a purported reconstruction.
The official Supreme Saudi Aid Committee occupies one of the
largest governmental buildings in the Bosnian capital. The committee
has paid for the rehabilitation of numerous mosques damaged during
the
1992-95
war. But the aid is not always appreciated by ordinary
Muslims, who, no less than art experts, have ways of expressing their
resentments .
At the Alipasha mosque in Sarajevo, a lovely Ottoman structure with
a slender, graceful minaret, only meters away from the committee's
headquarters, the word "Saudi" has been scratched off the commemo–
rative plaque announcing a donation for its restoration.
The problem is that the Saudis and their local agents are Wahhabis,
followers of the main fundamentalist sect in the Islamic world. Wah–
habis do not approve of Ottoman mosques. Their rehabilitation of the
Imperial mosque, also in Sarajevo, turned what had been a beautiful,
