Word: bosnians
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...Pendulum Swings The Islamic revival in Bosnia is classic human nature [June 15]. The Bosnian Muslims had a mainly secular sense of identity but were nevertheless brutalized during the Balkan civil war due to their religion, for there is little else to differentiate Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks. In reaction, the generation that grew up during the horror of the war is boldly reclaiming the religious identity for which they were victimized. At the other end of the spectrum is Iran, where religious observance is declining in the generation that came of age under the Islamic Republic. The young there...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...