Word: sarajevo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Many other Bosnians are growing accustomed to the resurgent Islamic faith around them. Nearly 15 years after the country's vicious war - in which an estimated 100,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed - its capital, Sarajevo, is experiencing a religious revival. The city's physical scars have mostly healed since the siege of the 1990s. Its shell-blasted walls have been replastered and the infamous Sniper Alley - named for the Serb gunmen who shot at those crossing the street - is now clogged with traffic. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...
...while the war has begun to seem like far-off history, the city's spiritual renewal is happening every day. There are now hundreds of women dressed like Husic and her friends in Sarajevo, where such styles had long since yielded to Western fashion. Last year Sarajevo's city council launched an option of religious education for children in kindergarten; so far only Islam is on offer. The city's mosques are packed, including the huge King Fahd Mosque and cultural center, which Saudi Arabia built in 2000 - at a cost of about $12 million - and still maintains...
Though there is little talk of the war in Sarajevo today, religious leaders trace Bosnia's Islamic revival directly to the horrors people witnessed in the 1990s, when they were children. "This generation grew up overnight," says the country's Grand Mufti, Mustafa Efendi Ceric. "We had an entire generation asking, 'Does God exist?' And now we have a generation that is very religious." Husic and her friends bear that out. As young girls, they watched their hometown of Mostar become ripped apart as lifelong neighbors turned against each other in a spiral of ethnic enmity; two of the four...
...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 not returned. "The ethnic division has been really successfully done," says Srdan Dizdarevic, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "Kids...
...locals about Sarajevo's Islamic resurgence and most rush to point out that the city is still mainly secular. People continue to pack its many bars, and plenty of women wear revealing outfits. At the King Fahd mosque, Nezim Halilovic, a former war commander who delivers the Friday sermons to thousands of worshippers, says that the city is simply experiencing the kind of religious feeling that was impossible under the communist rule of the former Yugoslavia's leader, Josip Broz Tito. Like others in Sarajevo, Halilovic also accuses Serb politicians of falsely portraying Sarajevo as a hub of militant Islam...