Rose of Sarajevo

by Ayşe Kulin

The only republic able to evade disaster would be Slovenia, because it was populated exclusively by Slovenians.

“Up until the time of Tito, Bosnian Muslims were called Bosniaks. Being a Muslim is one thing, being a Bosniak another. Muslims live all over the world. Turks, Iranians, Arabs, Indonesians, and many, many others are Muslim, just like us. Why do they insist on calling us ‘Muslims’? The Croats aren’t called ‘Catholics,’ and the Serbs aren’t called ‘Orthodox Christians.’” “It’s perfectly obvious,” Burhan said. “They’re changing the definition of the word ‘Bosniak’ slowly and stealthily. They want to eliminate our ethnic identity so that we’re left with only our religious identity. That way they can claim the homeland we’ve lived in for nine centuries. Once we’re branded ‘Muslims,’ it will be easier to kick us out of Europe.”

“Because they don’t believe there’s such a thing as Bosniaks. If you ask the Serbs, we’re fellow Serbs who converted to Islam under pressure from the Ottomans. If you ask the Croats, we’re Croats who turned our backs on the Catholic Church. They’ve repeated this lie so many times, they’ve started to believe it. And now they’ve got their eyes on our land.”

“It wouldn’t be accurate to say that the Bosniaks ‘converted,’ Fiko,” Raif said. “The Bogomil sect had a lot in common with Islam in any case. As you know, the Ottoman Empire was established in the lands of Asia Minor known as Anatolia. Even as the Turks were staging incursions, they’d begun trickling into the Balkans as migrants. In a sense, those first settlers from Anatolia were part of the propaganda efforts for the Ottoman conquest. Before sending in the army, they sent dervishes to win over the local people.”