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In the West, the top three watershed geopolitical
events of the modern era are commonly seen as the end of the Cold
War with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the al Qaeda
attacks in the U.S. in 2001, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in
2003.
The 1995
Srebrenica Genocide, has largely been
forgotten and outside the Muslim world its significance never widely
grasped.
Yet as Brendan Simms noted in
Europe: The Struggle
for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present:
In the Muslim world, the slaughter of their
co-religionists in Bosnia contributed substantially to the emergence
of a common consciousness on foreign policy. According to this
global discourse, Muslims were now on the defensive across the
world: in Palestine, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere. A
large number of Arab, Turkish, Caucasian, central Asian and other
Mujahedin – in search of a new jihad after Afghanistan – went to
Bosnia to fight. It was among European Muslims, however, that the
Bosnian experience resonated most forcefully. ‘It doesn’t really
matter whether we perish or survive,’ the Grand Mufti of
Bosnia-Herzegovina [Dr. Mustafa Cerić] remarked in May 1994, ‘the
lesson will always be there. And it is a simple one: that the Muslim
community must always be vigilant and must always take their destiny
in their own hands. They must never rely on anyone or anybody to
solve their problems or come to their rescue.’ This ‘Zionist’
message echoed across the immigrant communities in western Europe,
especially Britain. ‘Bosnia Today – Brick Lane tomorrow’ warned the
banners in one East London demonstration. Some of the most prominent
subsequent British jihadists such as Omar Sheikh, who masterminded
the kidnapping and murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl, and the
Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg – were radicalized by Bosnia. In
other words, the new Muslim geopolitics of the mid-1990s was a
reaction not to western meddling but to nonintervention in the face
of genocide and ethnic cleansing [my emphasis].
A decade later, when Nadeem Azam
interviewed
Cerić
(who in 2003 in recognition of his contributions to inter-faith
dialogue, tolerance and peace, was awarded UNESCO’s Félix
Houphouët-Boigny
peace prize) he reiterated his message on the
necessity of Muslim self-reliance.
What are your feelings about the future of Islam
in Europe?
Not very good. The rise of fascism combined with
an officially-sanctioned tendency to be unreasonable when it comes
to discussion about Islam are bad omens. I am not a soothsayer but I
can see the reality of a day when the treatment of a Muslim in
Europe will be worse than that of serial killer: we are, I am
afraid, on the verge of seeing a situation develops whereby it would
be a crime to be a Muslim in Europe. The events of 11 September,
2001, have made things worse. May Allah protect us.
But having such feelings does not depress me. It
actually should motivate us and make us even more resolute in our
efforts. More importantly it should make us think of planning and
organising. If the day comes – like it did in Bosnia – you might be
unable to control events around you but you should at least be ready
to do what is needed to be done by a Muslim at such an hour.
[…]
The message of the four year-long war we fought is
a simple one: that the Muslim community must always be vigilant and
must always take their destiny in their own hands. They must never
rely on anyone or anybody to solve their problems or come to their
rescue; they must always rely on God and the faith, goodness and
compassion within their communities. This is very important. Our
strength will always be reflective of the strength of our
communities.
Today, Cerić’s fears are clearly all the more
well-founded as across Europe xenophobia and Islamophobia
relentlessly grow and in the United States a presidential candidate
gains the strongest boost to his campaign by promising a “total and
complete shutdown” of Muslims.
The lesson that Srebrenica taught many Muslims in
the West was that even when they are in no sense foreign or
culturally set apart, they are still at risk of exclusion and
elimination.
Last month after the EU referendum in the UK, a
resident of Barnsley, South Yorkshire (five miles from where I grew
up), when asked to explain why he had voted for Brexit
said: “It’s
to stop the Muslims coming into this country. Simple as that.”
Among opponents of the war in Iraq, a widely
accepted narrative has long been that the antidote to the unintended
consequences of so much ill-conceived Western meddling in the
Greater Middle East over the last 15 years is to simply step back
and disengage. This sentiment, in large part, is what got Barack
Obama elected in 2008. Let the region sort out its own problems or
let closer neighbors such as the Russians intervene, so the thinking
goes. The U.S. has much more capacity to harm than to help.
Yet as the killing fields of Syria have grown
larger year after year, the message from Srebrenica merely seems to
have been underlined: the magnitude of the death toll in any
conflict will be of little concern across most of the West so long
as the victims are Muslim.
After Donald Trump called for Muslims to be shut
out of America, Michael Moore declared:
We are all Muslim. And he
promoted the hashtag
#WeAreAllMuslim.
Expressions of solidarity through social media are
easy to promote and of debatable value, yet the isolation of Muslims
in this instance, rather than being overcome, merely seemed to get
reinforced. #WeAreAllMuslim was mostly deployed as a sarcastic slur
shared by Islamophobes.
The global trends are strong and clear, pointing
to a future marked by more and more social fragmentation as people
withdraw into their respective enclaves where they believe they can
“take care of their own.”
We live in a world in which we are getting thrown
closer together while simultaneously trying to stand further apart.
It can’t work.
At some point we either embrace the fact that we
are all human and have the capacity to advance our mutual interests,
or we will continue down the current path of self-destruction.
* * *
Last year, Myriam François-Cerrah, a British
journalist who is also a Muslim, took a group of young people from
the UK — all of whom were born in the year of the genocide — to
Srebrenica where they learned lessons that arguably have more
relevance now than they have had at any time since 1995.
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