Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

tions within mainstream faiths have come “from above.” However, this theory
is still an oversimplification. Although I generally hesitate to seek excuses
for leaders, focusing rather on their responsibilities, it must be noted
that hard historical circumstances that affected the Balkan peoples in general
have often transformed moderate religious leaders into zealots. The political
outlook of Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac was decisively shaped by two
historical events: the concordat crisis of the 1930s and the communist revolution
in 1945. Likewise, the moderate Serb Orthodox patriarch Germanus
Djorić turned into a zealot and ethnic nationalist extremist at the age of
eighty-seven under the pressures of several combined factors, such as the
“triple schism” within the church, the relative progress of Catholicism and
Islam, the worsening of the Kosovo crisis, the rise of Milosˇević, the nationalistic
responses from the Catholic Church in Croatia, the European anticommunist
euphoria of 1989, and so forth. I would also argue that the
Islamic Community has always been relatively less nationalistic and militant.
The Serb anti-Muslim campaign of the 1980s and, most of all, war and
genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina have produced numerous Islamic hawks in
the IZ and made Arab revolutionary Islam popular in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Thus, for example, the currently ultrahawkish reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Cerić
appeared to me, when I interviewed him on the occasion of the Gulf War,
to be an ambitious Arab-educated Muslim cleric, and I described him as a
moderate. Yet, fueled by the horrors of the Bosnian war and Milosˇević’s
assault on Albanians in Kosovo, militancy swamped Muslim communities
not only in Bosnia but also in Kosovo and Macedonia. Now Islamic hawks
could be found even among the two most moderate Muslim religious communities
I found in the Balkans, the Slavic Muslims of Macedonia and the
sufi (dervish) orders in Kosovo. I think that I can conclude the same about
the recently increasingly nationalistic archbishop of Sarajevo, Vinko Cardinal
Puljić. Although I spoke with him only briefly, I followed his career and
came to the conclusion that he is one of the young, highly competent members
of the Vatican’s “cadres for the twentieth first century.” Puljić was
originally a moderate church leader and turned into a militant after his
disappointment with the international community, combined with his frustration
over the decline of the Croat population in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
his conviction that neither the local Serb nor Muslim communities will communities
will ever sincerely cooperate. Nonetheless, although religious leaders
operating in such a rough setting as the Balkans might have had more
or less compelling reasons for feeling what Mircea Eliade has termed the
perennial religious communities’ “fear of extinction,” which often turned
them into zealots, it is strange and discouraging how quickly and easily
religious leaders succumb to this fear and lose faith and patience. Besides,
one can never be sure when the religious leaders’ “fear of extinction” is real
and when they intentionally magnify it in order to mobilize the faithful
against the “other,” to revitalize faith, boost the cohesion of the religionational
community, and consolidate privileged social status of the clergy.
conclusions 241