Kosovo mythology transforms religious identity into a racialist ideology

Evidence

Religious nationalists manipulated the vision of Lazar as a Christ figure to portray all Yugoslav Muslims, not just the Ottoman Turks who fought Lazar, as responsible for the death of the Christ-prince Lazar at the “Serbian Golgotha.” … At moments of crisis, the Kosovo ideology helps efface the boundaries between notions of religion and race and turns religious nationalism into the most virulent form of racialist ideology. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 25

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of Christoslavism and its mechanism of conflating religion with race.

Related

• Kosovo’s mythic centrality was imposed by nationalists, not present in the folk canon (similarity 0.86)
• Serb religious nationalism mapped the Kosovo myth onto the Passion narrative (similarity 0.85)
• Serb nationalist ideology fuses religious identity with race-traitor charges against Muslims (similarity 0.83)
• Nationalist myths coalesced into an ideology defining Slavs as innately Christian (similarity 0.82)
• A professional biologist converted religious conversion into a genetic defect theory (similarity 0.82)
• Slavic Muslims were redefined as Turkish invaders through religious nationalism (similarity 0.81)
• Serbian nationalist ideology treats religious conversion as a change of race (similarity 0.81)
• Christoslavism defined Slavic Muslims as traitors outside the nation (similarity 0.81)
• The 1989 Kosovo commemoration fused Christ-killer myth with anti-Muslim and anti-Albanian hatred (similarity 0.80)
• The Kosovo myth of ancient Serb-Muslim enmity is a recent nineteenth-century construction (similarity 0.80)
• A retrieved Serbian tradition could recast Kosovo’s traitor as the genocidaires themselves (similarity 0.79)
• Pre-nationalist Serb epic prized a mediator with the Ottomans, not the Kosovo martyr (similarity 0.79)
• The Kosovo-as-holy-land discourse is a modern nationalist invention, not ancient tradition (similarity 0.78)
• The anti-Muslim genocide reused the Christ-killer myth once aimed at Jews (similarity 0.78)