The harem fantasy projected the perpetrators’ own women’s-bodies-as-battlefield logic onto victims

Evidence

The rapes were a form of desecration, closely related to the desecration of the sacred spaces symbolized by mosques. The term for sacred space in Islam is haram, originally an Arabic term that Serb nationalists associate with one small aspect of Islamic sacred spaces, the women’s quarters. Fantasies of “the harem” were commonplace among Serb nationalist clergy, academics, and soldiers. The commander of the Manjaca camp, for example, justified the attack on Muslims on the grounds that the Bosnian Muslims had a plan to seize Serb women and put them in harems. Serb religious nationalists used radio broadcasts to spread the charge that Bosnian Muslims were plotting to put Serb women in harems. Many Bosnian Serbs believed, or claimed to believe, these charges despite their being wildly, even ludicrously, inconsistent with the marriage practices of their Bosnian Muslim neighbors. The harem fantasy involves a particularly cruel version of the use of women’s bodies as a battlefield. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 104

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘haram’ means sacred space in Islam and was willfully reduced by Serb nationalists to the women’s quarters—a definitional distortion with genocidal consequences.
• XREF: The projection-and-reversal dynamic echoes the moral-panic machinery (accusing victims of the very crime being committed) seen in Islamicphobia literatures. — connects to: European portrayals of the harem projected fantasy rather than observed reality — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 306

Related

• European portrayals of the harem projected fantasy rather than observed reality (similarity 0.79)