The Muslim label trapped Bosnians between Western and Islamic stereotyping

Evidence

Central to the Orientalist stereotype is a confusion in the presentation of Islam between religious observance and religious militancy. While few would argue that the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army represents all observant Catholics, the association of observant Muslims with religious militancy is widespread. Some defenders of Bosnia have fallen into this trap, arguing that Bosnian Muslims are not “real Muslims” since many of them eat pork or drink alcohol and dress in Western fashion. The implicit logic seems to be that if Muslims in Europe eat pork, they deserve to exist. Desperate to counter false charges that they were fundamentalists, there were Bosnian Muslims who used the same logic, arguing that some of them also ate pork and drank alcohol, or were religious skeptics. Ironically, while European powers out of prejudice against Muslims and fears of fundamentalism tried to prevent Bosnia from attaining arms to defend itself, support in the Islamic world was slow in coming, partly because some Muslim leaders viewed Bosnians as not rigorous enough practitioners of Islam. A particularly sad absurdity awaited many Bosnian refugees in Western nations. Having been driven out of home and country for being Muslim, the refugees sometimes find themselves castigated for not observing what certain Muslims in the West deem proper Islamic observance, dress, or behavior. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 319

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The double bind: Bosnians held guilty as Muslims by the West while deemed insufficiently Muslim by the Islamic world — a demonstrable structure of what life under a totalizing identity label does.
• SEED: A contrast piece between how the IRA was never taken to represent all Catholics while observant Muslims are routinely equated with militancy — a precise asymmetry worth an essay.

Related

• Bosnian Muslims suffered uniquely methodical persecution from both nationalist sides (similarity 0.82)
• Bosnian Muslims suffered wartime losses rivaling Serbs yet bore Nazi stigma (similarity 0.80)
• Western betrayal of Bosnia strengthened the very Islamic extremism it feared (similarity 0.79)
• Bosnian government’s religious diversity was erased by the phrase Muslim-dominated (similarity 0.79)
• Serb Church leaders applied global anti-Muslim stereotypes to Bosnian Muslims (similarity 0.78)
• Bosnian culture is multilayered across multiple religions and ethnicities (similarity 0.78)
• Serb nationalist ideology fuses religious identity with race-traitor charges against Muslims (similarity 0.78)