Today marks 25 years since Serbian militiamen – literally blessed in pre-carnage Masses by their Orthodox priests and bishops – chased down some 8,000 Muslim men and boys through the woods surrounding the UN-declared “safe haven” city of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, slaughtering them without mercy, one-by-one, in cold blood.
The soldiers then converged on a UN compound protected by two battalions of Netherlands peacekeeping troops, where 15,000 Bosnian Muslims had successfully fled.
Although the UN had pledged to protect all who entered the Srebrenica and Zepa safe areas, the Netherlands soldiers nonetheless stood down. Not a single shot fired. Instead, they helped the Serb troops separate 2,000 boys and men from their 13,000 mothers, sisters, and wives.
The Serbs killed the boys and men, some pitched upon waiting bayonets, then into mass graves, still being uncovered. The girls and women, the Dutch and Serb soldiers together loaded into trucks, hauled to Serb-governed camps. And there …
Srebrenica became the largest organized mass extermination in Europe since 1945 and the World War II “never-again” Holocaust.
At the time in 1995, Europe’s governments and the global media excused the complicity of the Netherlands peacekeepers. They were “outgunned.”
But in 2006, this oversight was righted.
The Netherlands government duly awarded the peacekeeping battalions medals of commendation for their heroism in not intervening to save the fleeing, defenseless Bosnian civilians. A tide of neo-Nazi parties across Europe rose up boldly to cheer the ceremony.
“In seeking to understand the force and spirit of Serbian Islamophobia, it is helpful to see it as an analogue to anti-Semitism,” explains Abdal Hakim Murad in his erudite and indelible essay on the topic. He highlights Serbian (and European) wildly absurd, though nonetheless carefully constructed and propagated, identitarian myths systematically demonizing Islam and Muslims in his recent, trenchant book of essays on Islam in Europe, Travelling Home.
But while the will raging in Belgrade to obliterate Bosnia’s Muslims may have been bombed by American and NATO airstrikes into quiescence in 1995, its supremacist spirit has lost none of its potency among still-unrepentant Serbian Orthodox Church prelates and the baptismal partisans that follow them. Indeed, we see this virulent anti-Muslim xenophobia now rampaging through Europe, its object lessons learned as far afield as India’s and Myanmar’s respective Hindu and Buddhist jingoists, China’s and Canada’s disparate ethno-racists, and here at home among America’s increasingly strident Christian and Euro-centric nativists: Muslims are to be banned or banished. Islam, an alien deviation, is to be eradicated.
Hence, these shameless celebrations of virulent exclusivism and nationalisms – religious and secular, ethnic and ideological, specifically victimizing Muslims – have only grown more boisterous in the years since: Swelled on the right by a chorus of exultant hosannas from empowered chauvinists, east and west, speaking in the macabre tongues of their mythical ethno-religious traditions; and boosted from the left by the increasingly shrill wailings of liberal society’s absolutist lords of tolerance, high priests of the social contract, who are no longer willing to tolerate the “reactionary,” “puritan” pieties of the nonprogressive unenlightened.
Yet these seemingly contending supremacist surges in this churning human sea inevitably crash against a single nihilist shore: the bleak strand of genocide. Even now as this ideological tsunami rushes aimlessly on, it seems poised at last to hit its highpoint – with a global swath of hapless, helpless Muslims standing squarely before its devastating onslaught, countless “others” not far behind.
In truth, against our hopeful denials, the first wave of the coming deluge has already whelmed the Muslim heart. Behold, humanity, the world through Muslim eyes: The wrecked Rohingya. The unwelcome Syrians. The cordoned Kashmiris. China’s mass internment of the native Uighurs. The perennial western, whipping boy Afghanis. Yemen’s starved out. Libya’s bombed out. Somali’s droned out. And the Palestinians, who are simply being deleted.
A quarter century on, the raped and buried bodies of Srebrenica and the Bosnian Aggression of 1992-95 were martyred holding up a mirror to us of modernity’s disfigured human soul and of dark things to come in our Orwellian world if we do not soon come face to face with ourselves, and the choice before us. For we stand at the threshold of what the Quran calls the two highways.
One road is downhill, and therefore “easy.” We simply let the gravity of the world pull us down to the earth to crawl upon it like animals, unleashing the worst impulses of our clay natures. Arrogance. Acquisitiveness. Ruthlessness. Belief in nothing but our own survival, appetites, and illusions of inherent exceptional ascendancy over others. And our care for even less.
The other way requires personal and communal sacrifice and striving. The Quran names it the steep road.
And do you realize what is the steep road? It is the freeing of a human being from bondage, or offering food on a day of starvation, to an orphan who is a relative, or to an indigent person who is down in the dust – all the while, being of those who believe – and who exhort one another to patience, and who exhort one another to mercifulness. (Surat Al-Balad, 90:12-17)
This is the human being called to realize its highest, upright, symmetrical balance of earthly body and heavenly spirit, its dual duty of temporal stewardship and divine love.
What is that heavenly human balance?
It is freedom for all. Care for the least of us. A hand up for the downtrodden. Humility within. Hope to the struggling without. Enjoining pity on the empowered, admonishing them to a thankful humanity, and to remembrance – but for the grace of God …
Yet for 25 years, we have studiously avoided our increasingly hideous “human” reflection in the looking-glass eyes of Srebrenica’s martyrs.
We have shut out the screaming cries of Srebrenica’s children in Bosnia – “for what sin was I killed?” –the haunting howls of its ravaged women, and the death gasp, facedown in the earth, of its murdered men.
But the sated soil and the ancient trees of Srebrenica’s forests! They yet bear witness … as will the very skins of the killed and their killers, on an inevitable day, testify.
Muslims the world over cannot sensibly and responsibly be less than clear-eyed and vigilant, attentive to what’s being said about us as a faith-community and about our religion in every quarter, disabused of all naiveté about its implications and possibilities, and prepared with a plan. That is one of the images revealed in Srebrenica’s truth-telling mirror.
But there is another that surfaces in its urgent light. We have resolutely denied that it is our own sightless eyes we see peering back from that reflection – Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and skeptic; European, African, Asian, First Nation; White and Black, Arab and American, South and North, Eastern and Western.
It is upon all of us to reconfigure the beautiful symmetry heaven cast in the very face of our humanity. Such is the recovering of our human senses, the attributes set in us to evince, in each servant’s tailored countenance, the reminding image of God.
This is our common quest for redemption, to reclaim our humanity, our civility, our defining compassion, our spiritual elevation.
Then let Muslims race to be first upon these pathways to peace, even as God has guided us to follow His good pleasure out of our faltering darkness and into their unfailing light. This requires us to shed our worldly veils of anger and revenge, of waste and selfism, of false supremacies.
Only then may we attempt – our brothers and sisters of dust in hand – to ascend by the high road of godly humanity. Such is the straight – and only – way of salvation.
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