Eurasia Press & News
Razed or ‘restored’ with little regard for their original form, Ottoman-era mosques in a mainly Muslim pocket of Serbia face extinction.
In mid-December, a group of men, some of them armed, set up a roadblock at a construction site in the southern Serbian town of Novi Pazar, where an Islamic centre was being built by the Islamic Community of Serbia.
Police intervened and the men dispersed, but the incident cast fresh light on a long-running power struggle between Muslim Bosniaks in the country and the damage it is doing to their cultural and religious heritage.
At issue that December day was control over who builds what in the name of Islam in the predominantly Muslim Sandzak region that straddles parts of both Serbia and neighbouring Montenegro.
The Islamic Community of Serbia said the armed men answered to local strongman Muamer Zukorlic, the deputy speaker of the Serbian parliament and former head of a rival Islamic authority, the Islamic Community in Serbia.
The two similarly named Communities have been at loggerheads for years, vying for control of property, funds and political patronage.
Zukorlic, who still exerts considerable control over the Islamic Community in Serbia, denied having anything to do with the roadblock, but observers of the Sandzak power struggle are unconvinced.
They say the episode bore all the hallmarks of his heavy-handed and poorly thought-out approach to the construction, restoration and – controversially – demolition of Islamic religious sites in the Sandzak region that experts warn threatens to erase centuries of Islamic heritage stretching back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan peninsula.
Already a handful of 16th and 17th century mosques in Novi Pazar, beloved by residents, have been razed or subjected to shoddy renovation work under the auspices of the Islamic Community in Serbia, with little or no regard for the principles of protection of cultural and religious heritage. Observers say the damage has been enormous.
“It was bad enough when our mosques were burned down and demolished when Novi Pazar was occupied during various wars,” said Tarik Bruncevic, an architect specialising in Islamic monuments.
“Now, however, we have a completely different situation in which we are destroying precious symbols of our cultural identity because of ignorance and ideology.”
Mosque razed in ‘renovation’
Founded by the 15th century Ottoman general Isa Beg Ishakovic, Novi Pazar [‘New Bazaar’] grew into an important centre of trade, culture and Ottoman military expansion and seat of the Sandzak region. As part of Yugoslavia, the town of some 100,000 people was a thriving textile hub, but its economy collapsed with the demise of the socialist federation. The region has since been heavily neglected by successive Serbian governments that have shown little interest in the preservation of its Islamic heritage.
In 2018, as part of a ‘renovation’ project, a bulldozer tore through the Arap mosque in the centre of Novi Pazar, built in 1528. The building, a protected monument, was reduced to rubble and a new, brick and cement mosque built in its place. In 2002, the Kurd-Celebi Mosque, dating to 1604, was also radically altered and now bears no resemblance to the original.
Other historic mosques either partially or completely razed and rebuilt since the demise of Yugoslavia include the Hadzi Hurem Bor Mosque [1561], Gazi Sinan Beg Mosque [1528], Hajrudin Bajramli Mosque [1528] and Iskender Celebi Mosque [1516].
“Only Altun Alem Mosque and Lejlek Mosque, both built in 1516, have retained their authentic exterior,” said Bruncevic. “But the interior riches have been completely lost amid recent unprofessional renovations.”
As the highest representative body of Muslims in the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, the Islamic Community of Bosnia claims jurisdiction over the preservation of Islamic heritage in Serbia, but says the Islamic Community in Serbia pays little heed.
Mirsad Kalajdzic, head of the strategic planning department of the Islamic Community of Bosnia, said that when an application is made for the construction of a new mosque or renovation of an old one, his office consults local residents, imams, architects and historians before any work begins. But no such applications arrive from Novi Pazar.
“We drew up new regulations to stop ill-advised, unprofessional renovation projects,” Kalajdzic told BIRN, but to little effect in the Sandzak region. “The Islamic Community in Serbia does everything on its own, without consulting us,” he said, despite the fact it is officially subordinate to the Islamic Community of Bosnia.
“They always say the renovations will respect the history and tradition of Bosniaks, but we see the result.”
Part of the reason comes down to politics. The collapse of Yugoslavia severely undermined the authority of the Islamic Community of Bosnia among Muslims in Serbia, where the government in Belgrade does not recognise its jurisdiction.
This led to a split among Muslims in Serbia in 2007, with the Islamic Community of Serbia advocating greater independence from Sarajevo and Zukorlic’s Islamic Community in Serbia still largely loyal to Bosnia.
“This division made us much weaker in Sandzak,” said Kalajdzic. “Muslims are divided and there are often problems in prayers, appointing imams, controlling mosques and even in funeral services. Naturally, this also effects the protection of Muslim Bosniak heritage.”
Zukorlic: Sandzak strongman
Zukorlic rose to prominence in 1993, when Serbia was sending men, money and arms to help ethnic Serbs in Bosnia during a 1992-95 war that killed 100,000 people, most of them Muslim Bosniaks. At just 23 years of age, Zukorlic became Grand Mufti of the Islamic Community in Serbia, remaining in the post for the next 14 years, through the rule of nationalist Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
“He emerged as a religious leader during the 1990s as the opposition against Milosevic and the Belgrade regime,” said Maja Bjelos, a political analyst at the Belgrade Centre for Security Studies.
Zukorlic, Bjelos said, “has since proved that he is a skilful strategist,” frequently likening Belgrade’s treatment of Sandzak to the way Milosevic dealt with majority-Albanian Kosovo, the former Serbian province that broke away in 1998-99 during a brutal Serbian counter-insurgency war.
“He follows the way the wind blows, filling those niches that are not occupied and mobilising people who feel marginalised and discriminated against by the system and the majority of the population.”
A political career followed, when Zukorlic founded the Bosniak Democratic Union of Sandzak in 2010 and ran for the post of Serbian president in 2012, winning some 50,000 votes. Zukorlic later renamed his party the Justice and Reconciliation Party, SPP. It currently holds four seats in the 250-seat Serbian parliament. Though the party is not officially part of Serbia’s ruling coalition, it has indicated it may vote with the government on an issue-by-issue basis. Zukorlic holds the post of parliament deputy speaker and the SPP has its eye on other public positions.
Zukorlic has also found time to grow a small empire of NGOs, businesses and media holdings in the Sandzak region, affording him huge political and financial sway.
“He has been acting as the absolute ruler and owner of the Islamic Community for a very long time, so it is clear that everyone who is employed by and in any way related to the Islamic Community depends on him,” said prominent Novi Pazar rights activist and former MP Aida Corovic.
Corovic alleged that none of the controversial mosque demolitions and renovations could have occurred without Zukorlic’s say-so or the tacit blessing he has from the Serbian state despite years of public friction.
“It is clear how and why Zukorlic does all of that,” Corovic told BIRN.
“He has the support of a state that is deeply criminalised, where cultural monuments are being abducted and devastated because they are seen as sources of significant financial income, not as part of the cultural heritage, traditions and identities of the people of this region.”
Salafi influence behind mosque demolitions?
At the Islamic Community of Serbia, the rival to the Zukorlic-aligned Islamic Community in Serbia, they see powerful foreign influences at play in the neglect of Ottoman-era Islamic heritage in Serbia.
“There are some powers who want to erase the Ottoman traces and cultural heritage of this region,” said Muhamed Demirovic, Deputy Mufti of Sandzak at the Islamic Community of Serbia.
Some experts and religious officials cite the appointment of a number of Salafi imams to senior positions in the Zukorlic-aligned Islamic Community in Serbia, and there are signs of funds arriving from Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arab states.
Salim Cevik, a professor of religion and politics at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, SWP, in Berlin said there were significant differences between Salafism and the more moderate Sunni Islam practiced for centuries in the Balkans.
Salafis, he said, “want everything pure and simple. Therefore, they do not accept any colourful motifs, adornment or additional things in mosques,” in contrast to the ornate Ottoman-era mosques of the Balkans.
“Salafis are very influential in the Balkans and any post-conflict area in the world,” Cevik told BIRN. “They become very effective in places where Islamic institutions are in crisis because of the communist past. With the help of financial backing from the Gulf, it is not a surprise to see such mosques in the Balkans and in the Sandzak.”
Kalajdzic of the Islamic Community of Bosnia said there were “some” imams in the Sandzak who had studied or worked in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. “They are heavily influenced by Salafi ideologies and do not share the same practices and understanding of the majority of Muslims in the Sandzak.”
“These imams,” he said, “do not care about art, culture and history. They want to have the simplest places of worship and they are destroying our culture and heritage.”
The Islamic Community in Serbia dismissed this, saying recent renovation projects and imam appointments were carried out in accordance with the practices of the Prophet Mohammad and the Quran.
Accusations of Salafi influence on mosque renovations are “nonsense”, said Samir Skrijel, general secretary of the Islamic Community in Serbia, telling BIRN in a written statement that such claims were made to “satanise the Mufti Muamer Zukorlic and the Islamic Community in Serbia.”
A top aide to Zukorlic in his SPP party dismissed the idea that Zukorlic still wields control over the Islamic Community in Serbia and denied that any mosques had been “wiped out.”
The SPP does not control the Islamic Community in Serbia, SPP general secretary Edin Djerlek told BIRN, “but we as believers give maximum support to the traditional and legal Islamic Community, especially when it is threatened by violations of the constitution and the law.”
Arap mosque: protection ignored
For many, the fate of Novi Pazar’s Arap mosque was a step too far.
As one of the oldest remaining Ottoman-era mosques in the Sandzak and a protected cultural monument, the Islamic Community in Serbia should have sought the permission of the state Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Belgrade for the restoration work that became inevitable as the mosque aged. It should also have involved the Islamic Community of Bosnia. It did neither, however.
The Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments “passed a decision whereby the investor, the Islamic Community in Serbia, was prohibited from carrying out the work on the demolition of the remains of the walls and the minaret of the Arap mosque,” the Institute told BIRN, and said all relevant institutions were informed.
The demolition work continued, however. “A new mosque was built on the site of the old mosque and all the shops that previously surrounded it were also demolished and built again,” the Institute said. “In so doing, significant cultural property and cultural heritage of Novi Pazar and Serbia were completely destroyed.”
A new brick mosque was erected in its place, different in size and design to the original. One of the last remaining businesses next to the old mosque – a barbershop – was also demolished on the morning of February 23, 2020, despite the fact that its fate was the subject of an ongoing court case. “They [the Islamic Community in Serbia] didn’t wait for the court decision because they knew they would lose,” Bruncevic said.
Kalajdzic said that in Bosnia, Turkish money and expertise had restored mosques in the towns of Travnik and Foca in recent years, as shining examples of Bosniak Islamic art and culture.
“However, examples of these mosques are decreasing in Sandzak,” he said. “What happened to the Arap mosque is unacceptable.”
Djerlek, of Zukorlic’s SPP, said the party was “proud” of the mosque’s appearance. It “was on the verge of collapse”, he said, and “restoration was necessary”.
Neglect of cultural heritage in general
According to the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Belgrade, besides the Arap mosque, in the Sandzak region the Altun Alem Mosque, Lejlek Mosque, Hadzi Hurem Bor Mosque, Kurt Celebi Mosque and Valide Sultan Mosque all enjoy protection. But most have been disfigured or lost entirely in ‘renovation’ work.
Kalajdzic blamed a cynical disregard for Bosniak identity and history on the part of the Serbian government.
“The Serbian government does not do anything because they want to delete Bosniak identity and history from the Sandzak,” he told BIRN. “They want Bosniaks to destroy the few remaining mosques that they could not.”
But Visnja Kisic, general secretary of Europa Nostra Serbia, a non-profit that tries to raise awareness of the importance of cultural heritage, said it is not just Islamic heritage that is perishing in Serbia.
Politics, she said, had played a role in the diminishing power of cultural protection bodies.
“This lack of power to impose and monitor the highest standards of restoration for significant civic and religious monuments is not visible only in the case of Islamic monuments, but also in the case of Orthodox monuments, medieval monuments, Roman Heritage, as well as 19th and 20th century heritage,” Kisic told BIRN.
“Unfortunately, there is a new wave of restorations and renovations which do not follow professional, careful and non-invasive restoration and conservation techniques”, Kisic said.
Nenad Makuljevic, a professor of art history at the University of Belgrade, said both sides were to blame.
“Zukorlic does whatever he wants,” Makuljevic told BIRN. “The Serbian government does not want to get involved in this because it is reluctant to cause an ethnic and religious conflict. They even do not want to speak about the situation,” he said. “The current situation regarding the protection of Islamic monuments is a disaster in Serbia.”
Importance of education
Haris Dervisevic, head of art history at the University of Sarajevo and an expert on Ottoman-era Islamic art, said it was vital that Bosniaks as a people define what constitutes a Bosniak mosque and Bosniak heritage. “Then we can decide what to do with our mosques,” he told BIRN.
In the Sandzak, he said, the mosque renovations demonstrate a desire to “cleanse everything of Ottoman heritage and everything of Bosniak heritage at the same time.”
“I really do not understand how religious leaders and politicians can explain this new style of mosques to the people of Sandzak.”
Both Dervisevic and Kalajdzic stressed the importance of education about Islamic art and heritage.
“Local people and imams are keen to renovate and to reconstruct mosques out of goodwill, but without the necessary knowledge and education these projects can be disasters, as has happened,” said Kalajdzic.
“Our number one priority should be education, because our people do not know about our culture, heritage and art.”
Demirovic, the Deputy Mufti of Sandzak at the Islamic Community of Serbia, advocated the creation of a single “directorate” in which both rival Islamic Communities in the Sandzak would be represented, alongside, “at least for a while,” an expert from Turkey.
“We believe that it is of utmost importance to revitalise all surviving historical objects, especially those of a religious type,” he said, “but in accordance with the style and architecture in which they were built, taking into account all their specificities and peculiarities.”
