Islam, Bosnia And The Dilemmas Of The Present Day

Four of the religions of Abraham's descendants have encountered each other in Sarajevo for five centuries. The city is Europe in miniature. Islam, as if anyone should need reminding, was and is an integral part of Europe, a stone built into the mosaic of the traditions of the continent.

We often hear orientalists and political scientists speaking about the problem of Islam. Seldom can we hear the voice of a Muslim theologian, a voice from the very center of the religion. Professor Silajdzic considers the greatest problem that faces all religions today: the strategy of encounter with the secular present. Adaptation or confrontation? Evolution or an attempt to return to the mythical golden age of one's faith? This is the place where, in collision with the problems of the present, fundamentalism arises -- a defensive reflex against a world that seems threatening. Professor Silajdzic says, however, that this is also a place where true opportunities lie for religion. In his opinion, dialogue between the faiths has a key role to play here. Professor Silajdzic reaches beyond the current political and social dimensions of the dramas within Islam in order to lead us to the very source of the debate going on within that faith.

Olga Stanisławska: Are the contemporary dilemmas of Islam similar to those that the world poses to other religions today?

Prof. Adnan Silajdżić: Like Christians and the adherents of other religions, Muslims are passing through a double crisis typical of our century: a crisis of presence and a crisis of identity. The two are connected. The more that a religious tradition attempts to become an important reference point in the secular present, the deeper it becomes involved in the crisis of its own identity.

Conversely, the more that it tries to assert its identity in a strictly traditional sense, the less it is present in contemporary secular society. Muslims face a basic dilemma: what is the place of Islam in contemporary society? Can laicization avoid destroying the essence of Islam in the long run, or avoid causing it to fall apart? Yet is there any other option?

I believe that creating a model of Islam for the post-modern world does not require either unconditional adaptation to the achievements of western civilization, nor an uncritical, blind faithfulness to its own past and tradition (taqlid). There is another solution about which Muslim theologians are today carrying on a lively discussion. This would be a forward-looking, functional - rather than a structural - transformation of Islam as a religion. We are talking about a religiousness within secularity, in which Islam would concern itself with its original task. This would give the religion a totally new social significance and provide it with new opportunities.

One thing is certain: Muslims must understand that they live within the culture of secular humanism. Thanks to its achievements, this culture has attained a dominant influence on intellectual trends throughout the world. We cannot artificially change this historical-cultural epoch into some other epoch. We cannot turn back the clock...

Faith and Reason

O. Stanisławska: So what would life in our epoch mean to Islam, in practical terms?

A. Silajdżić: Muslims cannot uncritically accept the false values of permissive western civilization as "progress". They must embrace its knowledge and technological progress, but only when knowledge and progress have been, as Max Weber accurately termed it, "demystified".

After all, Islam also had the potential to develop its modern science and technology but, as Weizsäcker correctly observes, it chose not to. Muslims had mathematics, natural sciences and cosmology on a very high level. Yet they never went through scientific and technological revolutions. Why did those revolutions occur in France, England or Germany, and not in Persia? It is hard to give a satisfying answer. I think, however, that scientific and industrial revolutions occur where man and the world are deprived of their sacred character, where human reason is divorced from the intellect, or Revelation.

What do western people find hardest to understand in Islam? I think it is Islam's capacity to integrate the two apparently separate halves of reality into a single unique Center. To put it differently, this is Islam's regard for both the sacrum and the profanum. All Islamic thought and the Islamic way of life are concentrated in the supreme principle of harmony, both physical and spiritual. Islam never experienced anything like the Renaissance that Europe passed through, which was a mutiny against Nature, against God and against Heaven, where man usurped for himself the highest privileges in relation to God and the world, and began destroying the world with the help of his own supposedly absolute rights... Do the positive achievements of western civilization constitute a threat to Islam and the traditional experiences of Muslims? In the positivistic dimension, I would reply: of course they do. In the metaphysical dimension, once they have been "demystified", as I mentioned before - not at all! We see here one of the paradigms for the contemporary comprehension of religion: secularity against a religious horizon. That means neither a struggle against knowledge, technology and progress - nor, on the other hand, a struggle for knowledge, technology and industrialization as the ultimate goals of human existence.

Such a standpoint would make it possible to preserve the religious substance of Islam while offering new opportunities to contemporary man. Creating a new model of the Islamic understanding of the world, which embraces all the positive achievements of western civilization within its own religious experience. In this way, Chomeini would not outrage the West with his concept of the sacralization of society. Nor would the West outrage Muslims, who are firmly rooted in the traditional world of symbols.

O. Stanisławska: The traditional, "popular" faith of the community sometimes diverges from the "High Islam" practiced by the theologians. Doesn't this internal distance pose an obstacle to the transformations you are talking about? What, for instance, is the status of these issues in Bosnia today?

A. Silajdżić: The understanding, and therefore the practice of Islam among Bosnian Muslims has indeed known extremes - from the primitive fideism that dominated during the period of Turkish and, partially, of Austro-Hungarian control, through the positivistic rationalism of our own century. This was also a divergence between an irrational and static faith that was not interested in the agency of the intellect, and a laicized or downright irreligious Islam reduced to its historical and cultural phenomena.

Unfortunately, few had a full awareness of the fact that the development of faith and knowledge about faith are a specific sort of dialectical process. There is a mutual dependence between faith longing for understanding and the believing intellect. Through His Revelation, God "pulls man, who is burdened by reason, upwards". Similarly, human reason is inevitably challenged to consider revealed truth, even if it cannot comprehend it.

Just as in other corners of the world, questions have been asked here in Bosnia about faith and knowledge - What does it mean to believe in God and to know something about God? This question also touches on the interrelation between a living or positive faith, and knowledge about faith - in other words, theology. These questions were already becoming acute in the nineteenth century, the age of agnosticism, positivism and empiricism. Unfortunately, we did not have enough educated and talented theologians to be able to investigate the phenomenon of religion in general and Islam in particular from the perspective of these important tendencies in western European thought. If we had had critical studies dedicated to these problems, it would be much easier for us today to follow the path of spiritual and cultural renewal, a process that began two decades ago.

Mohammed, a.s.,(*) said in his numerous teachings - hadis - that Islam as a faith cannot be reduced to a question of intellect either in the individual man or generally. However, this does not deny the intellect as an intermediary; to the contrary, it assumes such an intermediary and even requires it. The contents of the faith, as defined by the Messenger of Islam, are very broad indeed. They are made up of sixty or seventy branches or degrees. Removal of obstacles from the path in order to make it easier for those coming after is regarded as the lowest of the degrees, which demands neither great intelligence nor abilities. The highest degree of religious consciousness and religious experience, on the other hand, is professing that God is the highest ethical ideal, since that degree of experience requires emotional, spiritual and intellectual abilities from man. That is why emotional, spiritual and intellectual maturity are embraced, in Islam, in the concept of the jihad.

What is Jihad?

O. Stanisławska: Jihad - what does that word really mean?

A. Silajdżić: That is a word that is currently in universal use. We find it in the newspapers and hear it on the radio and television. It comes up during scientific assemblies, in interviews and political commentaries. Very often it is used in an inaccurate and, furthermore, in a negative way, with an aggressive meaning. It is particularly emphasized by those who see jihad as a great danger, and think that the Muslim nations must be subjugated as a defense against it.

The brutal aggression against the Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina shows the extreme results of such attitudes. Their exponents want to feed world public opinion the false belief that the normative sources of Islam require the faithful to impose the doctrine of their faith and their way of life on others by armed force and, furthermore, kill those who will not acknowledge Islam as their religion. That is why, in the West especially, the word jihad is brought under the negative definition "holy war". This definition hardly expresses the full content of the Koranic concept of jihad.

The word comes from the verb jehede, which means to take pains, to exert an effort. That is why jihad in its religious and theological significance refers to man's emotional and intellectual involvement in the world. In the Koran, the word is used as the opposite of qu'ud, which means inertia, decrepitude and defeatism. To be more precise, jihad means, on the one hand, the effort to oppose the world's evil no matter what form it takes. On the other hand, it refers to all activity that aspires to ennoble the harmony of the world. We should not be surprised that the Messenger counted speaking the truth in the face of authority, seeking knowledge, bearing children, travelling to spread faith and knowledge, and struggling against one's own passions as examples of jihad. This is the context of the famous hadis, "We returned from a small jihad (war) to the great jihad (against the world's evil and our own passions, through which man can lose the awareness of his own metaphysical origins)".

We are accused in the West of conducting a jihad. Sticking to the authentic definition and real contents of the concept of jihad, I could answer that, unfortunately, Muslims have not conducted a jihad during the recent centuries. The concept of ijtihad, the interpretive effort of the human mind, has been replaced by the concept of taqlid, or the uncritical repetition of tradition. In this very way, we have moved from a dynamic to a static and mechanistic understanding of our own faith and history. This has given birth to a consciousness lacking in critical thinking and a feeling of history. As a result, Muslims began to be marginalized as active social, cultural and political agents, and to be treated instrumentally in global bargaining. Others imposed a social and political status on Muslims, until the reform movements began to appear in the nineteenth century. They were similar to those that had earlier caused great transformations in Europe: humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

O. Stanisławska: Was the spiritual history of Islam also shaped in a similar way in Bosnia?

A. Silajdżić: Islam has existed in Bosnia for several centuries. I need not discuss how it was shaped as an autonomous faith and learning in earlier historical eras. The important thing is that for today's Bosnian Muslims, the faith is a challenge that they cannot refuse. All Muslims, without exception, are going through a crisis today. And we in Bosnia also stand at the crossroads of tradition and the contemporary. Time cannot be stopped. Muslims in Bosnia must finally understand that they are not an eschatological nation that has been promised the kingdom of heaven from the beginning to the end of time, but that they are part of the history of the world and have an obligation to make history on the level required by their Creator. That is, according to the highest ethical values. In post-modernistic European culture, the Muslims of Bosnia and Hercegovina must serve as a particular model of Islamic culture. The sphere of Islamic culture and civilization must become known through them. They will, of course, build spiritual and ideological links with the rest of the Islamic world, but that will not endanger their own specific cultural and religious institutions. The process of renewal has begun, and its tempo and quality are up to them.

God does not need Theologians

O. Stanisławska: How do you see your role, the role of the theologian, in all of this?

A. Silajdżić: You have touched on an interesting problem which is seldom discussed. The theologian should at heart be a person living in the here and now, and perhaps in the future. Theology is not for God, but for man. God does not need theologians. Muslims in Bosnia, like the Orthodox Christians, have not developed their theology in the same way that the Catholics have. They have generally kept up with Islamic theological trends around the world, but they have not fully met a fundamental requirement for theology: they have not interpreted the holy text, which for us is the Koran and the hadis, to meet the needs of contemporary people.

We should devote ourselves to the needs of the sort of people who live today in Bosnia and Hercegovina now, and not merely to speculations about concepts of existence and non-existence in the works of old theologians, which is something that I also study. It is part of a theologian's duty to talk to people. That is why I try not to avoid discussions. They are avoided, unfortunately, by those with overly narrow specializations or who have too little knowledge to answer the questions that people ask.

Future theologians are now being trained in the history of religion, which includes not only the history of Judaism and Christianity, but also of the civilizations whose culture was assimilated by Islam, such as ancient Greece and Rome, and, in Bosnia, the western European philosophical tradition. Perhaps theologians should be even more broadly educated, so that they could understand all the experiences that shape the contemporary man of faith? Above all, however, what needs changing is the mechanism of consciousness that makes us keep repeating only old, obsolete formulas from the holy texts. Islam is not a static religion, despite what western orientalists say. They often simplify not only the very essence of Islam but also the spirit that animates its culture and civilization. Here and now, on the burning ground of Europe, theologians must lead us through the basic origins of Islam. That is the highest task that theology poses for those who deal with Islam as a profession. They must leave their mosques, wildernesses and offices, and go out and meet people, talk to them, free them of the burden of folk traditions and a folkloristic awareness of religion. In a word, they must gradually lead them to the broadest possible encounter, based on dialogue, with the world they live in.

Dialogue and Peace

O. Stanisławska: Do you think that dialogue between the religions is important in today's world? What is its sense?

A. Silajdżić: This is one of the most important questions in today's world. Some theologians ask: Who needs this dialogue? In Islam, dialogue is the attitude of Mohammed a.s., who saw above all the ideal that was common to all of them, the faith in one God, in his contacts with Jews and Christians. That is the basis of all three monotheisms. Regardless of how their philosophers solve the problem of oneness (for instance, the Christians believe in three hypostases of God in the Trinity), man bows down to worship one God in the church, the synagogue and the mosque.

For Muslims, therefore, discussions with the People of the Book (as we call Jews and Christians) are not conditioned only by the problems of today's world. The need for such a dialogue stems from the very nature of Islam. That is the basis for a commandment found in the Koran, where it says, "Oh People of the Book! Approach the word in the same way for yourselves and for us: so that we worship no one else, only God, so that we do not add anything to him for our fellows' sake and so that none of us chooses anyone else for his lord, except God" (Koran 3,64).

According to Muslim Koran commentators, this text is not addressed to Jews and Christians as followers of religions (institutio vitae) or as representatives of a given theological-philosophical mentality. It is addressed to them as people connected with that one Divine message, which has a common transcendental source and in which lie the foundations of the one unique history of the revelation of the word of God.

Therefore Revelation calls on Muslims to concentrate on the one word of God, before any speaking about God, before any experience of God, and before any thinking about God. And thus also before any theology, any theodicy and any philosophy. Because against all of this is the commandment: "Honor me! That is the simple path" (Koran, 36,61).

Muslims and Christians must understand today that belief in One God is sufficient reason for dialogue. It obliges them to know about each other and to live together in the world. That should be the basis of dialogue. It cannot be confined to the horizontal plane, to everyday life, to politics, which dominates our everyday existence in Bosnia. Without knowing the history and foundations of our own faith and that of others, that dialogue is impossible. It must also have a vertical dimension of union in God and faith in God. In fact, it is a dialogue of the one and the other with God.

O. Stanisławska: Does today's world offer the conditions for such a dialogue?

A. Silajdżić: Interfaith dialogue also has cultural roots today. During the last several decades the West, understood as a certain metaphysical-religious phenomenon, has been going through profound changes. Having rejected cultural, civilizational and above all religious isolationism, the world has started down the road to ecumenical consciousness. That is why Sayyid Hossein Nasr is fully correct when he says that moving from one religious universum to another is the new human experience of the twentieth century.

Today's world as a whole lives in pluralism. There is not a single place inhabited exclusively by members of one religious tradition. The greatest achievement of western civilization is its universalism, the planetary nature of a civilization that extends everywhere, creating a field for cultural exchange. Even in Saudi Arabia - apart from Mecca and Medina, regarded as Islamic holy places - western specialists are employed. The old division between East and West is gone.

Contemporary theological and philosophical thinking must take into account the challenge of the times. Since people began to meet members of other religious and cultural traditions in their everyday lives and at work, the question about their attitude towards them has taken on particular importance. The process of interfaith dialogue between the members of the world's great religions has begun, but its results are to be expected in the twenty-first century.

The paradox of common roots

O. Stanisławska: Paradoxically, don't the common roots of our religions make dialogue more difficult? How can we free ourselves from the burden of history and mutual prejudices?

A. Silajdżić: Without disregarding the positive examples, of which there have doubtless been many on both sides throughout history, it needs to be said that so far the encounters between religions have taken place on the basis of their exclusivity. Up until contemporary times, the world of western Christianity was more or less isolated in its corner of Eurasia. For this reason, western Christianity did not come into contact with other religious traditions, and above all with Islam. Islam, on the other hand, encountered both Christianity and Judaism in the place where it arose. These differing historical experiences necessarily had an influence on the attitudes of our religions towards each other.

An attitude to Islam based on ignorance had its roots in the early history of Christianity. A distorted picture of Islam and Muslims is to be found above all in the polemical texts of such Byzantine thinkers as John of Damascus, Nicetas Byzantios and Bartholemew of Edessa. Islam is presented here as a falsification of the ideas of the Old and New Testaments. Mohammed is described as a charlatan, and additionally identified as the Beast of the Apocalypse of St. John. Unfortunately, both the Eastern Orthodox Church (Gyorgy Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky) and some Lutheran circles (W.C. Smith and Marius Baar) remain deeply rooted in their traditionalism, and still base their attitudes to Muslims and other religions on traditions that go back to the early days of the Church. In general, however, as Hans Küng has said, the attitude of Christians to Islam has developed from ignorance through arrogance towards the tolerance that has been achieved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the Second Vatican Council (Nostra aetate and Lumen Gentium), Islam has not been regarded as a syncretic religion and Mohammed a.s. has stopped being a liar, fraud and anti- Christ. Like the Old Testament prophets, he is a man who admonishes the world through divine inspiration. Muslim theologians emphasize this joyfully.

And yet we can already say today that this road, too, lies behind us. The elements that lay at the basis of the encounter of the great religions - the identical heavenly archetype and its numerous historical figures in the Bible and the Koran -- are no longer the decisive factor. Even Karl Rahner's crowning theological work on the theological-redemptive role of the non-Christian religions plays a smaller role here. Religion is entering into dialogue today through the humanization and salvation of the world as it is. What is important to dialogue today is the degree to which those religions take us, ourselves, into account, the degree to which they care about us and our fate. I believe that in our epoch, the epoch of technology at the service of genocide, it is precisely this aspect of the interfaith dialogue that is more important than purely academic divagations, theological subtleties and intellectual pedantry. And without such a dialogue, says Küng, there will be no peace between religions, and without peace between religions there will be no peace between the nations of the world.

O. Stanisławska: Can those words also be applied to Bosnia?

A. Silajdżić: Different religions and different cultures have mixed in the traditional historical model of Bosnia and Hercegovina from the playground where children play to the factory where people work side by side. And yet people never got to know each other well enough here. Perhaps the current tragedy of Bosnia results precisely from too long a silence and the lack of dynamic dialogue. Communism, and later the western lifestyle, brought about a superficial intermingling. Superficial, because it was based on ignorance. For instance, no one here carried out any serious studies of the sociology of religion. Only what served the communist ideology was written. All differences were brushed over - but superficially brushed over. That was what made possible the negative emotions that came out in such an awful way, for instance, in the young Serbs who murdered Muslims... Insufficient familiarity with other faiths was also characteristic of the theologians of all our denominations. For instance, I can cite only one work on Islam by a Catholic theologian: the excellent work by Tomislav Jablanovic on the basis of Islamic apologetics...

Hope for Bosnia?

O. Stanisławska: Do you believe that hope of dialogue is emerging today?

A. Silajdżić: In many countries, and even in some Islamic countries (above all in Egypt and the countries of the Mahgreb) the proponents of ecumenism have appreciated the worth of dialogue. I am continually invited to interfaith conferences. Many institutions have sprung up with dialogue as their objective. For instance, an Egyptian, Dr. Abdel Amer, runs the Society for Dialogue between Christians and Muslims in Paris. The idea there is that encounters occur not among systems, but among the people who have adopted those systems.

Unfortunately, we in Bosnia have been left behind in this regard. We have not a single institution that could undertake interfaith dialogue. I must admit that I was once more optimistic. It is more difficult for me today, but I still have hope. There are people open to dialogue in the Islamic Community, in the Catholic Church, and although we have no contacts with the Eastern Orthodox Church, I believe that there must be proponents of understanding even there.

Dialogue, however, is the principal need. I believe that encounters between Muslims and Christians based on dialogue will have a decisive influence on the fate of this land, the future - and, God permitting, democratic - Bosnia. We must enter on the road of dialogue, which would move beyond the problems that tormented our forebears and take into account all those phenomena of religiousness that make our society a true multicultural and multidenominational model.

There must be a will to live together with other people and a psychological ability to enter their world while remaining true to one's own spiritual and cultural tradition. To get to know other people well - their language, culture, history, desires and hopes. Not in order to change them, but in order to know them; not in order to convince them of our view of the world, but in order to understand their view of the world. We must take up the problems facing today's Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews, with the people who live here today as the starting point. Dialogue must take place in a concrete perspective. That means, at the existential level of a people living in Bosnia and Hercegovina, absorbed by the concrete problems of their own survival and the survival of our country.

O. Stanisławska: Does religion have a role to play in the survival of that country?

A. Silajdżić: Our great problem is the way that religion has been harnessed in the service of nationalistic politics. I have long been one of the few who propose something different. In the spirit of the French Revolution, religion should be separated from the state. In order to have any influence on people's lives aside from politics, two separate systems should exist in the community: religious institutions and political institutions. Both should exist, not just one using the other as a tool. Life without religion is impossible, but religion requires autonomy.

The Muslims in Bosnia, after all, face a great dilemma. They have begun energetically searching for their own identity. It is too late, however, for us to construct a nationalism of our own based on religion, along the lines of the Serbian and Croatian nationalisms that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. That could end only in a catastrophe for the Bosnians, and the disintegration of the country. We must build a shared, wider identity that will not exclude anyone in advance. And if we Muslims do not build it, no one will build it.

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