Spiegel Online International carries all sorts of excellent pieces, beautifully written in or translated into English for a wider audience.

This one about Islamic extremists in Sarajevo is thought-provoking. And not all the thoughts are positive:

The obliteration of Israel is heralded in a torrent of words. "Zionist terrorists," the imam thunders from the glass-enclosed pulpit at the end of the mosque. "Animals in human form" have transformed the Gaza Strip into a "concentration camp," and this marks "the beginning of the end" for the Jewish pseudo-state.

Over 4,000 faithful are listening to the religious service in the King Fahd Mosque, named after the late Saudi Arabian monarch King Fahd Bin Abd al-Asis Al Saud.

The women sit separately, screened off in the left wing of the building. It is the day of the Khutbah, the great Friday sermon, and the city where the imam has predicted Israel’s demise lies some 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) northwest of Gaza.

It is a city in the heart of Europe: Sarajevo.

This analysis poses a Good Question:

Could a radical, potentially violent parallel society be emerging in the Muslim dominated region of the war-torn republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, eight months after the signing of the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the European Union?

Don’t expect Bosniac leader Haris Silajdzic to answer:

Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim representative of the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, sits a few buildings down the street, in the presidential palace. He played a very active role as foreign minister and prime minister during the war but now, after years of power struggles, the one-time beau is starting to show signs of exhaustion. Nevertheless, he is still widely regarded as one of the most artful advocates of Muslim interests in this multi-ethnic state.

Silajdzic says he sees no indication of an Islamization of Sarajevo or Bosnia. In his opinion, it is more important to talk of ensuring that the Muslims receive justice after the "genocide" of the 1990s.

For anyone interested, there latterly have been three main streams in the political organisation of the Bosnian Muslims aka Bosniacs (and for those who really need help, here is the difference between Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian muslims, and Bosniacs):

  • secular social-democratic, let’s-all-get along stream: not unpopular and even appealing to a lot of people, with Zlatko Lagumdzija to the fore
  • overtly nationalistic, demagogic, Bosnia is the Muslim part of former Yugoslavia stream: Haris Silajdzic is the undisputed exponent of this view, which plays up the ethnic identity and territorial demands of the Bosnian Muslims rather than any specific Islamist agenda
  • overtly Islamist stream: people who want to create an openly Islamic space in Bosnia as part of a longer-view Islamic agenda. Not all of these people are obvious extremists in themselves – the late Alija Izetbegovic was if anything an ultra-liberal by global Islamic standards. But other parts of this stream spiral off into foreign-funded fanaticism and potential terrorism.

For a small community (some two million people) in a small country, the rivalry between these philosophically distinct and largely mutually exclusive tendencies looks like a recipe for incessant divisions. Which is what the Bosniacs have, and why issues going to the modernisation of Bosnia take a distant back seat.

The region’s Serbs and Croats tend to suspect that the Silajdzic nationalist view is merely the radical Islamist view wearing a thin tactical disguise of Westernisation. So they behave defensively towards it, which undermines the secularist Bosniac approach, which reinforces the nationalist/Islamist tendencies, which reinforces Serb/Croat ‘we told you so’ angst, and so on.

Which, looking at the demographics of Bosnia, is Bad News for the Dayton process. And for Europe?

Why should the Bosniacs spend too much energy filling in all those thousands of EU application forms and cutting back corruption when (they might think) there is a much bigger prize in sight in a mere 1100 weeks or so: the collapse of Dayton and the rewriting of the basic Bosnia deal – on Bosniac/Muslim/muslim terms?

Then the real fun will start, as the nationalist/Islamist tendencies start to fight over what terms those might happen to be.

Incoming. Slowly. But surely.