NEWS FEATURE: Imam: `It’s not easy being a Muslim in Belgrade’

c. 1999 Religion News Service BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Judging from the frequent attempts to burn down and blow up this city’s one mosque, Imam Mustafa Yusuf’s judgment that”it is not easy to be a Muslim in Belgrade”is something of an understatement. A small crater in a flagstone walk and a shrapnel-chipped wall mark the place […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Judging from the frequent attempts to burn down and blow up this city’s one mosque, Imam Mustafa Yusuf’s judgment that”it is not easy to be a Muslim in Belgrade”is something of an understatement.

A small crater in a flagstone walk and a shrapnel-chipped wall mark the place where someone lobbed a grenade a month ago in a daytime attack just after prayers. Although no one has been injured in any of the bombings or arson attempts, the message to the city’s 200,000 Muslims seems clear.


Belgrade’s mufti and imams, however, are determined not to succumb to the nationalist politics they say are destroying the province of Kosovo and its 1.7 million Muslims.”The Serbs are Slavs and they are my brothers by blood and by language,”said Belgrade’s longtime mufti, Hamdija Jusufspahic, 62, a native of Bosnia.”That is why I feel such pain now, because my brothers on both sides are hurting.” The mufti, a tall man with a stately bearing and large jutting eyebrows that give him an added air of authority, is contemptuous of the NATO bombing campaign and its stated purpose of protecting the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo from ethnic-cleansing Serbs.

Pointing to the West’s reluctance for decades to aid Palestinians displaced by Israel, Jusufspahic said NATO is seeking world domination not justice for Muslims.”The NATO criminals are killing everybody without discriminating between who is Muslim and who is not Muslim,”he said.”They keep saying they are defending Muslims. That is a lie.” Like nearly all of Belgrade’s religious leaders, the mufti does not directly criticize Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. He does, however, intimate his displeasure at Milosevic’s Serbian nationalist politics by condemning equally the Kosovo Albanian extremists and their Serb counterparts, led by Milosevic, who rose to power in 1989 with pledges to protect the ethnic Serbs of Kosovo.

Jusufspahic’s is not an easy position. He leads Belgrade’s largest religious minority, one regarded with suspicion by the dominant Orthodox Serbs who bitterly recall 500 years of domination by the Muslim Turks.”People ask me why do I defend Serbs when they plant bombs or try to set fire to our mosque door,”he said.”I tell them I don’t know who is doing this, the Serbs or someone else. But I do know that the fire brigade is Serbian.” By language and culture, Jusufspahic’s community has little in common with the ethnic Albanian Muslims of Kosovo. For example, Belgrade’s Muslims are far more likely to study Islam in Sarajevo or Cairo than in the Muslim university in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.

On top of it all, Jusufspahic gets no support from the rest of the Muslim world, something he attributes to the West’s influence.”Because the world is dominated by Western (news) agencies, the Muslim world is not informed,”said Jusufspahic, who was educated in Cairo and has an Egyptian wife.

During the fighting in Bosnia earlier this decade, Jusufspahic said Muslim countries funded a feeding program for 100 refugees a day. Now, when indigent Kosovo Muslims are fleeing by the hundreds to Belgrade, Jusufspahic said,”We don’t have the financial support to feed anyone.” Marked by a single minaret on a quiet side street, the 17th century mosque is one of the city’s oldest structures and anchors a complex that includes a modest restaurant and a three-story school building still under construction.

Although used for 25 years as a Roman Catholic church by Austrian occupiers and closed in the 1960s by communist authorities, the mosque today cannot accommodate the 1,000 believers who come for Friday afternoon prayers. Many of them spill out onto the sunbaked courtyard.

Since the bombing started and public transportation was severely curtailed,attendance at evening and night prayers is negligible but Mustafa, the imam, said he is certain that if a peace plan is worked out, religious life will return to normal. Of greater concern for him personally is how he will support his wife and child.”We are just starting a family. We have a daughter. I need about $150 a month just to survive,”said Mustafa, 29, adding that he currently collects about $75 a month as imam. Since the war started, Mustafa’s small rice importing business that he operated on the side has collapsed.”The bottom is approaching fast,”said Mustafa in near fluent English.”I must work. Now, I cannot.”DEA END BROWN


Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!