Islam in the Balkans

The Christian Science Monitor has a interesting article on the clash within Islam in the Balkans, between the tolerant and western oriented Ottoman tradition and the more conservative Arab tradition.

Fissures in Balkan Islam

Macedonia’s Muslims are likely to elect a moderate leader soon, but extremism persists.

SKOPJE, MACEDONIA ““ For Muslims in this small Balkan country, the Ottoman Empire’s Islamic legacy still endures. However, some say Arab rivals are seeking to undermine it.

“When my cousin entered university in Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis offered him 200 euros a month and an apartment if he would spread their customs back in Macedonia,” says Blerim, a young ethnic Albanian and Muslim who didn’t want to give his last name for security reasons. “He accepted, and my uncle is quite concerned.”

The tensions in Blerim’s family are being felt throughout Macedonia’s growing Muslim community ahead of its elections later this month for a new national leader, or reis. Tapping into young Muslims’ disdain for the older generation, which many see as corrupt, bureaucratic, and uneducated, fundamentalists – pejoratively referred to as Wahhabis – are turning some in the younger generation toward more conservative interpretations of Islam.

Around 66% of Macedonians are Christians and about 30% Muslims according to Wikipedia and the country was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the 14th Century, reemerging for a short time after the Balkan Wars preceeding WWI and then being swallowed up into Yugoslavia. It’s reindependence came in 1991 as Yugoslavia was collapsing and unlike Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, it achieved this without bloodshed.

The article goes on to note Wahhabi influence in Macedonia funded by everyone’s favorite terrorists, the Saudis who have a long history of spreading radicalism throughout the world and spending their vast oil wealth on bringing Muslims from around the world to Saudi Arabia to indoctrinate them and then paying them to go home and spread the word. A Freedom House report on this subject noted:

“¢ Various Saudi government publications gathered for this study, most of which are in Arabic, assert that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping them in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations;

“¢ The documents promote contempt for the United States because it is ruled by legislated civil law rather than by totalitarian Wahhabi-style Islamic law. They condemn democracy as un-Islamic;

“¢ Regarding those who convert out of Islam, the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs explicitly asserts, they “should be killed;”Â?

“¢ Saudi textbooks and other publications in the collection, propagate a Nazi-like hatred for Jews, treat the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact, and avow that the Muslim’s duty is to eliminate the state of Israel;

“¢ Regarding women, the Saudi publications instruct that they should be veiled, segregated from men and barred from certain employment and roles;

It’s as if Al-Qaeda has it’s own Aid and Undevelopment agency. Although stopping or disrupting Saudi Arabia’s massive radicalism exports would be difficult, beating them at their own game may instead be a better route. As friends and acquaintances from the Middle East have told me, not many people watch American channels like Al-Hurra nor take them seriously. Backing regional players such as Turkey in spreading a more tolerant version of Islam would be a much smarter deal. Turkey’s influence reaches from the Bosphorous to parts of Croatia and into parts of northern Syria, Iraq and Azerbaijan. Using Turkey as a middle-man for funneling learning materials, scholarships and other religious influence into these regions may indeed be a promising idea.