Radical Muslim imams and nationalist politicians from all camps are threatening Sarajevo's multicultural legacy. With the help of Arab benefactors, the deeply devout are acquiring new recruits. In the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," Islamists are on the rise.
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.
According to a survey conducted in 2006, however, over 3 percent of all Muslim Bosnians -- over 60,000 men and women -- profess the Wahhabi creed, and an additional 10 percent say that they sympathize with the devout defenders of morals.
After discovering that some of the masterminds behind 9/11, such as Khalid Scheikh Mohammed, had been active in Bosnia, international pressure increased on the government in Sarajevo in 2002.
Srdjan Dizdarevic, chairman of the Bosnian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights -- an independent, nonprofit organization for the protection, promotion and monitoring of human rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina -- spoke afterwards of a defeat for civil society, of "fascist rhetoric" leading up to the incident, and called it reminiscent of the "pogroms that happened in the times of Adolf Hitler."
