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My good friend Abdullah Faliq sent me this photograph today. He is in Srebrenica with a group from London.
It shows the burial yesterday of the remains of over 600 men and boys at the Potocari cemetery.
Mourning the dead from 1995 at Srebrenica yesterday (photo Abdullah Faliq)
Around 8,000 Bosniacs (Muslim Bosnians) were killed when Serb forces overran a UN safe enclave during the civil war in 1995. It is the worst European atrocity to take place since WWII.
They are still discovering the remains of brothers, sons, uncles, husbands, grandfathers, nephews, fathers and friends – these are buried at a special service once a year.
Find the BBC report on yesterday’s events here and a post from my 2009 visit to Bosnia here.
Maybe it’s just a summertime news spike, but there’s been increasing coverage of the plans to build an Islamic community centre near the site of the former World Trade Centre in New York City, which was destroyed by terrorists on 9/11.
I welcome a lively public conversation – how else should we work out, together, what sort of city or world we want? – although this one seems to have polarised rather quickly between those who think it triumphalist of Muslims to build something like this near the Ground Zero site (for views on how near is ‘near’, see a recent Salon post), and those who make a distinction between (American) Muslims in general and the 9/11 terrorists in particular, and who want to retain the religious freedom so precious to passengers on the Mayflower in 1620.
The last time I was in Manhattan I stayed in Battery Park City, which was created from the excavation material from the building of the twin towers. The Ground Zero site still looked, two and half years ago, very desolate.
Memorial to the Great Famine in New York City (photo: David Shankbone)
Between my hotel and the Hudson river there was something very different. Even in mid-winter, the memorial to the C19th Irish Gorta Mór or Great Hunger, which commemorates a famine that took a million lives and prompted another million Irish people to emigrate, is a beautiful, contemplative place to come across. It’s partly a patch of rural Ireland, with grasses, heather and stone walls, and partly a collection of quotations and thoughts on famine and on migration. When it was created (2002), the intention was to add more, as further hunger crises occurred.
Of course there is no public memorial to the dead of the Gorta Mór in London, so far as I know – we were part of the problem, not part of the solution.
New Yorkers, and US citizens generally, will have to decide how they want to live together. With the mid-term elections coming up, everyone seems to have an opinion, from Sarah Palin (“hallowed ground“) to the the President. If new mosques or Islamic centres or schools are banned in lower Manhattan, what effect would that have? Would anything else be banned? How would Muslims, and maybe other groups, feel about it? It seems that some of those who oppose the Islamic centre in Park Place think it runs counter to honouring those who died at the World Trade Centre – it’s an affront, it shows disrespect. So what is needed to remember those who died on 9/11? And what is needed to be able to reach some kind of consensus or acceptance of different views, in uncertain times, on the historical significance of the atrocities that day? How do we live well locally when our neighbourhood includes the site of a wider conflict? How do we carry that responsibility?
Northern Irish schools had difficulty agreeing a shared history syllabus and textbooks after the Good Friday agreement – but they’ve managed it. Bosnia is still struggling to agree what version of history should be taught to children in school. When I think back on conflicts I’ve been part of, I know my own re-telling of the story is very different from my antagonist’s – unless our differences have been worked through and acknowledged. Painful stuff.
Without some agreement on the past, it’s hard to find a shared future. It’s early days for New York City but I’m hoping it won’t want to be part of the problem, it’ll be part of the solution and show us how different kinds of people, even under difficult circumstances, can share our cities and our world.
Toaha Qureshi MBE - sporting a medal at the Faith Forum's football team's prizegiving!
Delighted to see Toaha’s name in the New Year Honours List today – very well deserved. The citation reads
Toaha Bashir Zulqarnain Qureshi. For services to Community Relations in Stockwell, South West London.
I’ve known Toaha and his family for many years. We set up Clapham & Stockwell Faith Forum together in the summer of 2001 – an all-faiths-&-none group which got local people together across religious boundaries. There were multifaith football teams, arts groups, round tables, festivals, peace-building and solidarity work.
Toaha has worked hard at Stockwell Mosque and at Stockwell Green Community Services looking after both the local Muslim population and the wider community, with a particular focus on education. After the London bombs and the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in 2005, Toaha broke off from an engagement in Birmingham to speak at the Faith Forum’s hastily organised public meeting.
He keeps close contact with family, friends and educationalists in Pakistan and does a tremendous amount to improve relations between people and institutions in Punjab and their counterparts here in the UK. My son and I had a wonderful time meeting everyone there during our visit in 2007.
Congratulations Toaha!
We have met wonderful women in Bosnia
A month ago, there was an unpleasant incident in Tuzla when a Christian nun was verbally attacked in public by Muslims. The Federation of Women (a Muslim women’s group which draws women from all the mosque congregations in Tuzla) supported the nun and issued a public statement denouncing the incident. It was the combination of personal support and public action at the right time which made this a very effective rebuttal. When it comes to new or risky multi-faith activities, it is sometimes easier for women to take the lead – we are less likely to be in senior positions (of any world faith) and can organise under the radar.
The deep respect shown by men towards women within the Muslim community here is striking.
The best laid plans . . . no wi-fi at the motel, but I have an hour’s free time now in central Sarajevo and have found an internet cafe: Bosnian keyboard (not quite qwerty and lots of extra accents). Central Sarajevo is buzzy and feels like a petite Paris or Vienna – warm sunshine, lots of cafes and smart shops, stylish young people, a river, cathedrals. Extras include small, Ottoman-style mosques, powerful one-shot turkish coffee and some mortar and bullet damage on the buildings. One of our hosts over lunch told me about three families (Serb Orthodox, Bosniak and Croatian Roman Catholic) sharing a small block of flats during the siege who took it in turns to go to the water pump each day (risking sniper fire) to get water for all the families. The history, particularly C20th, inevitably comes up a lot. Getting directions to this cafe I was told, “near the assasination point”. The houses on the outskirts of town are like Swiss chalets – large, detached, not in rows and with balconies and pitched roofs. Inside: IKEA no, solid wooden unpainted furniture yes.
At the moment we are trying both to get to know one another (we are five Muslims and seven Christians from the UK – although it isn’t obvious at a glance who is what) and also to start meeting Bosnians and learn about what’s happening here.
Over half of Europe is right out of my comfort zone – the iron curtain had a much more profound effect on my understanding than I’d realised. I’m far better informed about countries with colonial & trading links to the UK, with a bit of western Europe thrown in.
Having visited Andalusia, I was fascinated to meet a Jewish woman from the Sephardic tradition here whose family was thrown out of Spain after the reconquista. But just like the shocking events in Salonica, the Jews from here were also put on trains to the extermination camps. There was an island off the Dalmation coast which had a concentration camp. And it was people from two countries within my comfort zone, Italy and Germany, who were responsible.
We met Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Roman Catholic and Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) religious leaders at the Inter Religious Council this morning. Building civil society, and how religious groups can support that, is a challenge. I was interested, with my faith literacy hat on, to hear about the Council’s booklets and activities designed to inform the different communities about the variety of religious customs in Bosnia. Information certainly helps and I wonder whether the telling of personal stories about our heritage and values, as we do, might add to the experience of understanding one another. There was some discussion on the merits of confessional and information-only teaching of RE in schools. A very formal meeting.
