Some Personal Comments

My first academic post at Westminster College, Oxford, from September 1992 came shortly after the break-up of Yugoslavia when the conflict in Bosnia was about six months old. Teaching a course on Islam and the West, I realized that this needed to include Islam in the West and that the Muslim communities of the Balkans were centuries old, much older than the Muslim communities of more recent migrant origin in West Europe. Of course, not all Muslims in West Europe are migrants or of migrant origin. However, many are and the Muslim cultures of France, Britain and Holland, for example, are largely imported. In the case of the Balkans, Muslims are ethnically Slav as are their Christian neighbors. Most belong to families that have been Muslim for hundreds of years. As some in the West speak about the need for Muslims to develop a type of European Islam, here, perhaps, was a European Islam that already existed and had a long history. Muslims quickly emerged, so it seemed, as victims rather than victimizers in the conflict, breaking the stereotype that Muslims are, more often than not, aggressors. This added another dimension of interest to the developing story of Yugoslavia's demise. As events proceeded, I was dismayed by the slowness of international response and by how some depicted the Muslims of Bosnia as bringing retribution upon themselves.