JEDDAH, 4 February 2004 — Leaders of the Muslim communities in Bosnia and Croatia marked Eid with very different messages. In Sarajevo, the Grand Mufti, Mustafa Ceric urged Bosnian Muslims to value their spiritual salvation from the East as well as their material benefits from the West. In neighboring Croatia, however, his counterpart, Sefko Omerbasic, attacked the treatment of Islam in Europe.
According to the Croatian news agency, Hina, Omerbasic said Europe “considered itself the cradle of human freedoms and democracy” yet only a few European states, Croatia included, had officially recognized Islam. He was particularly scathing of the situation in neighboring Slovenia where the Muslim community has been trying to build a mosque in the capital for the past 35 years but has been constantly denied permission.
Without naming Slovenia explicitly, Omerbasic lashed out at “the fierce opposition to the construction of a mosque in a neighboring country that will soon become a member of the European Union and which is home to 50,000 Muslims.” The Croatian Grand Mufti is known for his anti-Western views which some view as a throwback to the old Communist order in former Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Grand Mufti has a more sympathetic attitude toward the West, and the United States in particular, largely because of its involvement in ending the 1992-95 Bosnian War.
