[ek_hornbeck]

It shouldn't be so surprising, even though Bosnians were once among the most secular and least fanatical of Muslims. Nothing radicalizes a sense of religious identity (or any kind of collective identity) like a civil war.

[Paladin2]

More like some place(s) in Saudi Arabia.

[MarMema]

First was Chechnya

[The_Reader_David]

Seems like an opportune thread on which to recall what my tag-line would read if FR gave us more characters:

And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was all about. —Slobodan Milosevic

He said this when the kangaroo court in the Hague before which he had been dragged to “answer” for his defense of his people refused to allow him to show in open court pictures of Bosniak jihadis exulting over piles of severed Serb heads.

The first shots fired in the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution were the machine-gunning of an Orthodox Christian (Serb) wedding by Bosniak Muslims. Don’t believe the NATO propaganda ginned up to justify the pro-Muslim interventions in the Balkans.

If you fancy the Bosniaks were secular before the war, you might look at the writings that got Alia Izetbegovic thrown out of the Yugoslav government — they advocate the establishment of a Sharia law regime. I suppose maybe they were secular the way Iraq was secular under the Ba’athists, or Iran was secular under the Shah, but that provides no comfort to their countrymen or neighbors when the authoritarian secularizing government collapses.

[miss marmelstein]

I thought the cradle was Paris. Certainly that where Khomeini got his start.