From "Blic" - one hundred million euros, from Serbia - autonomy for Sandžak, from Catherine Ashton - international observers, and from Bosniaks in the motherland and diaspora - one percent of personal income for "financing projects of national importance". This is only a part of the requests that Muamer Zukorlić, the chief mufti of the Islamic Community in Serbia, has recently sent to various addresses.
It was not difficult for the priest, who loves luxury and weapons, to make a list and give it serious weight: by doing and not doing, the Belgrade authorities have been successfully nurturing the growth of his influence in Sandžak and his increasingly obvious radicalization for years. There are many examples - from the registration of the Islamic Community with Adem Zilkić at its head and center in Belgrade and the famous organization of the Eid reception in the House of the National Assembly during the government of Vojislav Koštunica (where there was no place for Zukorlić and his supporters) to this year's blunders related to the formation of the Bosniak of the national council (for which no one was held accountable). We should also not forget the "artificial" reconciliation of two long-time rivals from Sandzak - Rasim Ljajić and Sulejman Ugljanin, made possible by their entry into the ruling coalition at the republic level, which led to the creation of an empty opposition space, which Zukorlić readily occupied. And he spoke in a voice appealing to a considerable number of increasingly poor and increasingly desperate fellow citizens, to whom the state in which they live for years has not sent any very convincing evidence that it is trying to do something to solve the difficult social and economic situation. The recipe has been tested for years on the territory of the former Yugoslavia: for all our troubles, others are to blame, those who oppress us only because we are members of such and such a nation and such and such a religion.
Not without reason, today there is talk of the "ayatolahization" of Zukorlić's activities (the original term for the highest religious title among Muslims, thanks to Ayatollah Khomeini, got a new meaning that implies that a religious leader also has the role of a political leader). There are also assumptions about his desire to be the "Nelson Mandela of the Bosniak people". According to some interpretations, reaching the stage that inspired such interpretations was also helped by international officials who for years did not miss the opportunity to meet with the mufti of Sandzak and additionally feed his (immoderate) ambitions.
PLAYING WITH FIRE: Another significant contribution to the rapid transition from a young, promising, educated clergyman to a political leader prone to extreme demands and appropriate models of action was pointed out by Zukorlić himself: in public appearances, he already justified his transition to the field of politics by recalling the examples of certain bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church church, such as Amfilohi Radović and Artemij Radisavljević.
Regardless of the degree to which the mentioned factors influenced Zukorlić's "swinging", there is no doubt that the specific structure of his personality is the most responsible for the current upswing. Because not everyone in his position, regardless of "external factors", would have managed to use the construction of a kindergarten on disputed land to incite demonstrations in which four policemen were injured and after which four participants were arrested. And to request the internationalization of the problem due to the "increasingly frequent occurrence of discrimination and rights violations on religious and ethnic grounds".
Not everyone in his place would even be able to confidently utter the following threatening statement: "Playing with Sandžak means playing with this part of Serbia." A country is like a building where the occupants may like or dislike each other. If the majority of tenants decide to set fire to one apartment, they risk the entire building being set on fire. That's why you shouldn't play with fire. Either we will all have a good time, or the fire will be to the top. Only our house will not burn." Nor would it occur to anyone in his position to ask for an apology from the owner and editors of the newspaper that published the "humorous feature" and - "symbolic compensation from 100 million euros"! And it is likely that not every other potential clergyman in Zukorlić's position would "sign" the statement according to which "the authorities in Serbia treat Sandžak in the same way as Milosevic treats Kosovo" and that "there are only fewer batons and beatings" while "the rights of Bosniaks are threatened as which were the rights of Albanians".
PLAN AND PROGRAM: It is not, at the same time, a question of "slapping" in accordance with the current inspiration and the occasion. There is also a plan in the whole story: after numerous evaluations of the mufti's political ambitions, the formation of a new political party was officially announced last week, which will be headed by the brother of Zukorlić's younger wife, Emir Elfić. According to all announcements, the chief mufti himself will stand behind the new party (the mufti himself, not so long ago, was the holder of the list of the Bosniak Cultural Community in the elections for the National Council of Bosniaks, but it seems that he is still not ready to take over the office of party president).
Zukorlić officially claims that he will formally maintain a neutral attitude towards the party led by Elfić, but that he will informally support anyone who will "remove this evil". In the continuation of his explanation, it is added that the "struggle for the survival of Bosniaks" had its first half in the elections for the Bosniak National Council, and that the turning point will come "after the second half", that is, the next local elections.
There is also a program - the autonomy of Sandžak, whereby, according to the explanation of Džemail Suljević, "it means the entire territory within its historical borders, which means the part of the territory located in Montenegro". Suljević, by the way, is the president of the Committee for the Reconstruction of the People's Council of Sandžak, whose main goal will be to restore autonomy to that part of Serbia "following the example of the so-called partisan autonomy from 1943 to 1945". According to Suljević's explanation, the Board is a temporary body that should prepare the necessary documents on which the future People's Council will work. The renewal of the Sandžak National Council is foreseen by the Declaration adopted on July 14 of this year, at the Bosniak Assembly convened by the (unrecognized) Bosniak National Council, constituted under the auspices of the Bosniak Cultural Community and Mufti Zukorlić.
INTERNATIONALIZATION: What else is written in the (Zukorlić's) Declaration: that "Bosniaks are the constituent people of Serbia". The President and the Government of the Republic of Serbia are then required to "urgently organize talks with the legitimate representatives of the Bosniak people, in order to resolve the constitutional status of Bosniaks". Furthermore, the Parliament "strongly condemns the legal and political barbarism of the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights, with clear discrimination and elements of racism against Bosniaks" and "demands the immediate dismissal of Minister Čiplić and the determination of criminal liability of the participants in the falsification of the Bosniak electoral will". And "in order to internationalize the issue of discrimination against Bosniaks in Serbia, the Parliament forms a special committee"...
After the demonstrations over the kindergarten, this weekend the General Assembly of the Islamic Community in Serbia held an extraordinary meeting and called on the Bosniak National Assembly to speed up preparations for the restoration of the autonomy of Sandžak, and citizens to "stand in solidarity in civil disobedience towards the authorities and pro-regime political parties". In the conclusions, it was also assessed that "the seizure of the land in the Hajjet settlement (on which the kindergarten should be built) represents the culmination of violence, discrimination and elementary rights of Muslims" (the Islamic community claims that the disputed land is a waqf, i.e. endowment, while the state claims that it has evidence that she bought it). The Plenary Assembly also added that "the attack on Islamic religious education is the end of preparations for the assimilation and Christianization of Muslims, which represents the continuation of the genocidal policy towards Bosniaks" (for the uninitiated - the "continuation of the genocidal policy" was observed in the dispute over the election of religious teachers - which arose after the election of Reis Adem Zilkić as a member of the government Commission for Religious Education, after which, according to Zukorlić, members of his IzuS were removed from the list of religious teachers. while the Minister of Education Žarko Obradović claims that members of both Islamic communities were given the opportunity to teach religion to students).
Even without recent reasons - the construction of a kindergarten and the election of religious teachers - Mufti Zukorlić has for a long time managed to find reasons to maintain tension and launch accusations against the "Belgrade regime" for "violence, torture, hypocrisy and tyranny against Bosniaks". This work is going great for him, so there is no reason to believe that he could give up what he started.
YOUNGEST CHILD: Mufti Zukorlić considers Sarajevo the spiritual center of Muslims in the Balkans, and Reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Cerić as the supreme leader. "We see Turkey as our mother who left her children a hundred years ago because she had to." Now he comes to see them, Bosnia as the oldest child, this Albanian that strengthened us in Sandžak, as the smallest and youngest child, who is loved the most. When you have brothers like that and strong parents, it's a wonderful feeling," he said two years ago at a ceremony in Novi Pazar on the occasion of his re-election as president of Meshihat.
Due to his spiritual and political activities, the mufti does not neglect his other interests - he is still the rector of the International University in Novi Pazar (whose founder he is). In his spare time, he successfully attracts attention with his appearance, which includes a quality modern suit, dark glasses, an expensive jeep and several bodyguards. This summer, the media published a photo from the commemoration of 15 years since the crime in Srebrenica, where Zukorlić and his friends arrived in a column of four huge BMW X5s, on which the word "Mufti" was written in large letters across the windshield. Unlike similar colleagues from the Serbian Orthodox Church, who have not yet publicly announced that they consider this type of luxury acceptable/desirable, the spokesman of the Islamic Community in Serbia, Samir Tanadir, explained that those vehicles belong to "sympathizers who are accompanying" Mufti Zukorlić and that "his Excellency can't ride in anything."
His Excellency drew the public's attention in an unusual way four years ago. Zukorlić then married a young woman from Novopazar, although he was already married to Jordanka, whom he met in his student days. The public's remarks did not excite him - he explained polygamy from the point of view of Islam, adding that his private life was "too expensive to share with a curious audience" (the audience was not ashamed of the mufti's mild reprimand, so they precisely counted all five months, which elapsed from his second marriage until the birth of the wife in question).
In the official biography of Mufti Zukorlić, it is stated that he was born on February 15, 2. in the village of Orlje, municipality of Tutin. He finished elementary school in the village of Ribariće, Tutin municipality, and the Madrasa "Gazi Husrev-beg" in Sarajevo. He graduated from the Faculty of Islam, Department of Sharia Law, in 1970 in Constantine (Algeria), after which he became a professor at the Madrasa in Novi Pazar. He chose Lebanon for postgraduate studies. As soon as the Meshihat of the Islamic community of Sandzak was founded in 1993, he was elected its president (thanks to Sulejman Ugljanin, sources claim, but this is not stated in the official biography). He was re-elected in 1993 and 1998. On March 2003, 27, he was elected president and chief mufti of the Mosque of the Islamic Community in Serbia.
"He is an excellent connoisseur of the Arabic language and is characterized by high organizational skills, general literacy and missionary affinities. In the past nine years of existence and work, Meshihat, in addition to reviving religious activities in Sandžak, managed to establish significant connections with Islamic factors in the world. He participated in the work of many important Islamic gatherings around the world, promoting the Islamic Community of Sandžak and its institutions. He is a member of the Rijaset of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is married and is the father of six children," it is stated, among other things, in his biography on the website of the Mosque of the Islamic Community in Serbia.
