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Of Bogomils, Race, and Ivo Andricby Michael Sells, 7/3/96

Betrayal is a key theme of The Mountain Wreath and the strand of Serbian literature it represents. By converting to Islam, Njegos hadinsisted, Slavic Muslims 3Turkified.2 To Turkify was not simply toadopt the religion and mores of the Turk, but to transform oneself from a Slav into a Turk. It was to become one of the Christ-Killers whoslew the Christ Prince Lazar.[see my posting on Christ-Killers andChristoslavism, above].

This religious ideology, originally set forth in the 19th century, found anew and powerful form in the work of Andric (1892-1975). Even more

explicitly than Njegos, Andrics 1924 dissertation. Andrics disserationwas composed in German and presented to the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Karl Franz University in Graz, Austria on May 14, 1924under the title Die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in Bosnien unterder Einwirkung der trkischen Herrschaft. It has been recentlypublished in English under the title The Development of Spiritual Life inBosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule (Chapel Hill, DukeUniversity Press, 1990).In his doctoral dissertation of 1924, Andric makes the followingstatement about Njegos and the people. Andric writes:

Njegos, who can always be counted on for the truest expression of the peoples mode of thinking and apprehending . . .the process of conversion thus: The lions [those who remained Christian] turned intotillers of the soil, the cowardly and covetous turned into Turks(is turciti). [p. 20]. Andric ascribes to the people Njegoss judgment that Slavic Muslimswho converted to Islam were the cowardly and covetous who turnedinto Turks. Bosnian Slavic Muslims are thus doubly excluded from

the people: first, they becam e an alien race by converting to Islam;and second, it is the judgment of the people not of one nationalistwriter that they have changed race along with religion. Given that

the people are making such a judgment, Bosnian Muslims are notpart of the people, excluded presumably by their religion. The verse quoted by Andric (the cowardly and covetous turned intoTurks) is followed immediately in Njegos s Mountain Wreath by thecurse: May their Serb milk be tainted with the plague. Few Serbreaders of Andric would be unfamiliar with the famous line about Serbmilk.

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Njegos had applied the curse of Kosovo, leveled against those whorefused to fight at the battle, to all Slavic Muslims. Andric revived thiscurse and reinstated Njegos s chorus as the voice of the people. Thisvoice of the people excludes all Slavic Muslims from the people, andcurses them to disappear through a lack of progeneration.

Of Bogomils, Race, and ConversionAndric finds a historical rationale for such exclusion in the belief thatthe Slavs who converted to Islam were primarily Bogomil heretics fromthe Bosnian Church. For Andric, the ancient Bosnian Church showed a

young Slavic race still torn between heathen concepts with dualisticcoloring and unclear Christian dogmas. Andric portrays the BosnianSlavs who converted to Islam not only as cowardly and covetous andthe heathen element of a young race, but finally as the corrupted

Orient that cut off the Slavic race from the civilizing currents of theWest. [pp. 16 f f.]The notion that the Bosnian Slavs who embraced Islam in the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries did so out of cowardly and covetous reasons isbased upon a particular ideology of conversion held by Christiannationalists in the Balkans.A Slav who converted from Christianity to Islam must have done out of greed or cowardice. Yet such terms are never applied to theconversion of the Slavs to Christianity believed to have occurredaround the eighth century. It is a premise, so basic that its authors donot even bother to argue it, that conversion to Christianity is basedupon genuine religious sentiments. Of course, at the time of Slavicconversion to Christianity, there were no doubt a similar combination

of economic, political, military, and personal incentives as there wereunder the Ottomans.The notion that the Slavic Muslims are descended from the Bogomils isone that is held by many Bosnian Muslims. By holding it, they try tocounter the notion, advanced in Christslavic polemic, that they arealien to the area and do not belong. By showing the are descendentsfrom Bosnian Church Bogomils, they reaffirm the connection of theirpre-Islamic ancestors to the region, a reaffirmation they need giventhe constant implication in the polemic of Religious Nationalists thatSerb Orthodoxy was in Bosnia before Islam (which is largely true), and

therefore (a false implication, but a deadly one and one that is oftenused) the ancestors of Serbs were in Bosnia before the ancestors of Muslims. [See my earlier postings of comments by Serb prelates onthis issue]The notion that the Bosnian Church, which was persecuted by bothCatholic and Eastern Orthodox rulers, was Bogomil has beenchallenged by the groundbreaking historical work of John Fine. In hisbook on The Bosnian Church, Fine shows there is almost no evidence

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showing Bogomil Manichean beliefs among the Bosnian Church. More importantly for this discussion, Fine dismantles nationalmythologies that portray Slavic Muslims, Croats, and Serbs asunchanging entities. See John Fine, The Medieval and Ottoman Rootsof Modern Bosnian Society, in the volume The Muslims of Bosnia -Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to theDissolution of Yugoslavia, Ed. M. Pinson (Cambridge, HarvardUniversity Press, 1993), pp. 1-21. Both Fine and Malcolm, Bosnia: AShort History, show that the Orthodox Christians in Bosnia only in thepost-medieval period came to identify themselves explicitly as Serbs.As Fine states, based on careful study of registers and populations, p.15, Conversion was a large -scale and multidirectional phenomenon.We find Bosnian church members converting to Islam, Orthodoxy, andCatholicism and as a result disappearing from the scene entirely. Wefind Catholics greatly declining in numbers [due to Ottoman preferencefor Serb Orthodoxy over Catholicism, as shown in Fine's earlierdiscussion], with many emigrating but also with some converting toIslam and others to Orthdooxy. We find Orthodoxy gaining in numbersbut still losing some of its members, particularly to Islam, but even afew to Catholicism. Thus changing religions was a generalmultidrectional phenonmenon; Islam certainly won the most newconverts, but Orthodoxy won many. Exposed as historically untenable are the national myths that ethnicgroups are stable entities that remain fixed down through thecenturies, or that the Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslims of Bosnia today are direct descendants through stable ethnoreligious

communities of ancient Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim ancestors. Thevarious loyalties in Bosnia were complex and shifting, and conversionsfollowed many patterns. Orthodox Christians converted to Catholicism,Catholics converted to Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Christians andCatholics converted to Islam. Muslims converted to different forms of Christianity. As Fine and Malcolm both demonstrate, OrthodoxChristian in Bosnia did not call themselves Serbs until the 18thcentury.Thus the claim by Radovan Karadzic, Metropolitan Nikolaj, andPatriarch Pavle, that Serbs were in Sarajevo before Muslims, and that

thus, the present-day Serbs have priority over the city, is based uponthe myth of unchanging racio-religious entities.Ivo Andric placed a religious essence in the unchanging racial entity of Slavdom. It was Christian by nature and any conversion fromChristianity to Islam was a conversion out of the Slavic race into theTurkic race.The ideology of ethnic cleansing is based upon the reified,unchanging ethnoreligious entity. One is a Serb, Croa t, or Turk born

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of a Serb, Croat, or Turk parents, descended from origina Serbs,Croats, or Turks. Ones identity if fixed in the essence of onesethnoreligious group.At this point we return to Visegrad. As the genocide was about tobegin, the monument in Visegrad to Ivo Andric was vandalized. This

became one of the excuses for the genocide against Bosnian Muslimsthat occurred in the town on the Drina in 1992. Ivo Andric frquentlyrefers to Christian Slavs without great distinction between Orthodoxand Catholic; they are both part of the people as opposed to BosnianMuslims. Andric is claimed as a hero by both Croat nationalists (he wasborn to a Croat family) and Serb nationalists (he later identifiedhimself with Serbs).His compelling writings have indelibilty impressed themselves onWestern readers. To see how they can lead even those most horrifiedat the ethnic cleansing to mouth some of the ideology used to justify

ethnic cleansing, we need only look at Peter Maass recent account of the Visegrad atrocities, in his recent book Love Thy Neighbor. I turn tothis issue in the next posting.Michael Sells