Bosnia – Headscarves for Muslim Women Reflect Generation Gap

Bosnia
– In Sarajevo, Headscarves Uncover Generation Gap

7/20/08

By
Ann Tornkvist
WeNews correspondent

In Sarajevo many young women are choosing to wear the headscarves that
their mothers spurned. It’s a provocative decision in the moderate Muslim
country, where one young visiting Muslim says she feels more accepted back
home in Des Moines, Iowa.

There may be fewer headscarves in Sarajevo than in the immigrant
neighborhoods of London or Berlin, but many young women walk through the tiny
capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina wearing the headscarf most of their mothers
spurned at their age.

They contribute to the harmonious diversity of the street scene here,
where different expressions of Islam mingle with men in shorts and women in
short skirts in this country of 4 million. Muslims, 40 percent of the
population, live alongside Serbian Orthodox and Croat Catholic citizens.

The Ottoman Empire introduced its religion into the heart of Europe 600
years ago but as a member state of Communist Yugoslavia, secularism was
promoted in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the brutal 1992-95 war, Muslim
Bosnians in Sarajevo turned to the mosques as a lifeline in a valley plagued
by snipers. Religion’s restored status remains more than 13 years after the
Dayton Peace Accord.

The country has signed an agreement with the European Union that will
eventually lead to formal negotiations for membership, and EU peacekeepers
are still present despite tangible progress after the war. On July 11, 307
newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men
and boys were reburied at a memorial site. The scars from the war are still
raw and identification along ethnic, rather than national, lines prevails.

Quest for Calm
Led to Scarf

For Muminovic-Kuric, becoming more religious came as part of a quest for
inner calm. As a young psychology student she used to party and drink but the
lifestyle wound up leaving an empty, unsettled feeling.

“Generally young people are looking for some kind of
spirituality,” says Sadika Aydic, editor in chief of Zehra, a magazine
for Muslim women with a readership of around 20,000. “Young people are
tired of materialism.”

Muminovic-Kuric says her family’s hostility to her embrace of religion
stems from the days of secular communism.

While Jasenka, who works as a teacher, sees no conflict with modernity or
equality in her choice, she knows there is a belief that religious Muslim
women are fettered in their roles as wives and mothers. In the former
Yugoslav countries, that jars with the egalitarian work ethic promoted under
communism.

Six years ago when she covered her hair, her father, a retired civil
servant, refused to speak to her and withdrew all financial help while she
was still studying. “The most important people in my life wouldn’t
support me,” she says sadly.

The stress and uncertainty propelled her to ask her boyfriend to marry
her. Now, her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter have helped heal the
family rift. Her father and younger sister, who does not wear the headscarf,
to this day refuse to speak to her about Islam.

Vibrant Tradition

Muminovic-Kuric discussed her decision to cover her head in Sarajevo’s old
town one sunny afternoon, speaking in flawless English in the cafe of the
Ottoman hostel Mohica Han. In accordance with Bosnian tradition,
Muminovic-Kuric’s striped, purple headscarf is vibrant compared to the black
ones being sold in a Muslim-fashion shop a few streets away.

Although she says she doesn’t aspire to wear a lengthier, cloak-like
hijab, which can be worn with an accompanying niqab to cover everything
except the eyes, she expresses sartorial appreciation of a chocolate brown
version a friend picked up abroad. Some link such foreign fashions to the
foreign soldiers who came to fight in the war and defend Bosnian Muslims,
then settled here and became citizens.

A year ago the government revoked the citizenships of about 400 Bosnian
men believed to have been promoting Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative form of
Islam predominant in Saudi Arabia.

Some Sarajevans call young, trendy women with headscarves “wahhababes,”
an amalgamation of “babe” and “wahhabi.” Women who wear
the hijab with the niqab are derogatorily called “ninjas.”

A niqab-wearing friend of Muminovic-Kuric was once confronted by an angry
woman who tugged at her black clothing and exclaimed, “I’m a Muslim too!
What do you think you’re doing?” She says this shows a concern among
more moderate believers that they are looked down upon, but says that opinion
is never expressed by her more religious friends. For her, being religious is
a personal choice in a democratic society rather than a prescription of how
others should live.

Some women who practice Islam abide by the stricture against working
alongside men, which limits their professional options.

Employment Hard
to Find

Only one of Muminovic-Kuric’s niqab-wearing friends works.

Finding employment was also difficult for her. With experience as a radio
DJ, she applied unsuccessfully to several media jobs. She attributes part of
her bad luck to discrimination on account of her headscarf, but unemployment
is high in general in Europe and in particular for people under 25. Youth
unemployment in Bosnia-Herzegovina is double the national average, according
to the World Bank.

“I don’t think you’d get a job if you showed up to a job interview
with a scarf,” says Nedim Cetovic, 32, of his own employer, the United
Nations. His mother wears a scarf, his wife does not.

Economically, Bosnia-Herzegovina struggles, and a third of young people
expressed a wish to emigrate in a recent study by Oxford Research International.
A 2006 report from the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia,
an EU agency in Vienna, Austria, found that Muslims across Europe perceive an
“Islamophobia” that results in discrimination. In that climate, the
headscarf has become a potent symbol.

Aida Ramic, 24, whose family fled to the United States when the war
started, sprinkles her conversation with observations from the Quran and the
hadith–sayings of the prophet–as she chats while visiting family in
Sarajevo.

She says she encounters more prejudice for her beliefs in
Bosnia-Herzegovina than at home in Des Moines, Iowa, where she works as a
laboratory technician.

As she talks, her Bosnian American husband is nearby, playing with their
3-year-old daughter in the courtyard of the imposing King Fahd mosque, which
was built by the Saudis after the war. While she wears a black scarf and
modest clothing, he sports the traditional long beard, combat shorts and a
T-shirt that says “Don’t panic, I’m a Muslim!”