The Balkan Chronicle

Extracts from the book, The Bible, The Quran and Science, by Maurice Bucaille

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

There is, perhaps, no better illustration of the close links between Islam and science than the Prophet Muhammad's often-quoted statements:

"Seeking knowledge is compulsory on every Muslim."

"wisdom is the lost property of the believer."

"whoever follows a path seeking knowledge, Allah will make his path to paradise easy."

Hazim Akmadžić, is Bosnian author who was born in 1954 in Western Bosnian town of Cazin. His works were published in a number of overviews, panoramas, and anthologies in Bosnian-Herzegovian literature.

His work has been translated into English, German, French, and Turkish language. He has been the recipient of the Yearly award from the business association of Bosnian-Herzegovian publishers, for the novel „Mimar" in the year 2002. His novel „Gazi Husrev-bey" is currently being translated into Turkish language. Another of his novels, Gazi Isa-bey has been nominated for the highest B-H literary award Meša Selimović in the year 2007.

Akmadzic now lives and works in Sarajevo, BiH, and Balkan Chronicle talked to him about his interesting newest book and few more things.

This is a well-written book by Charles Tripp, a Reader in Politics in the Department of Political and International Relations in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His many publications include Iran and Iraq War (1988), Iran–Saudi Arabian Relations and Regional Order (1996), and A History of Iraq (2000, 2002).

The book deals essentially with the intellectual response of the Muslim world to the secular and material ethos of Western civilization during the latter's penetration of nearly all aspects of Muslim life, including philosophy, education, politics, society and economics.

Zilhad Kljucanin, one of the most impressive authors in Bosnian-Herzegovinian modern literature, finaly got published in the French language. After German, Scandinavian and Turkish editions, his novel "Sehidi" (Shahids) now is available in French language as well.

The story is set in the writer's birthplace, the village of Trnovo, near Sanski Most, in Bosanska Krajina. The story follows the Bosnian Muslim person whose head was cut off while he was in concentration camp. He then takes own head in his arm and from the concentration camp walks back home.

Sarajevo is not one of the great European capitals. Its population stood at no more than 600,000 before the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the effects of the long siege left it with half that. Peace has restored its population by a third, to 400,000, but it is a provincial center where the streets seem empty half the time--a De Chirico painting with mosques, perhaps --and where everybody seems to know one another.

Charles Kurzman’s book The Missing Martyrs is an important contribution to the combating of false stereotypes, pointing to terrorism as a political rather than religious phenomenon and demonstrating the relative failure of al Qaeda ideology.

Any book that is subtitled "Why there are so few Muslim terrorists" is bound to elicit mixed feelings from the average reader of altmuslim.

On the one hand, why "so few"? How many were you expecting? Of course, the prevailing assumption in the demotic literature of the op-ed pages and the cable news shows is that the term "Muslim terrorist" comes close to being an oxymoron. What other kind, after all, could be there?

American scholar John Freely has written a comprehensive but readable history of Islamic science for the general reader.

It is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to tell them is that they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. (Hermann Goering, Nuremberg Trials)

To those who are convinced that such titles are suggestive of Islamophobia, A world without Islam could be misleadingly provocative. Those who believe that there can never be a world without Islam or Muslims and that such a thought could be nurtured only at the cost of humanity will find it highly deceptive. The book vigorously argues that Islam has nothing to do with whatever violence, war, or ill-feeling is happening in its name.

This collection makes a unique contribution to the study of anti-Muslim prejudice by placing the issue in both its past and present context. The essays cover historical and contemporary subjects from the eleventh century to the present day. They examine the forms that anti-Muslim prejudice takes, the historical influences on these forms, and how they relate to other forms of prejudice such as racism, antisemitism or sexism, and indeed how anti-Muslim prejudice becomes institutionalized.

Ayet Arifi, pictured, says interest in Turkish literature has changed the way Bosnians view Turkey.

Publishers in Bosnia and Herzegovina are competing to publish books translated into Bosnian from Turkish that have drawn great interest from Bosnian readers in recent years. After exporting food items, clothing and TV series, Turkey began exporting books to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The country’s Bosnians, Serbs and Croats are learning to look forward to the newest books from Turkey.

Publishers began competing to publish Turkish books in their own language particularly after 2003, when Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's “Yeni Hayat” (New Life) was published in the Bosnian language.

The new academic trend now is to produce books on Islam in the Western countries. It also reflects the concern which is being felt in the West about Muslims.

This an excellent study produced by the three editors, for in one volume there is comprehensive coverage of both South Eastern Europe (countries like Macedonia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece) and Western Europe (covering Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain and Italy). If one compares the level of analysis of the two Europes in this volume, then the analysis offered by academics in Western Europe is much more sophisticated. This may be due to the fact that there is more data on Muslims in Western than in South Eastern Europe.

This book written by Justin McCarthy is the dramatic history of the deportation and death of millions of Muslims in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from areas that have remained centers of conflict, the Balkans, the Middle East, and what was the Soviet Union -- and shows how these conflicts developed. The history of the expansion of the Russian Empire and the creation of new nations in the Balkans has traditionally been told from the standpoint of the Christian nations that were carved from the Ottoman Empire.

By Munevera Hadzisehovic

Foreword by Sabrina P. Ramet

Translated by Thomas Butler and Saba Risaluddin

Born in a small river town in the largely Muslim province of Sandzak, Munevera Hadzisehovic grew up in an area sandwiched between the Orthodox Christian regions of Montenegro and Serbia, cut off from other Muslims in Bosnia

Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call things, but we may also need to, obviously, in order to give figure to that which we think and study. Remarkably true to that necessity, Stefanos Geroulanos tells us in the first pages of his impressive book that the “conceptual reorganization” he will describe and analyze became “an almost official face of French thought.”

A book edited by Shireen T. Hunter

Introduction:

In only a few decades, Islam has peacefully emerged as Europe’s second largest religion after Christianity. Today, at least 15 million people in Western Europe adhere to the Muslim faith and have close cultural affinities and afflictions with the Islamic world. Furthermore, relative to a dwindling and aging European population, the percentage of Europe’s Muslims, particularly the youth, is growing steadily. The presence of Muslim communities in Europe dates to the turn of the twentieth century, when Muslim immigrants began arriving from Europe’s empires. The influx of Muslims reached substantial levels during the postwar years of economic reconstruction, as single male and mostly unskilled or semiskilled laborers were “invited” to work in Europe.

More than 8,000 books and over 3,000 titles are available for visitors again at a major historical landmark in Banja Luka.

A library founded originally by the Bosnian Sanjak-bey Ferhat Pasha Sokolovic has been re-opened at a site belonging to the city's Muslim community. "We finally experienced a moment when a part of history, tradition and culture of the people from this area has been recovered," Imam Muriz Effendi Spahic said.

In a short book of four chapters (170 pages including an appendix), Richard Bulliet presents a compelling vision for what he calls an Islamo-Christian Civilization. Bulliet—professor of history at Columbia University, former director of The Middle East Institute, and executive secretary of the Middle East Studies Association—seeks to transcend the all too common ways of seeing and talking about the relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds.

The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing"

by Norman Cigar

With the Jewish Holocaust etched in people's memories, how could genocide happen again? Does fierce nationalism necessarily lead to mass murder?

In this study, Norman Cigar provides the first scholarly study of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, arguing that it is neither the unintentional result of civil war nor the unfortunate by-product of rabid nationalism.