Aid as pan‐Islamic solidarity in Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Abstract

For decades Arab Muslims have engaged in pan-Islamic solidarity aid work in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In delivering aid from the Middle East to a European country, they disrupt the racial and civilizational hierarchies that structure most international relief work. Their experiences demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of universalism. Rather than dismiss universalism as mere ideology or as a set of homogenizing processes, I highlight how universalist projects put into practice complex idioms that are notionally directed at all of humanity. Ethnographic attention to these relief workers’ material conditions reveals that they lack many of the privileges of the white, Western, and highly mobile protagonists of most ethnographies of aid. Moreover, it illuminates how spiritual practices coalesce with considerations of transnational mobility, class, and political action—considerations that are often neglected in anthropological work on Islamic piety. [universalism, solidarity, humanitarianism, charity, aid, Islam, pan-Islamism, Bosnia-Herzegovina] I n the early 1990s the eyes of the world were on Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was emerging from the collapsing socialist federal state of Yugoslavia, in southeast Europe. Under prolonged siege by Serb nationalists, the multiethnic but predominantly Muslim city became a symbol of tolerance and pluralism under threat. It was, moreover, a key site of concern for the “International Community,” as embodied by visiting “Internationals”—diplomats, peacekeepers, aid workers, and journalists.1 And their most famous gathering spot was the bar at the iconic Holiday Inn, built in Sarajevo for the 1984 Winter Olympics, a monument to cosmopolitan modernity. In 1993 one of the more atypical guests at the Holiday Inn was Nasser Al Saeed, head of the regional office of the Saudi High Committee to Aid Bosnia-Herzegovina (SHC). Al Saeed was a specialist in childhood education who graduated from the University of Oregon, and he would later serve on Saudi Arabia’s Consultative Assembly. At the personal invitation of Bosnia’s president, Al Saeed arrived on an evening flight from Zagreb, Croatia, to the Sarajevo airport, which was then operating under UN supervision. Al Saeed soon found himself admonished by a French peacekeeper for being unaware that the armored UN escort he was expecting would not be leaving for town until the next morning. Years later he recalled the testy conversation in a press interview: I said to him, “I am carrying a UN identity card, and you are with the UN. Right now we are both equal. I came here on a UN plane. Why didn’t they tell me in Zagreb not to arrive at this time?” He said, “No, I am not responsible. You can leave the airport now, in the cold and with any Serb bullets that may kill you.” I told him, “I will not leave this place, I am part of the same body [ghurfa] as you.” (al-ʿAssāf 2007)2 After much badgering, the Frenchman relented, but only after placing Al Saeed in a jeep with an Italian journalist, who lacked any official standing other than a press pass. Once Al Saeed arrived at the Holiday Inn, he was told that there was no proper water or electricity and that to get to his room he had to climb seven flights up the AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–14, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.13031 American Ethnologist Volume 00 Number 0 xxxx 2021 rear staircase (the front one being exposed to Serb sniper fire). Al Saeed did so only to encounter a locked door, so he trudged back down and went up another staircase, finally reaching his room and finding barely enough water to perform ablutions for his prayer. For Al Saeed, the ordeal of getting to the Holiday Inn led not to the reward of a stiff drink and cavorting with other Internationals, but instead the possibility of a small measure of ritual cleanliness and solitude in preparation for the days to come. Even though he stayed in the most iconic building of Bosnia’s international social scene, his account reflects little sense that he belonged to it. And although SHC became a major conduit for foreign aid into Bosnia, its Sarajevo offices were raided by US troops in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Al Saeed’s plea for recognition from the French peacekeeper (“I am part of the same body as you”) highlights how pan-Islamic aid workers participate in the UN-led International Community even as they are not as always accepted as part of it. Their experiences are useful for rethinking universalism. During and after the war, Arab Muslims who engaged in aid, relief, or charity work in Bosnia were surveilled as suspected terrorists, and in some cases detained and deported. They were seen as foreign, and they lacked many of the privileges of the white, Western, and highly mobile protagonists of most ethnographies of aid. And their spiritual practices coalesced with considerations of transnational mobility, class, and political action, considerations that tend to be muted in anthropological work on Islamic piety. Through ethnographic attention to these relief workers’ material conditions and experiences of racialized mobility, this article develops an anthropological approach to universalism. Rather than dismissing universalism as mere ideology or a set of homogenizing processes, highlighting universalism as a category for anthropological analysis entails understanding how complex idioms notionally directed at all of humanity are put into practice in the face of lived differences. Moreover, as will be discussed in the conclusion, an ethnographic approach to universalism can also help clarify the conceptual and political stakes of solidarity practices more generally. The 1990s wars in ex-Yugoslavia—and especially the 1992–95 conflict in Bosnia—are widely understood as a major site in the development of post–Cold War humanitarianism (Coles 2007; Gilbert 2020; Vah Jevšnik 2009). Media images of mass atrocities introduced the term ethnic cleansing into the global lexicon, and Western public opinion was galvanized by the prolonged siege of Sarajevo (Maček 2009) and the genocidal massacre in the town of Srebrenica in the presence of Dutch UN peacekeepers (Wagner 2008). The Bosnian War also occasioned significant pan-Islamic solidarity organizing among Muslim communities worldwide, organizing that has been much less studied than its Western counterparts. Pan-Islamic solidarity activity included providing diplomatic support, relief, and aid; proselytizing; and participating in combat, the latter denominated as jihad. In contrast to other recent wars that raised concerns over humanitarianism and terror, the Bosnian War had a distinctive racial politics (Baker 2018), given its European location. In a global order that tended to racialize Muslims as nonwhite, the Europeanness of Bosnian Muslims— whether understood through phenotypical traits or signs of “modernity” and “moderation”—made them objects of fascination and suspicion from different directions. Liberals in the West saw “saving” Muslims in Bosnia as an important test of Europe’s commitments to secular civilization; similarly, to many Muslims around the world (including those in the West), the whiteness of Bosnians was a reminder of Islam’s universality and transracial scope. For these reasons, the Bosnian War is helpful not only to think with as one site among many for pan-Islamic relief work but also to highlight how all transnational relief work is situated in a variety of concrete political contestations. The research for this article was shaped by the fraught nexus of terror and humanitarianism that also affected my interlocutors. My own engagements with this topic began when I worked for human rights NGOs addressing detention and torture policies in the War on Terror, culminating in several years working as part of a clinical legal team defending a Saudi held by the US military at Guantánamo Bay. Many of the captives at the base have claimed to be aid workers—an assertion readily dismissed by their captors as a “cover story.” Frustrated by the limited understandings of these experiences among NGOs and defense attorneys, I embarked on ethnographic research on Arabs who traveled to Bosnia for jihad and settled in the country after the war as civilians. This work also brought me into contact with Arab migrants who had not participated in fighting, but whose very racialized religiosity—in contradistinction to the white and largely secular Bosnian Muslim population around them—made them objects of suspicion. For my own part, racial outsiderness marked both constraint and opportunity during the 12 months of ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, mostly from 2009 to 2011. I encountered skepticism as a US passport holder but guarded curiosity as a person of Chinese origin at a time when China was seen primarily as a potential counterweight to US hegemony. In the end, my background in human rights—which I originally sought to shed as unhelpful baggage—turned out to be the easiest way for interlocutors to make sense of my interest in their lives. I became involved in some human rights advocacy opposing deportation and detention policies, and my affiliation with a local human rights NGO allowed me to visit some of my interlocutors after they were placed in an immigration detention center on the outskirts of Sarajevo (Li 2020, 18–22). The research was necessarily multisited, since I had to capture a sense of my interlocutors’ range of movements. Some