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From the Weekly Standard The Balkan Front
The Wahhabis are up to no good in southern Europe.
by Stephen Schwartz
05/14/2007, Volume 012, Issue 33

Tirana
Taking the temperature of Islam in the Balkans this spring is only partly reassuring. In Sarajevo in late March, observances for the 800th anniversary of the birth of the great Sufi poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (who is hugely popular, incidentally, with American readers) were entirely in keeping with the moderate, peaceful character of the Islam of the region. Yet at the same time, a visitor to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia encountered unmistakable evidence that extremist intruders are opening a Balkan front in the global jihad.

The celebration in Sarajevo--to which we will return--marked what UNESCO is calling the "Year of Rumi." It was only one of several commemorative events taking place around the world. Rumi's work, written in Farsi, has been translated into every major language; a Google search turns up four million references to him. Yet even in the Balkans, all is not peace and poetry. The ominous presence of Wahhabi missionaries, financiers, terror recruiters, and other mischief-makers bespeaks a fresh offensive in that tormented land. From the new Wahhabi seminary in the lovely Bosnian city of Zenica, to the cobblestone streets of Sarajevo's old Ottoman center, to the Muslim-majority villages in southern Serbia, extremist Sunni men in their distinctive, untrimmed beards and short, Arab style breeches (worn in imaginary emulation of Muhammad), accompanied by women in face veils and full body coverings (a bizarre novelty in the contemporary Balkans), are again appearing, funded by reactionary Saudis and Pakistanis. They aim to widen the horizon of global jihad--witness the revived campaign of terrorism in Morocco and Algeria. In the Balkans, their targets are both Sufis and traditional Muslims. Within Albania itself, Wahhabi activism remains minimal, concentrated on individual outreach (dawa) in mosques and backed up by fundamentalist literature flooding into the country. In Kosovo, although Saudi Arabia maintains a relief office in the capital, Prishtina, Wahhabis keep an even lower profile, since most Kosovar Albanians are outspoken in their support for the United States and hostile to any indication of Islamist designs. But elswhere, trouble is afoot.

In neighboring Montenegro and districts of southern Serbia, the Wah habi presence is open and even violent. Wahhabis have disrupted religious services, yelling abuse at imams for not following their practices, and have precipitated gunfire between ordinary people as well as fatal confrontations with local police. Most recently, on April 20, a Wahhabi was killed in a clash with police in the southern Serbian town of Novi Pazar. In Bosnia, on April 27, a cache of automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, bombs, ammunition, and related material was seized in the remote north western village of Upper Barska. The owner of the house where the weapons were discovered, 47-year-old Ahmet Mustafic, was described as a Wahhabi by people in the village and in the Bosnian media. The location has been a Wahhabi hot spot for some time. Wahhabis and Bektashis are presently locked in an armed standoff at the Bektashi complex known as the Harabati Tekke, in Tetovo. This large enclave of varied structures, many of them dating from the 18th century, is famous throughout the region, and appears on Tetovo's municipal shield. Under Titoite communism, it was nationalized and turned into a hotel and entertainment complex. Since the fall of the Communist regime, the government has failed to settle the matter of ownership. In 2002, however, in the aftermath of Slav-Albanian ethnic fighting, a group of Wahhabis including Arabs, equipped with automatic weapons, seized a major building inside the Harabati complex, formerly used for Sufi meditation. The commemoration of Rumi was held on March 30 at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences, a lovely 19th-century building on a high hill in Sarajevo. The Bosnian scholar Resid Hafizovic, one of the world's great authorities on Sufism and a pronounced enemy of the Wahhabis, said Rumi "calls for friendship, collaboration, peace, and fraternal relations between people, invoking love towards all human beings as the supreme Divine creation, regardless of the religious, cultural, civilizational, or spiritual garments in which each of us mundane beings is clad. As a result, when Rumi died, his funeral was attended by mourners of many faiths: Muslims, but also Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others. His words convey this inclusiveness." Hafizovic went on to quote Rumi: Whoever you may be, come
Even though you may be
An unbeliever, a pagan or a fire-
 worshipper, come
Our brotherhood is not one of despair
Even though you may have broken
Your vows of repentance a hundred
 times, come. [t]he approach to moderate Islam embodied in the recent Rand report appears justified in the strategic defense of the democracies. But in the streets of Balkan towns, the terrorist enemy is once again present, and while commemorations of Sufi poets may invigorate an alternative to extremism, they will not suffice to defeat it. We will need serious help from moderate Muslims, in the Balkans and elsewhere, and they will again need help from us.Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.