The mechanism of the dualistic approach can be seen here. Two extreme propositions are set against each other, and proclaimed to be irreconcilable. Their irreconcilability lies precisely in their extreme formulation, and is thus a truism. This approach automatically excludes all intermediate formulations which might combine elements of the two positions and thus render them reconcilable. This exclusion of the intermediate reasoned positions is necessary in order to arrive at the “problem”    a universe of irreconcilable opposites    which can be solved only by an extra rational miracle: God. Or, for Izetbegovic, to be precise, submission to God’s will, that is, Islam.

Only Islam can bring the virtues of religion into the real world. “Being a priori against the use of violence, Christianity and religion in general could not directly influence anything that might improve man’s social position.” (p.192) “Islam started as mysticism and ended as a state. Religion accepted the world of facts and became Islam.” (p.194) “Islam knows no specifically `religious’ literature in the European sense of the word, just as it knows no pure secular literature. Every Islamic thinker is a theologian, just as every true Islamic movement is also a political movement.” (p.197)

While the “Islamic Declaration” is concise and clear, the 300 pages of Islam Between East and West are replete with dubious science, dubious philosophy, erudite references and logical fallacies, all summoned to illustrate the author’s sweeping assertions (6). In this type of text, abounding in truisms and circular reasoning, it is impossible not to find some statements with which one can agree, and others one cannot accept. In short, it is pure ideology, a series of statements that one may accept or reject, but that cannot be proved or disproved.

The Political Impact of Izetbegovic’s Ideas

Along with a dozen co religionists, Izetbegovic was arrested in still communist Yugoslavia and sentenced to prison in 1983 (all were freed by a general amnesty in 1988) for “counter revolutionary activities” and seeking to transform Bosnia Herzegovina into an “ethnically pure Islamic state” (7). The very fact that such charges were brought by a Communist state, and again reiterated by “nationalist” Serbs, has seemingly protected Izetbegovic’s writings from critical examination.

From a democratic secular viewpoint, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in either the “Islamic Declaration” or Islam Between East and West to justify arresting Mr. Izetbegovic and putting him in prison for five years. The harm done by jailing people for ideas goes beyond the personal injustice suffered. The fact that Izetbegovic was persecuted for his ideas has tended ever since to make any free criticism of those ideas “taboo”, since criticism is readily equated with endorsement of communist persecution. Unfortunately, the fear of taking “the wrong side” in one way or another has stood in the way of free and open debate regarding all the main “subversive” writings that marked the ideological crisis of the Titoist regime, notably the most controversial, those of Izetbegovic, Tudjman and of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Without open debate, the prevailing tendency has been to cite such texts (often inaccurately) for polemic purposes rather than to examine them fairly and critically.

The unquestionable right of Mr. Izetbegovic to express his ideas without being sent to prison should not preclude evaluating the impact of those ideas on the recent history of Bosnia Herzegovina. Those ideas became notorious locally as a result of two trials in the 1980s in which Muslims were accused of fomenting counter revolution of the basis of the “Islamic Declaration”. Later, supporters of the Sarajevo regime dismissed any suggestion that Mr. Izetbegovic might be considered an “Islamic fundamentalist” as grotesque Serbian nationalist propaganda. The question was not examined seriously. Insofar as “fundamentalism” can be defined as basing an entire social and political order on religion, then Mr. Izetbegovic is certainly a “fundamentalist”. There is another aspect that deserves study, and that is the extent to which fear of the implications of the “Islamic Declaration”, specifically the call for an Islamic state once Muslims are a majority of the population, drove large numbers of the Orthodox and Catholic Christians of Bosnia Herzegovina into the arms of nationalist Serb and Croat parties. This is a legitimate question, that needs to be elucidated as part of the process of clarifying the causes of the conflict and working for reconciliation between communities (8).

FOOTNOTES

1. It is indicative of his reputation that in March 1997, Izetbegovic received an award for “democracy development” from the U.S. Center for Democracy in Washington, D.C.
2. In his passionately pro Bosnian book, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (Vintage, New York, 1995), the American writer David Rieff points to the major signficance he and many others saw in the war in Bosnia. He had come to Europe to write about immigration, he explains, to see whether the Old Continent would be able to cope as successfully as the United States with the mass influx of people of different cultures. It was “in search of this `Americanization’ of the European future”, with the “conviction that in the twenty first century we would all be polyglot or we would kill one another off”, that he discovered the war in Bosnia, which seemed to support the second, pessimistic hypothesis.
3. The fact is noted in the influential book by Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, London, Penguin, 1995; page 211: “Fikret Abdic, a local hero in the far northwestern corner of Bosnia, received 1,010,618 votes, compared to 847,386 for Izetbegovic. [...] In an unexplained deal, Abdic, who did not have enough support within the SDA, traded his rightful position as head of the presidency in exchange for naming his man, Alija Delimustafic, as Interior Minister.” Chris Hedges, New York Times International Herald Tribune, 26/4/1996, called the deal “bewildering”. Except for such rare references, the popularity of the Bihac businessman who favored cooperation with Serbs and Croats was quickly forgotten by Western media which accepted Izetbegovic as the unchallenged leader of his people.
4. An oddly deceptive introduction to Islam Between East and West by one Dr. Balic, a Bosnian Muslim teaching at Frankfurt, states that Izetbegovic had no interest in politics. The purpose of this false assertion was no doubt to deny any grounds for the political prosecution of Izetbegovic and his colleagues. Such a claim is belied not only by the historic facts but by the book itself. The very theme running through everything Izetbegovic has written is the necessarily political nature of Islam.
5. It may be pointed out that Izetbegovic’s criticism of “conservatives” and “modernists” has nothing to do with the distinction, much noted in the West since the Iranian revolution, between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. If he rejects Sufi mysticism, that is a tendency found in both. One passage in the Islamic Declaration explicitly rejects a key Shi’ite tenet, the importance of Ali as direct descendent of the Prophet: “The hereditary califate represents the abandoning of the elective principle clearly asserted as an institution of Islam.” However, this is no doubt of limited significance in light of Izetbegovic’s clear advocacy of a worldwide unity of the Islamic community, regardless of the Sunni Shi’ite distinction.
6. Example: On page 57, Izetbegovic asserts that: “Religiousness is inversely and crime is directly proportional to the largeness of a city.”  To support this sweeping statement, he cites, in a footnote, “an inquiry” (unidentified) according to which “12 to 13 percent of the inhabitants of Paris come to the Catholic mass, in Lyon 20.9 percent, and in St. Etienne 28.5 percent. Data about crime would certainly show the inverse gradient.”  Would they indeed? We have no way of knowing. Izetbegovic simply asserts that this relationship exists, and that it is due to the superior “experienced aesthetics” of the countryside in comparison to the city. Aside from the lack of serious supporting data or the dubious superiority of the “experienced aesthetics” of St.Etienne over Paris, this insistence on the moral influence of urban or rural environment is in blatant contradiction to Izetbegovic’s central argument, cited above (from p.161), rejecting the “materialistic” argument that evil comes from external “conditions of human life” as “the most godless and the most inhuman idea which has ever appeared in the human mind”. But Izetbegovic is immune to accusations of contradiction, since he can reply that “Islam” synthesizes every proposition and its opposite!
7. Alexandre Popovic, “Islamic Movements in Yugoslavia”, in Andreas Kappeler, Gerhard Simon, Georg Brunner & Edward Allworth, Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 1994, p.335.
8. Such a question is typically dismissed out of hand, for example by Silber & Little, op.cit., p.208. “Serb and Croat nationalists point to the Islamic Declaration, an esoteric document penned by Izetbegovic, in 1973, as proof that Izetbegovic planned to create a Muslim state. In fact, it was a work of scholarship, not politics, intended to promote philosophical discourse among Muslims. In it, he excluded the `use of violence in the creation of a Muslim state, because it defiles the beauty of the name of Islam’. A more significant indicator of Izetbegovic’s orientation was Islam between East and West, first published in the United States in 1984, and then in Yugoslavia after his release from prison four years later. This book mapped out his vision of an Islamic state in the modern world. In it he charts a course between Islamic values and material progress, arguing that the benefits of secular western civilization are without meaning unless they are accompanied by the spiritual values found predominantly in Islamic societies.”
Their comments on Izetbegovic’s writings are so far off the mark as to raise the question: have they read them? Or are they quoting the author of the work cited in their two footnotes, Srecko M.Dzaja, Bosnia i Bosnjaci u hrvatskom politickom diskursu, Erasmus, December 1994, p.33? This seems likely. There is in fact nothing “esoteric” about the “Islamic Declaration”, nor can it reasonably be called “a work of scholarship, not politics”.
To say that the 1984 book “charts a course between Islamic values and material progress” is a gross misreading. In reality, Izetbegovic presents Islamic values themselves as uniting the material and the spiritual, and this is the course he charts, not a course “between” Islamic values and anything else.
What is clear is that Izetbegovic, like, for instance, the Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria, sets great value on modern technology, and sees no contradiction whatsoever between material progress and Islam. This acceptance of the technological fruits of the enlightenment, accompanied by rejection of the enlightenment’s philosophical content, recalls the “revolt of the masses” forecast by Jose Ortega y Gasset. In that connection, it can be noted that contemporary American Christian fundamentalists are also highly receptive to modern technology while rejecting the philosophical heritage of the enlightenment.