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6 The Extremes Introduction The turn of the second millennium in Europe was marked by the widespread killings, persecution, and destruction that took place in Bosnia. It may be that this is an anomalous occurrence in the temporal evolution of uninterrupted progress, as Francis Fukuyama saw it,1 but it is also an important milestone on the path of which the end is known to no one. Seen in the context of this dilemma between happenstance and the possibility of the end of history—a possibility with which humanity has been obsessed, as a vision subordinate to reason, ever since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—Bosnia apparently remains torn between what it in fact is and the image of it that is put forward in numerous ideological and sentimental interpretations. The most important features of these two extremes can be identified. The first includes the traditional identity of Bosnia’s entire history, which remains largely inaccessible to interpretations based solely on discursive thought. The second is the attempt to conduct a scholarly examination of a phenomenon of which an integral element is also “the most atrocious crime in Europe after the Second World War”2 in terms of a convincing rational model that would include various political, economic, and cultural aspects. Throughout Bosnia’s history there have been attempts to institute the right to religious diversity. From the first indisputable references to the Bosnian state towards the end of the twelfth century3 to the most recent era, Bosnia never ceased to be a country where different Christologies clash, are reexamined , and become reconciled. In the earliest period, the intention was to ensure the right to the interpretation of religious prophecies independent of the direct influence of large church establishments. Implicit in this very tendency , however, were demarcation from these establishments and strained relations with them. This is why the entire history of Bosnia is brimming with instances of attempts to establish dialogue between those who advocated this 99 attempt to gain freedom for a small country and a small people on the one hand, and the major factors of the world order on the other. This process gradually gave rise to a Bosnian religious diversity that was composed of the members of the separate Bosnian Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism, primarily as moral communities based on different religious revelations. The exoteric diversity of religious forms thus became the most important element of Bosnia’s entire history. It can be said that the Bosnian people constitute one nation, given the fact that they share the same country, the same language, and the same history, but the assertion must be accompanied by the recognition that this unity has borne with it a diversity of religious identities throughout. They survived on the basis of tolerance that had neither permanent sources nor permanent forms: they underwent numerous changes of feeling and perception, which was invariably reflected in the relationships of the different identities. These forms of tolerance were to undergo their major transmutation at the turning point in Bosnia that marks the retreat of the traditional way of life in the face of modernity. Religious diversity in the premodern period in Bosnia cannot be interpreted or protected without taking into consideration the intuition, probably more significant than understanding, of a qualitatively different kind of human knowledge and the way of life that it implies. The sense of the sanctity of human life that springs from the uncreated and uncreatable substance of every self, through which one and the same God is present in every man, almost never disappeared from the horizon of traditional man. In this view, the possibilities of the self are limitless, but cannot be realized without a heteronomous authority and without transcending every form and every individuality . Although this realization is conditioned by the perfect human agency—Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad—its entire root lies in the unity of truth, in one and the same God. To leave the human horizons without this absolute transcendentality and immanence of God means to reduce and confine the human self to finitude. Phenomena, ideas, and urges then assume the status of that absolute transcendentality and immanence, thus becoming idols that determine the degree of freedom or slavery. The most essential aspect of tolerance—if we use the term in its modern sense, which does not exist in the traditional experience—was not taking on sufferance, a mere putting up with, the Other who is “wrong and mistaken .” It meant acceptance of a...

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