The Study of Children in Religions: A Methods Handbook

11 Religion and Youth Identity in Postwar Bosnia Herzegovina

172 | 11 Religion and Youth Identity in Postwar Bosnia Herzegovina Ruqayya Yasmine Khan Mosques, churches and temples once lined Your beautiful landscape Sometime ago your bridges connected Generations of lives, of Muslim, Croat and Serb Sometime ago, you were more than just a news story More than just a city, more than just a name Sometime ago, you were the heart The heart of a nation Hajat Avdović, high school student Vice-president Joseph Biden quoted the poem above on May 19, 2009, as he stood before the Bosnian Parliament and delivered a speech that was generally a well received by the Bosnian press.The words of Hajat Avdović, who left Sarajevo when he was a child and moved to America with his family,1 profoundly convey his feelings about religion and conflict in his birthplace. A need to access precisely such words and worldviews of Bosnian youth and children prompted me to conduct research as a Fulbright fellow at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, University of Sarajevo (Fakultet Islamskih Nauka, Sarajevski Univerzitet) in Bosnia Herzegovina (hereafter BiH) during spring 2009.2 With the assistance of my Bosnian colleague, Mujesira Zimić-Gljiva, I designed a survey assessing Muslim youth attitudes toward religion.3 We then applied this instrument at a selection of public schools in BiH’s capital city, Sarajevo, employing a two-stage process, which generated raw data contained in over one thousand student surveys.4 No doubt, the topic of Muslim youth identity in a uniquely European country currently commands global attention in both popular and academic circles.5 BiH offers a glimpse into the attitudes and experiences of Muslim youth in a Southeast- Religion and Youth Identity in Postwar Bosnia Herzegovina | 173 ern European country where Islam has been an indigenous, majority presence for over five centuries. This chapter aims to share some of these insights as it offers suggestions for researchers working with surveys as a method for accessing the words and worldviews of children and youth.6 We unintentionally prepared this research instrument using both child-centered and adult-centered methodologies where they seemed appropriate. Reflecting on the survey and its results reveals the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches in ways that may be illuminating to future researchers. Specifically, our work with these Bosnian teenagers emphasized the importance of tapping into child/youth input with regard to the design of the survey. Brief Background on Religion in the Western Balkans Sarajevo is a small, cosmopolitan city centered in a valley ringed by the mountains of BiH. Biden, in his May 2009 speech, also quoted English writer Rebecca West, who observed that arriving in Sarajevo was like “‘walking [into] an opening flower.’”7 Biden noted new construction in Sarajevo and spoke about a cautious air of optimism in the country. The flower that is Sarajevo is the capital of the only truly multireligious country in the Western Balkans, namely, Bosnia Herzegovina.8 Nearly 50 percent of its population is Muslim, and the remainder consists of both Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics. In the Western Balkans, three religious traditions prevail: Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and Islam.9 Three Western Balkan nations are predominantly Orthodox Christian: Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.10 Two are mainly Roman Catholic, namely, Slovenia and Croatia.11 Albania possesses a Muslim majority.12 Only BiH, as noted already, is multireligious. For centuries, up until the late 1300s, the Western Balkans region (located at a midpoint between Rome and Byzantium) was the arena for conflict between two rival forms of Christianity: Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism.13 Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Western Balkans became part of the Ottoman Empire, and as such, this region formed the borderland between Islam and Christian Europe for nearly five hundred years.14 Religion and nationalism are more often than not intimately linked in the Western Balkans, so that, for example, in Bosnia, “Serbian” is synonymous with Orthodox, “Croat” is synonymous with Catholic, and “Bosniak” is synonymous with Muslim.15 174 | Ruqayya Yasmine Khan Getting into Their Heads: Bosnian Youth and BiH Confessional Religious Education In the late 1980s, “religion” made a big comeback in BiH society and has continued to have an important presence for the past two decades.16 Consequently , the issue of religious education in the public schools has risen to the fore in BiH society and as Ahmet Alibašić (scholar of Islamic thought and history, University of Sarajevo), the...