“It’s a crime, a crime against culture. They are destroying a holy place, a place that is of incalculable value to Sarajevo.”

With these distressed words, art expert Zoja Finci implored the late Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, to save the Islamic relics of her beautiful city from destruction, despite the fact that she is Jewish herself. This was back in 1995, soon after the end of the Bosnian war, and she was referring to the Begova Mosque in Sarajevo, the largest Islamic monument – and arguably the most ornamented – in the former Yugoslavia. The vandals she was denouncing were not Serb militias, but none other than the Wahhabist hordes who traveled all the way to Bosnia to complete the destruction they started in Mecca.

As if the desecration of the graves of the Prophet’s wife and companions, and the complete demolition of every single remaining vestige of Islam in Mecca and Medina were not enough, the Wahhabist bulldozers set their eyes on Europe. Since 1995, a post-war crime of a different nature has been ongoing to erase the beauty of Islamic architecture in the Balkans under the guise of Islamic Aid.

You wouldn’t have thought for a minute that Wahhabis were particularly concerned with architecture to bother themselves with such expensive restoration efforts in far away lands, until you discover that their aim has nothing to do with restoration and everything to do with obliteration. All across the Balkans, even the slightly damaged structures were not repaired, although it would have been the easier thing to do, but were razed to the ground to be rebuilt from scratch in the ugliest form imaginable, and as far off from the original shape and design as humanly possible.

Then came the end of the war in Kosovo in 1999, and the architectural vultures immediately went after the corpses there as well. Harvard University Fine Arts Librarian and expert on Balkan Islamic architecture, Andras Riedlmayer, goes so far in condemning the grotesque defiling of ancient mosques in the Balkans to pronouncing that “the Wahhabis, with their wealth and fanaticism, are a menace to heritage, in some ways more dangerous than the [Serb paramilitary] Chetniks, since about the latter, at least, no one harbors any illusions regarding their uncharitable intentions.”

One foreign expert described one of the architects involved whom he had interviewed (and who never practiced the profession) by saying that “his ideas for mosque design involve knockoffs of Saudi-modern shopping mall architecture with odd touches inspired by the décor of the Love Boat, including portholes! He is the very model of the modern zealot, narrow minded, arrogant, and so dumb he doesn’t even realize it.”

Centuries old Ottoman mosques, libraries, schools and graveyards were knocked down for no reason except to implement Wahabist doctrines attacking any semblance of architectural splendor by inventing sayings of the Prophet decreeing that the ornamentation of mosques or tombs is a crime in the eyes of God. Reidlmayer recalls that prior to the War in Kosovo, “when the Wahhabis took out sledgehammers and set about smashing the 17th century gravestones in the garden of Peja’s ancient Defterdar Mosque, angry local residents beat them up and chased them out of town. I was shown the damaged gravestones, beautifully carved with floral motifs and verses from Qur’an. That was in the late summer of 1998. Six months later, in the spring of 1999, Serb paramilitaries came and burned down the mosque. Unlike the fundamentalist missionaries, they were not interested in the gravestones.”

So why do these Wahhabist scavengers travel the globe to implement the uglification project, you may ask? Who ultimately benefits if our culture and civilization is made to look as ugly and primitive as possible in the eyes of the world? Read More »

(This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine)

I always wondered whether there was a deliberate Western conspiracy for the “uglification” of Islam, or whether it was the Muslims themselves who did not need outside help in this regard. I accidentally coined the term “uglification” a little more than a year ago on these pages, and by that, I was referring to the stubborn campaign to reduce Islam into a peculiar sect of sorcery and senseless mythology.

This campaign is underway to represent Islam as devoid of beauty and good taste, despite the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, and the slanderous attempts to turn its prophet into a prolific babbler of jumbled fairytales, instead of the magnanimous humanitarian and genius – and even revolutionary women’s rights advocate – that evidence shows he truly had been. While I’m not usually prone to believing conspiracy theories, I did encounter personal evidence proving that the elaborate plot of “uglification” was a result of a mixture between the two: our own devastating ignorance and adherence to forged texts, but also the West’s active participation in promoting and perpetuating the outright lies.

One case in point which I shall never be able to forget took place exactly twenty years ago, during my first weeks at Charterhouse, the boarding school and bastion of the British establishment in which I landed at the tender age of 16. In that pillar of the English public school system, they used to invite certain speakers to address the students on various occasions, to educate the offspring of the British elite, so to speak, about other cultures and to promote tolerance and understanding.

At one such event, we were gathered to listen to a presentation about the different world religions and their contrasting beliefs and practices, given by a person introduced to us as an expert on this subject. After giving us a tour of the basic tenets of what everyone else believed, the lecturer then turned to Islam. I vividly recall the excitement I felt at that moment as a homesick student, proudly waiting for my schoolmates to find out what this misunderstood religion was all about.

Our guest speaker stood there with his aristocratic posture and impeccable upper class accent, and confined his description of Islam to the following short sentence: “Islam is a religion from the Arabian desert that set many teachings for its followers to abide by, for example, the requirement to eat food with their right hands, the rationale being that the left hand is designated for cleaning oneself after going to the toilet”. That was it. The time he allotted for Islam was over.

I swear by the God of all the religions which I learnt about that day that this was the only example that came out of his mouth. Coming from a supposedly learned authority, this incident confirmed to me that this guy came to the auditorium with a premeditatedly devious purpose, and could not have uttered what he said to this knowledge-thirsty audience out of sheer ignorance or lack of information. So, while Jesus died on the Cross for our sins and Buddhism preached peace and tranquility, Islam was apparently all about wiping your behind using the correct hand. So much for my pride amongst my peers that day. Read More »