Religion, especially Islam, has spread into what were previously secular areas of Bosnian society, Dan Bilefsky reports in the New York Times:
In [Sarajevo], where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.
Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.
…It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion—Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, rather than as Bosniak, Serb or Croat.
In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become stronger.
In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after Communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.
Read the full article here.