Gyorgy Lederer: 4/6/01

From: A EurasiaNet Extra
The "Religious Center of the Muslims of Ukraine" is a federation founded in 1994 to coordinate the activities of 24 member-organizations. It held its first congress on 8 April 2000 near the city of Donetsk, not far from the "Islamic University" and the "Ibn Fadhlan" mosque. Their inauguration in September 1999 had been a great achievement as Kiev Mufti Suleiman Yakubovitch pointed out in his opening speech to the more than 200 delegates.

Author: Ahmet Alibasić

I will restrict my presentation to the impact of globalization on a peripheral European Muslim community, that of Bosnian Muslims.
I start with a proposition that the reaction of Bosnian Muslims to globalization has been relatively mild when compared to the reaction of some other Muslim peoples or their own reaction to modernity and modernization a century earlier. This has its reasons.

Author: Ahmet Alibasić

Islam has been continuously present in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the middle of the 15th century when the Osmanli armies victoriously entered most of the towns of medieval Bosnian
 ingdom. Unlike the population of Serbia, majority of Bosnians accepted Islam during the following two centuries. They did so on the hands of the Osmanli ‘ulama and sufis and therefore adopted the dominant legal and theological schools in the state, Hanafi madhhab in law and Maturidi school of thought in theology...

Nature
The Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter ICBH) is the sole
and united community of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, of Bosniaks
outside their homeland, and of other Muslims who accept it as their own. The
autonomy of ICBH is based on the religious and legal institutions of Bosnian
Muslims from the time of Osmanli administration in Bosnia. The ICBH is
inseparable part of the Ummah. The organization of the ICBH and its activities are
derived from the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah, Islamic traditions of Bosniaks and
the requirements of the time. The ICBH is independent in regulating its activities
(rituals, Islamic education, management of Islamic endowments, publishing,
charity, etc.) and the management of its property.