By: Juan Carlos Antunez Moreno
For more than 500 years Bosnian Muslims have maintained the Hanafi tradition, following a moderate version of Islam, tolerant of other communities and compatible with western values.
The Islamic revival in Bosnia and Herzegovina , which began in 1970s, underwent radical changes from the beginning of the war in April 1992.
It is reported that several hundred Mujahidin joined with and fought along side Bosniacs during the 1992-5 war in BiH. Highly religious and motivated, some foreign fighters brought a specific understanding of Islam with them and tried to indoctrinate those ideas into Bosniac minds.
Thus the Salafi ideas surfaced for the first time on a wider scale. This foreign creed was very different from the traditional version of Islam in BiH.
Throughout 1990s BiH was in a unique situation: it had the political and mobilizing structures in place for the spreading of a different interpretation of Islam. Nevertheless, it lacked the cultural framework around which to mobilize social support. Nor did it have a context in which to develop a strong Salafi stream in BiH. Eventually, although Salafism has taken root in BiH for the last fifteen years, the number of its followers is not as important as some media try to show. 

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