KOVIĆ: CHRISTIANITY IN BIH IS MUCH OLDER THAN ISLAM

BELGRADE, JANUARY 13 /SRNA/ – Historian Miloš Ković said that Christianity is much older than Islam on the territory of BiH, describing the proposal by former head of the Islamic Community in BiH Mustafa Cerić to restore a so-called "Bosnian" Orthodox Church as an incredibly crude gesture with no historical foundation.

Speaking to SRNA, Ković said that Cerić's statement is part of a broader attack on the Serbian Orthodox Church /SOC/, which is known to be the spiritual backbone of the Serb people. "The Serbian national identity was formed within the SOC, which preserves it to this day, and that is precisely why such assaults on the Orthodox Church are taking place, both in BiH and across the region," Ković said. He stressed that if Cerić is already speaking about divisions and the continuation of some alleged historical `Bosnian` church, it would be more appropriate for him to propose that the Islamic Community itself be divided and that some form of a Bosnian Islamic community be established, rather than making such proposals regarding the SOC. Ković underlined that Cerić's call for the restoration of a "Bosnian" Orthodox Church is not based on any historical knowledge or facts, but rather represents, as he put it, pure political maneuvering. "Of course, everyone has the right to express their political views, including Cerić, but any invocation of history or historical facts that allegedly support those political views is completely unfounded," Ković said. According to him, it is extremely tactless, unusual and inappropriate for even a former head of a religious community to propose the fragmentation of another religious community. "Imagine what it would look like if one of our bishops or the Patriarch himself were to propose the fragmentation of the Islamic Religious Community or the Roman Catholic Church. That alone shows how incredibly crude and rather unusual such a gesture is," Ković noted. Speaking about history, Ković said that the so-called "Bosnian Church" is not something that has been definitively established, adding that among Bosniaks there exists a belief in a whole series of false myths created by Austro-Hungarian pseudo-science. "One of those myths is that present-day Bosniaks are descendants of the so-called Bogomils and that those Bogomils, members of the Bosnian Church, were collectively Islamized, for which we have absolutely no confirmation," Ković said, adding that historical sources do not clearly define what that church actually was. Ković emphasized that Herzegovina belonged for centuries to the Nemanjić state, that Saint Sava established bishoprics and episcopal centers in that area, and that it is therefore pointless to compare the age of various religious communities that exist in BiH today. "It is necessary to work on coexistence and tolerance, but if Cerić truly raises such questions, then it must be stated clearly that Christianity is much older than Islam on the territory of BiH," Ković said. He specified that the first historical sources on Bosnia, which are not of Serbian but of Frankish and Byzantine origin, state that Serbs lived there, and that no other people are mentioned in those sources. "In ethnic terms, that population was Serbian. Over the course of history it would later change religion, but the ethnic foundation is Serbian, and foreign sources wrote about the ethnic affiliation of BiH to the Serbian people all the way until the 20th century. Therefore, what Cerić is talking about has nothing to do with history," Ković said. According to him, it is possible that Cerić knows something historians do not, adding that "it would be good if he were to acquaint us with it". Ković emphasized that the "history of Bosnia" was largely written during the period of Austro-Hungarian occupation, by Austro-Hungarian scholars and pseudo-scholars. "That mythology, which Cerić evidently believes in, was created precisely by the colonial Austro-Hungarian authorities in BiH. It includes the existence of the so-called `bosančica,` the belief that medieval tombstones were erected by Bogomils, although it has been proven that Orthodox inhabitants of BiH, as well as Montenegro and Serbia, were buried beneath them," Ković said. He concluded that the most important goal of Serbian historians and scholarship is to critically examine that mythology and, on the basis of historical sources and facts, demonstrate the truth about the past of BiH.