The text is taken from the first issue of the journal “Centar” of the CSPR RS
In Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, all these decades the political struggle has not been about forming a new parliamentary majority or gaining power at the level of local communities, but about the very nature of the state as negotiated and established by an international peace agreement. That is why every talk of “functionality,” the “European path,” and “reforms” is most often just dust thrown in people’s eyes, meant to obscure a deeper reality. In the background there is a structural clash between two concepts of legitimacy whose mutual relation is not that of political competition, but of civilizational opposition. One concept is the Dayton consociational Bosnia and Herzegovina—established by an international peace agreement as a constitutional compromise among equal collective entities and as a mechanism for preventing domination. The other concept is a model of statehood grounded in the ideology of political Islam and its normative maximum, where the state is understood as an instrument of a “higher” norm—namely, where Sharia, as law given by God, stands above every human law, that is, above democratic society.
Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina is a consociational democracy in a similar way to, for example, Belgium or certain other cases in Europe, where the collective has a constitutional guarantee of its rights that takes precedence over individual rights. In such a democratic concept, the state is not a single unitary will, a single center, or a single truth; rather, it is a consensual mechanism based on the assumption that social divisions are deep and cannot be bridged by, for instance, granting one side a moral monopoly while assigning the other the status of a perpetually suspected subject. In this kind of democratic state model, it is understood that institutions must ensure that no one can be outvoted on issues that determine the democratic rights of a given collective. That is why, for example, veto mechanisms exist, along with entity competences, constitutional protection of collective rights and proper procedures as safeguards of stability and peace.
In contrast to that stands a concept whose deep code is ideological-theological—namely, political Islam as a normative project of society and the state. This is not Islam merely as a faith, but political Islam as a program that turns religion into an organizing principle of public life, law and institutions. In its classical form, as articulated by Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, the state is not a neutral instrument; it is a means of establishing the proper order—that is, Sharia as divine law. In that logic, democracy as popular sovereignty is not the supreme source of legitimacy, but at most a transitional phase toward the establishment of a Sharia-based Islamic state.
This ideology and social model—and the structures that draw their political action from it—are in direct conflict with any democratic order, and thus with the Dayton consociational system as well.
Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, established within political Islam an organizational formula of Islam as a system that must encompass all spheres of life and therefore must also have a state expression. Sayyid Qutb goes even further by sharpening the ideological edge: he argues that if the secular order is, by definition, jahiliyya, then compromise with it is not a permanent condition but a temporary stage, and that an Islamic vanguard is necessary to lead a total transformation. For Qutb, jahiliyya is a term for contemporary Western democratic society, but also for secular Muslims who live in a “new pagan darkness” because they do not base laws and the state order on the divine order—that is, on Sharia. Alongside jahiliyya, other key principles that form the foundation of political Islam include the claim that sovereignty (ḥākimiyya) belongs to God alone and that all human legislative authority is illegitimate; the Islamic movement as an avant-garde group that must “return sovereignty to God”; and the impossibility of coexistence between an Islamic order and a democratic society and state.
When these principles are combined, the result is an ideological and political model that, by its very nature, tends toward centralization, ideological discipline, and the monopolization of legitimacy—and therefore toward the discrimination of non-Muslims, which has a direct foundation in Sharia itself. Depending on political circumstances and the surrounding environment, this model can, over time, change its methods and vocabulary; it can be packaged in “civic” terms, but its internal logic remains the same: one political center, one ideological vertical, and one Sharia-based order as the ultimate goal.
The transfer of that ideological matrix onto the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), is highly important for today’s Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina as well. Through the organization Young Muslims, founded in Sarajevo in the 1930s by Muslims who had studied in Egypt, the first organized channel for the reception and adaptation of political Islam in a European, Yugoslav, and Bosnian-Herzegovinian context was developed. The Young Muslims were inspired by the Egyptian model, which is evident in their programmatic focus on Islam as a normative-political system and in their refusal to accept the secular structure of both Yugoslav states. It is precisely within that ideological framework that the young Alija Izetbegović emerges, whose intellectual development would be permanently marked by the ideas of political Islam.
With certain variations shaped by local historical circumstances, the core concepts of the Muslim Brotherhood found their explicit expression in Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration (1970/1990).
Understanding the Islamic Declaration as a political-ideological document is not possible without reconstructing its intellectual and ideological genealogy. Although it emerged under the specific conditions of Yugoslav socialist society, its underlying matrix is neither local nor the product of Alija Izetbegović’s individual theological reflection. On the contrary, the Declaration fits into the broader transnational ideological current of political Islam, whose foundations lie in the thought of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb—the founders and principal theorists of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun).
Alija Izetbegović’s Islamic Declaration consistently follows Ikhwan doctrine, according to which the state must be subordinated to religion where political authority is merely an instrument for realizing the Islamic ideal. In practice, this means that an Islamic order is not only desirable but also normatively binding, while all other forms of rule—democratic, secular, national or civic—are temporary and illegitimate. It is precisely this doctrine that made it possible for the Islamic Declaration to serve as the ideological basis of the SDA (Party of Democratic Action), which in the early 1990s sought to politically articulate the idea of Islamic governance within the Muslim corpus in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later—through the “Bosniak project”—to encompass the entire traditional Muslim community from the territory of the former SFRY. The founding of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) in 1990 represents the institutional moment in which that project was materialized. The SDA did not emerge as a classic national party aimed at articulating ethnic interests, but rather as a political instrument for implementing the ideological postulates of political Islam. In that sense, the Islamic Declaration, as noted, became not only a theoretical document but also the programmatic foundation of party practice, while the SDA assumed the role of a political bearer of a historical mission formulated as far back as Egypt in the 1920s.
This intellectual trajectory—from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, through the Young Muslims and the Islamic Declaration, to the SDA—represents a continuity that produces long-term implications for the political architecture of Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, regional security and the entire concept of European multiculturalism.
In that context, it is important to understand that the SDA was the first political party in Europe ever to be openly founded on the ideological corpus of the Muslim Brotherhood, with the total and constant support of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond. Consequently, both the content and the essence of the identity of the newly formed Bosniak nation in late September 1993, at the Holiday Inn hotel, were determined by Ikhwān doctrine. This can be seen in what is, in a sense, an ideological pathology of all Muslim parties in Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, their insistence on unitarization and the dismantling of Dayton consociationalism. It is also visible in the pressure placed on all Muslims from the former Yugoslav republics to accept a Bosniak identity, even though they never had any geographical or other ties to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Islamic Declaration is a symbol of a political consciousness that clearly states that a secular democratic state is not the ultimate goal, and that political compromise is only a temporary instrument. It holds that institutions are the terrain on which, over a longer period of time, the primacy of a particular normative—Islamist—code must be achieved. And this is where the essence of the structural clash begins: between Dayton consociational democracy as a lasting compromise and a kind of safeguard that prevents instability and conflict, and political Islam as a totalitarian project that treats compromise as a transitional phase toward the establishment of a Sharia-based order.
When this is translated into practice, we get two phases—or two faces—of the same strategy. The first is jihad in wartime conditions, marked by identity mobilization, the verticalization of power and an attempt to create, by force of arms, a political fact that can later be converted into an ideological and statehood outcome. The second form is action in peacetime, that is, “civilizational jihad,” where what was not achieved through war is pursued through democratic institutions—as in the case of Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here, unitarization is packaged as “functionality” and centralization as a “European standard.” In public, the rhetoric is not “we want dominance” but “we want a state that functions”. And in Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, given the nature of its demography and history, a “state that functions” in such narratives most often means a state that operates in the interest of a single ideological center—one controlled by the pan-Islamist structures of the Muslim Brotherhood.
That is why, in the post-Dayton period, the modus operandi of these structures is not frontal, but largely capillary. It does not overthrow the constitution in a single stroke; rather, it undermines it day by day through interpretations, rulings, procedures, imposed rules and quasi-moral narratives. Present here as well is the contemporary practice of legal-political warfare (“lawfare”), in which the judiciary becomes an instrument for achieving the political objectives of political Islam—acting in cooperation with ultraliberal globalist structures.
The mechanism is obvious: the constitutional positions of one constituent contracting party are declared a “danger,” the constitutional mechanisms of protection are labeled “obstruction,” and then institutions are misused to discipline political opponents.
A useful example of how political Islam thinks and operates within long-term strategic time horizons—and how it treats “soft” methods as a key form of struggle—is the case of the United States. In the American context, an internal document that entered the evidentiary record in United States v. Holy Land Foundation (known as the “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” 1991) contains a formulation about a “settlement” process described as a “civilization-jihadist process”—that is, as a long-term, civilizational jihad that does not necessarily insist on overt violence, but rather on gradual, systemic action “from within”.
The best way to understand “civilizational jihad” is as a strategy of institutional infiltration, cadre networking, narrative production and the use of the freedoms of a democratic system as leverage to reshape that very system. Its aim is not to subjugate society head-on, but to alter its normative backbone over time—what is considered permissible, what is considered normal, what is “progressive” and what is “retrograde”—that is, to establish a Sharia-based society. And that is precisely why this concept is relevant for Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina as well: in this case, too, the issue is not merely elections and laws, but the gradual shifting of the boundaries of legitimacy and the replacement of Dayton’s logic of balance with a logic of centralization and Islamic-majoritarian rule.
When we apply that logic to Bosnia and Herzegovina, we get a clear picture of a civilizational clash. Dayton consociationalism requires a lasting compromise and institutional symmetry. “Civilizational jihad,” as a strategic concept of political Islam, seeks a long-term reshaping of the order so that compromise is only a temporary stage, while a Sharia-determined normative center becomes the final outcome. One is an international and social contract among equal constituent parties, the other is a project aimed at dismantling that contract in order to reconfigure society into a totalitarian, theocratic state for adherents of a single religion.
When this is compounded by the monopolization of the judiciary—through which a projected “truth” about the character of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is established, along with its “Srebrenicization” and the dehumanization of an entire collective—the whole system begins to function as a machine of unitarization. The constitutional safeguards negotiated and signed in the Dayton Peace Agreement become “brakes on progress”, collective rights become “nationalism” and entity competences and constitutional self-protection become a “threat” to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to EU integration. In such an application of civilizational jihad, the institutional struggle ceases to be a matter of legal or constitutional reforms and becomes, in essence, a question of survival and a struggle for civilization.
Because of all of the above, the dilemma—the Islamic Declaration or Dayton’s consociational Bosnia and Herzegovina—is, in essence, a question of a civilizational choice: whether the state remains a democratic framework in which differences are managed through compromise, or becomes an instrument of a single ideological-religious framework. If we preserve the original Dayton consociational arrangement, we will preserve the only realistic foundation of peace. If we fail, then the Dayton Peace Agreement remains only a temporary obstacle to a unitary Sharia-based order—an obstacle that, within that logic, must be dismantled.
Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot simultaneously be a stable Dayton consociational democracy and a state that contains within itself the political-Islamic drive toward normative wholeness and centralization; it can only be one of the two.
To those who understand the ideology, concept, strategy and doctrine of political Islam and the pan-Islamist structures of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is crystal clear that these structures neither can nor will abandon the goal of establishing a Sharia-based—and therefore unitary—Islamic state in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Thirty years ago this process of civilizational jihad lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into a bloody civil war. Today, we are witnessing the same process in the western countries. It is not beyond the realm of possible that past of Bosnia and Herzegovina might become future of the West.