The Balkans: the Original Ground Zero

In the aftermath of 9/11, sales of the Koran in the United States increased dramatically. While perhaps signifying a positive and peaceful attempt at understanding, it's a laborious path if not a misguided one.  Absent the history, absent the political and cultural context, reading rote excerpts of the Koran likely won't likely tell you too much about Muslims in Indonesia, Albania, and North America anymore than reading Leviticus chapter 20 will deliver the Christian world's homogenous views on homosexuality.

A better approach would be to study part of the world where the two religions lived side-by-side - or at least on top of one another: the Balkans. The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric takes geo-politics down to the Google street view- to the Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge over the Drina river - to effectively document the history and emotion of 400 years of religious coexistence and conflict.

Andric takes us through a deceptively leisurely journey through the centuries, from the bridges construction in the 1500s to the onset of the Great War. The deception is that every vignette, every detail is not casual or leisurely, but absolutely deliberate in that it conveys the history, political context, and cultural context that all those new Koran reader sought - along with humanity and emotion and a story.

Andric paints a seemingly incongruous picture of Turkish rule, magnanimity punctuated by absolute brutality viz. the seemingly rote description of the sentence of impalement carried out on the bridge. Despite the despotism and some last-minute Oriental cruelty (nailing someone to the bridge by their ear) as the Austro-Hungarian army approaches, the end of Turkish rule is depicted almost ruefully by the narrator:

"About midday, [the Austrians] fired a few shells from the shelter of a little wood at the deserted caravanserai. They damaged the already ruined han and destroyed those exceptionally fine window grilles, each cut from a single piece of soft stone."

Perhaps change is rued simply because the Balkans are a part of the world where conflict appears to be the only measure of progress, where religion is just another manner of tribal affiliation.

Boiling down so much complexity into the happenings on this bridge, Andric captures a fundamental moment of transition from Eastern to Western rule, including a meeting between the town 'notables' (representatives of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities as well as an academic) and the Austro-Hungarian army colonel (derogatorily referred to as "Schwabes," which is amusing if you speak German). An excerpt from the proceeding chapter as the mechanisms of the new empire are slowly put in place:

"What most astonished the people of the town and filled them with wonder and distrust was not so much their numbers as their immense and incomprehensible plans, their untiring industry and the perseverance with which they proceeded to the realisation of those plans. The newcomers were never at peace; and they allowed no one else to live in peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable yet ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life, men, beasts and things, and to change and alter everything, both the outward appearance of the town and the customs and habits of men from the cradle to the grave..."

As the Turks (and the Serbs) still living in town attempt to unsuccessfully withdraw themselves from the encroaching bureaucracy that mercilessly governs the length and width of market stalls, what they hunt, and which trees they chop down, the bright shining lines still between East and West, between the rule of tradition and the rule of law, between passion and calculation, and between mysticism and corporate efficiency - is illuminated.