Photos by HEATHER AINSWORTH While Muslim men pray during a Sedzda, or prayer service, a child cries out and is tended to after the prayer is finished at the mosque on Kemble Street.

Arrivals practicing Islamic belief to varying degrees

By JULIANA FINUCANE
Observer-Dispatch

Ajdin Lovic looks a lot like other students at Thomas R. Proctor Senior High School in Utica.

He slouches in his chair, has the shadow of a mustache, and wears an oversized Dirk Nowitzki jersey. He doesn’t seem like the typical Muslim.

But in Utica, he might be.

“I’m proud to be a Muslim,” Lovic said. “My parents grew up Muslim in Bosnia. My grandparents were Muslim. I went to mosque every Sunday with my family and my parents went every Friday.”

Lovic is one of some 5,000 Bosnians who came to Utica during and after the Balkan war. The addition of so many Muslims to Utica’s population gives the city one of the highest concentrations of Muslim residents in the country, a fact that adds a new texture to Utica’s rich religious history.

Immigrants in the 18th and early 19th centuries tended to be Protestant. Many who came 100 years ago from places such as Italy or Poland were Roman Catholic. And refugees from around the world who have arrived since the Vietnam War have brought with them a variety of religious practices.

Most of the Bosnian newcomers, however, are Muslim or are married to Muslims. Not all of them are practicing Muslims, and many don’t even know the prayers, which are mostly in Arabic.

That reflects the fact that Bosnian Muslims tend to be more secular than their Arab counterparts, seeing that label as much as an ethnic consideration than a religious one. As a result, many young Bosnians have at best a loose connection to their faith.

That makes Bosnian Muslims no less proud of their background, however.

Those Muslims who sought a religious community when they arrived in Utica after fleeing the Bosnian war found a small, but devout community of Muslims already here to welcome them. Indeed, a visitor attending the Friday Jumah prayer at the Kemble Street mosque sees not only Bosnian Muslims, but also Pakistani, Lebanese and Afghan Muslims, among others.

They respond to the call to prayer by lining up along the duct-taped markers on the floor, pointing the worshippers toward Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the religious heart of Islam.

“It’s like the United Nations in here,” said Lenariss Patterson, an African-American convert to Islam. “Look around at all the different-looking brothers and sisters. But we share a common denominator, and that’s that we all love, we all feel pain, and we all come together in front of God.”

Most Bosnian Muslims in Utica do not attend mosque on a regular basis. This fact should not surprise people who have grown up in the United States, according to Samir Buljubasic, a Bosnian who arrived in Utica in 1999 and now runs his own business.

“In Bosnia, religion wasn’t pushed much,” Buljubasic said. “It’s kind of like here. Some Christians go to church on Sundays, some don’t. Some houses are filled with Jesus Christ, and some aren’t.”

Buljubasic and others in the former Yugoslavia grew up during a time in which religions of any kind did not have the full protection of the state. While Yugoslavia’s communist regime did not outwardly ban the practice of religion in the states, it provided many incentives for its citizens to refrain from public practice.

Once communism receded as a force in the late 1980s and Yugoslavia broke into multiple smaller countries, the religious forces that had been held in check exploded. Serbs, who are mainly Orthodox; Croats, who are mainly Catholic and Bosnians, who are mainly Muslim, all wound up fighting each other in a series of wars between 1991 and 1995.

But that’s not the world in which many Utica Bosnians grew up. The older refugees recall a time when religious practice was hindered.

“The problem was that you couldn’t be in the Communist Party and also be religious,”said Bahrudin Kajtezovic, who has been living in Utica for six years. “I used to go to mosque and Sunday school and pray and I never had any problems. But you couldn’t advance in your career and have success if you were openly religious, because you couldn’t be in the Communist Party.”

The 26-year-old Kajtezovic points to his own family as an example.

“My father wasn’t religious at all, even though my grandfather was very religious,” he said. “And now I’m very religious. My father never stopped me from going to mosque or praying. And he respected his father’s choice, just like now I respect my father’s choice.”

Kajtezovic represents a smaller segment of the younger Bosnian population in his religious devotion, as he prays as many of the five daily prayers as he can, doesn’t smoke or drink, and tries to live by the principles set out in the Quran, the Islamic holy book. He even plans his Friday lunch break in order to attend Jumah prayer at the mosque.

Many feel that Bosnians Muslims are different than Muslims from other parts of the world because of their communist background. The casual practice of many Bosnian Muslims coupled with the fact that most don’t distinguish themselves by the way they dress lead many to consider it a more liberal form of Islam than that found in other parts of the world. “Bosnians are European, first and foremost,” said Etin Anwar, professor of Islamic studies at Hamilton College. “Europe is a secular culture, and the Bosnians’ more secular approach to Islam reflects this.”

Tone Bringa also pointed to the origin of Islam in Bosnia. Bringa, a specialist in Bosnian Muslims at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway, said Bosnians first began to convert to Islam when the Ottoman Turks conquered the region in 1463.

“The Ottomans had a very tolerant approach to religions,” Bringa said. “During the empire, Bosnia was a haven for all sorts of religions, including the Jews who fled from Spain during the Inquisition. Jews and Muslims were living next door to, and actually living with, Christians in the community. The boundaries were very fluid.”

Another reason some people consider Bosnian Muslims to be different than Muslims elsewhere is that for many Bosnians, being Muslim is as much as ethnic marker as it is a religious one.

Adem Hamzic, a bilingual teacher at Proctor High School, explained that Bosnian Muslims don’t all believe in God.

“People see my name and say, oh, you’re a Muslim,” Hamzic said. “And I guess I am, but I don’t believe in God, no. Bosnian Muslims are different.”

His wife, Lidija, agreed.

“The Bosnian Muslims were recognized by Tito’s constitution in the seventies as a nationality, not a religious feature,” she said. “So when you see a Bosnian Muslim, you don’t necessarily know that that person is a Muslim believer. There were many nonbelievers, too.”

Bosnians in the United States are free to practice their religion as much as or as little as they want to.

While they no longer feel pressures from a government to refrain from practice, there are other pressures.

“I don’t barely ever practice,” said Dzevad Racic, volunteers coordinator of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees. “There just isn’t time, with school and work.”

Racic emphasized that the most important thing for any Muslim is to try to lead a good life.

“I try to be a good person, be a good father, teach my son who I am and where I came from,” he said. “That’s what it is to be a good Muslim.”

While many say there are differences between Bosnian Muslims and other Muslims, many more point to their similarities.

“Islam is Islam,” Bahrudin Kajtezovic said. “Islam teaches us that we are all equal and the same in front of God. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, old, young, whatever. All are equal. We read the same Quran, we worship the same God, we pray the same prayers at the same times. Our holidays are on the same days.”

Small differences matter little for local Muslims, who understand that Muslims come in many shapes, sizes and colors. Some pray with their hands by their chests, others with their hands by their waists. Some go to mosque every week, some every year, and some every day.

This is as true for Bosnians as it is for Muslims from any other part of the world. “These are all such small differences,” Muslim Community Association coordinator Yasser Chebli said. “We have much more in common than differences.”

Chebli hopes that a larger building will bring more people together for prayer and activities.

“This association is open for every Muslim of any ideology, because this is the house of God,” Chebli said. “It’s a place of sanctuary, it’s a place of peace.”

Chebli said even Utica’s Shiite Muslims sometimes come to the Kemble Street mosque for salat.

They prayed at the Islamic Center on Cornelia Street, which is now only occasionally open. So even though teen-aged Ajdin Lovic looks like he might feel more comfortable on a basketball court than in a mosque, he could be as “typical” a Muslim as any in Utica.

Which is, of course, not very typical at all.