Fifteen, Bosnian, and Building My Own Islam
My grandfather survived Srebrenica. My Islam is built on his silence — the things he never says but prays about every night.
The bullet holes are still in the buildings. They're on the National Library, on the Holiday Inn, on apartment blocks where people hang laundry and argue about football. In Sarajevo, history isn't in museums. It's in the walls.
My grandfather doesn't talk about Srebrenica. He was there. He survived. That's all I know. When the topic comes up on TV, he leaves the room. My grandmother turns up the volume as if sound can fill the shape of what he won't say.
But every night — every single night — I hear him pray tahajjud. Two o'clock in the morning, the floorboards creak, and his voice comes through the wall. Quiet. Steady. Talking to Allah about things he can't tell us.
I'm fifteen. I go to gymnasium in Baščaršija. My friends are Bosniak, Croat, Serb. We drink coffee together at Inat Kuća and argue about who makes the best ćevapi. The war ended eleven years before I was born. For my generation, it's a chapter in the history textbook between World War Two and the EU.
But it's also the reason I'm Muslim. Not because someone forced me — because I watched what faith did for the people who survived the worst thing Europe has done since 1945. My grandfather lost his brothers, his home, his country. He kept his prayer mat.
I started praying properly at thirteen. Not because of madrasah lessons — because of him. I watched his sujood and thought: whatever this man has, whatever holds him together, I want it.
My Islam is Bosnian. It's different from the Islam my Turkish friends practice, or the Saudi Islam I see online. We drink coffee, not tea. Our mosques have minarets that look like pencils. Our women wear hijab or don't — both are normal. We fast in Ramadan and make baklava with walnuts, not pistachios. We're European and Muslim and nobody gets to tell us those contradict.
At school, a teacher once asked me if I felt 'conflicted' being Muslim in Europe. I told her that Muslims built half of Sarajevo. The Ottoman bridge, the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, the Baščaršija bazaar. Islam isn't a guest in Europe. It's been here for five hundred years.
I wear my faith the way Sarajevo wears its bullet holes — openly, without shame, as proof of survival.
My grandfather heard me say that once. He didn't say anything. He just put his hand on my head. For him, that's a standing ovation.