The role of the Serbian Orientalists in justifying genocide against the Bosniak population of Bosnia is not well known. Norman Cigar wrote an excellent paper in which he analyzed the way in which the Serbian scholarship on Islam enabled genocide.

THREAD 1/

The Orientalists used every trope known to an Islamophobe in order to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In some ways, they have created a playbook from which the Islamophobes freely draw until today. 2/

The nationalist rhetoric created in Serbia against the Balkans Muslims, but especially the Bosniaks, set the stage for the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, and for the ensuing ethnic cleansing and genocide campaigns. 3/

First, the Serbian Orientalists claimed the Bosniaks were different from anyone else - they are inferior, abnormal, and so any violence against them is permissible. 4/

Then comes the inevitable trope that Muslims are aliens and, therefore, do not belong in Europe or the West in general. 5/

Islam is a remnant of the past. It doesn't belong in modern civilization. 6/

Islam is a violent religion (ok, not original, but it has to be brought up every time). 7/

Bosniaks are traitors because they have converted from Christianity to Islam. As apostates, they are worse than even the Turks. 8/

Finally, this "scholarly" discourse set the stage for the actual violence that the Serbs visited on the Bosniaks during the 1992-1995 aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina. 9/

This bears repeating for we are seeing similar tropes in scholarship on Islam in the West, and among the right-wing, white supremacist groups in Western countries. By reminding ourselves where such discourses lead to, we should be able to raise early warning signals. END