Europe’s ‘forgotten’ Muslims: Why I wanted to write them back into the history book

I didn’t set out to write a book when my family and I boarded a plane for Sarajevo in the summer of 2016—forever the ‘Summer of Brexit’ for us Brits. I was just relieved to be getting as far away as possible from the toxic, xenophobic and Islamophobic atmosphere that had emerged in the run-up to the vote to decide if Britain wanted to remain in the European Union.

I remember stepping onto that Austrian Airlines flight from London’s Heathrow airport in late July feeling quite disillusioned and dismayed by the country I called home.

But mostly, I remember feeling relieved.

The stuff we had been reading, the conversations we had been having—trying to counter the bullshit claims that ‘swarms’ of migrants and refugees were the source of our national mire (all in vain it seemed)—had left my wife Tamara and I absolutely exhausted, and so we made a pact. As we boarded the plane with our two daughters, we promised to ignore the news back home throughout our time abroad. It was just all too much.

I didn’t know it at the time, but our destination, the Western Balkans—home to Europe’s very own Muslim countries—was the perfect antidote to Brexit’s toxicity; in more ways than one. In little under five hours, our family of European Muslims had gone from a corner of the continent so paralyzed by the fear of ‘Eastern’ European immigrants and Muslim refugees that it had decided it no longer wanted to be a part of Europe, to another where being Muslim and of the ‘East’ was the most natural thing in the world.

The bridge was too brilliant to have been built by ‘barbarian’ Muslims; it simply had to be a Roman, claimed the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in his 1897 book, ‘Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina’.

We had planned a journey through six countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro; each of them home to large numbers of Indigenous European Muslims. The route we mapped out would start and end in a Muslim European city; Sarajevo, founded by the Ottoman Empire in 1461.

To guide us, I had brought along the writings of the Ottoman traveler, Evliya Celebi, who visited the western Balkans in the 17th century, when it was part of Muslim Ottoman Europe. Celebi was there to show me this Muslim Europe through his eyes; a perspective I had hitherto struggled to find.

All the English writing on the Balkans I had encountered up to that point had been written by non-Muslims; writers that viewed anything Islamic in Europe as foreign, alien and ‘other’. In other words, they did not see it as European and therefore did not see it as theirs—it didn’t matter to them that Muslims had been in Europe for 14 centuries.

The impact of Celebi’s lens was immediate. I remember sitting in that pristine aircraft unable to contain my excitement, as smiling cabin crew in loud red blazers and matching lipstick poured me a drink, that I would finally get to visit the ‘Jerusalem of Europe’, Sarajevo. An excitement borne out of a lifetime of reading white, Western literature that had exoticized the city and its tolerant culture because of how it stood in stark contrast to the pre-20th century Western Europe they knew.

But not for Evliya Celebi. In his world, there was nothing exotic about Sarajevo’s Abrahamic faiths co-existing. In every single town Celebi visited, he reported Christians, Jews and Muslims living together under the Ottoman millet system. Within hours of arriving in Sarajevo, Celebi had shown me just how different a place looked through lenses other than those I had become accustomed to.

Celebi’s lens changed everything. By ‘taking off’ the western European lens I had inherited—the lens that all Western travel writers inherit—a whole ‘other’ world was revealing itself to me. Europe’s Muslim heritage had been hidden in plain sight.

The more sinister way in which this had been done became apparent at the stunning Stari Most Bridge in Mostar. The bridge had been commissioned by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and built by a student of the great Mimar Sinan during the Ottoman Empire’s 16th-century Golden Age.

I learnt how the bridge that Celebi described as ‘peerless’ was targeted and destroyed during the 1990s Bosnian War in what one Harvard onlooker called ‘cultural genocide’—meanwhile, a literal genocide was being committed against the country’s Muslims at the same time. However, I also came upon the examples of blatant Islamophobia in historic Western European literature; the kind of stuff that paved the way for those war crimes and would be echoed in the Brexit rhetoric.

My book has shown that history left unexamined can create huge blind spots.

The bridge was too brilliant to have been built by ‘barbarian’ Muslims; it simply had to be a Roman, claimed the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in his 1897 book, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina. The French painter Charlotte de Lazen considered it a ‘marvellous remnant of Latin civilization’ in the midst of ‘Turkish barbarity’.

These writings, highly celebrated at the time, inevitably informed early modern perceptions of Europe’s Muslim lands and people; and it is this type of literary heritage upon which modern Western travel literature is founded.

It was shortly after our time in Mostar that I realized this trip was my book. I can still remember almost the exact moment it dawned on us. We were driving along the floor of the Neretva Canyon just north of the city, craggy cliffs on one side and the shimmering blue waters of the river the canyon was named after on the other.

“Look, another mosque in the mountains!” I said, pointing to a minaret in the distance.

“That should be the title of your book,” Tamara said, phone in hand as she filmed the spectacular scenery outside.

“What? Mosques in the Mountains?”

Tamara thought for a while; then smiled. “No; Minarets in the Mountains!”

The book came out in July 2021 and was long- and shortlisted for the biggest literary prizes in non-fiction and travel. It went on to win the British Guild of Travel Writers’ Adele Evans Award for best non-fiction travel book of 2022. This response suggests most people ‘got it’. They understood that our popular perception of places and people have been largely dictated to us by the historic lens we have had access to; in other words, the historic travel literature that has shaped popular perceptions of the modern world, which all too often was written from a very narrow perspective, by a very small demographic.

My book has shown that history left unexamined can create huge blind spots. This is why the responses to Minarets that gave me the most satisfaction were the truly candid ones, often sent to me in private, like this honest lady from Germany, who I quote with her consent:

“I knew very little about the Balkans and even less about the Muslim history of the region, and I found your book just fascinating. It encouraged me to consider and re-evaluate my own prejudices and assumptions about what it is to be European.”

As creators and consumers of travel literature, we therefore have to ask ourselves: What are our blind spots? What unconscious bias do we carry about the peoples and places we write or read about? Because one thing is absolutely certain: We all have them, as uncomfortable as that might make us.

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Tharik Hussain’s debut book, Minarets in the Mountains: A Journey into Muslim Europe, was published by Bradt in July 2021.

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