Asim Latić, a restaurant owner in Velika Kladuša, a Bosnian border town with Croatia, said: “In February I saw a man standing in the street in the snow. I asked if he was hungry, and he said he didn’t have any money. “I said it didn’t matter and fed him. That guy texted his friends and the next day they came. More people came, and I had to close the restaurant. Since then, we’ve given out 68,000 meals.”
Introduction The Ottoman Sultanate which later became the seat of the Caliphate in 1517 was by no means perfect. A decline in Islamic thought, weakness in the Arabic language and closing the doors of ijtihad all had an impact on the implementation of Islam across the state. Yet despite this, the Ottoman State remained an Islamic State, and its concepts, criteria and convictions were Islamic. Legislation and administrative laws (kanun) were based on sharia, even if this was a tenuous link in some cases due to the decline in ijtihad, such as the devshirme, hereditary bay’a and tanzimat reforms. When researching historical events, one must be aware that the written history contained in many books is unreliable because it contains the bias of the author or the period in which it was written. Many authors for example claim the Ottomans forced Muslims in Bosnia to convert to Islam or paint 600 years of Ottoman rule as cruel and repressive, which is simply untrue. Mladic stated his reason for the Srebrenica massacre was revenge against “Turks” …
The Caliphate is not allowed to force any non-Muslim to abandon his/her belief. Rather the non-Muslims should accept Islam after being intellectually convinced of the Islamic belief. Allah (Most High) says: لا إِكراهَ فِي الدّينِ “There is no compulsion in religion” (Al-Baqara, 2:256) Before the Ottomans liberated Bosnia, it was one of the only Balkan regions without a strong allegiance to Christianity. An independent Bosnian Church had been established in the 11th century, outside the jurisdiction of either the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, but even that was on shaky ground by the time the Ottoman’s arrived in the 15th century. Most scholars have rejected the old theory that Bosnia became a Muslim state because of an influx of Muslims that came to the region following the Ottoman invasion. Ottoman census figures show that there was in fact very little migration to Bosnia by the Turks; the increasing number of Muslims was due to the conversion of Bosnians already living in the region. In 1468-9, just after the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, the Ottomans recorded approximately …
The Ahdnama is an agreement written by Sultan Muhammed al-Fatih who is famous for conquering Constantinople and fulfilling the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammed ﷺ that Muslims would one day conquer the city. Sultan Muhammed al-Fatih’s great-great grandfather was Sultan Murad I (ra) who began the conquests to open up the Balkans to Islam. He is famous for defeating the Serbs at Kosovo field in 1389 and establishing the authority of Islam over Kosovo. Allah سبحانه وتعالى blessed Sultan Murad I with martydom (shahadah) in this battle. Sultan Muhammed’s father Murad II fought the second battle of Kosovo and began the conquests to open Bosnia to Islam. Following in the footsteps of his father and great-great grandfather, Sultan Muhammed completed their good work and opened up the entire region to Islam. Islam, the final message for mankind established clear and detailed rules relating to the rights of Christians and Jews living under the Islamic State. The Ahdnama agreement is a clear and definitive historical record of the rights Islam gave to Christians living under its …
