Ramadan karim!

"Bajraklidzamija" by Missty011 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I was moved by this NPR story on Ramadan preparations in Belgrade, of all places, where the congregation of the Bajrakli Mosque (built 1575, and last survivor of the 273 mosques of Ottoman Belgrade), where local Muslims are toiling to make sure refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere can break their fasts tonight—at the price, in some cases, of doing without themselves. Who knew there were still Muslims living in Belgrade after the horrors of the 1990s?

Serbia is still coping with some 88,000 internally displaced persons in need of assistance from those days, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, and about 43,000 from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but thousands of refugees arrive every year from the war-torn regions of the Middle East, mostly Syrian, and while most move on to elsewhere in Europe, Serbia is caring long-term for some 440 asylum seekers.

That number is around half of the "less than 1000" Syrian refugees that have been taken in by the United States since the civil war began in Syria in 2011. We're apparently worried about "security concerns" that Serbians are brave enough to ignore. That's pretty shameful, given how much responsibility the US bears for the destabilization of Syria and growth of Da'esh during the Iraq war (the reason dictator Bashar al-Assad's response to the Arab Spring was so extraordinarily violent, as we can now understand, was his fear not of the peaceful demonstrators but the Da'esh forces driven by the US to Syria from Iraq). Apparently it's about to get better, according to another NPR report, from a couple of days ago:

Anne Richard, U.S. assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, says the U.S. has received 12,000 referrals from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and she expects the number of those admitted to rise dramatically in the coming months and years.

"That's very rapidly going to change," Richard says.

I hope so.

I had a friend from Belgrade back in the day, when I was a graduate student, an ethnic Albanian and a (very secular) Muslim, who told me about the dense pluralism of what was then Yugoslavia. He remembered going out to play after school in six languages, he said. That's how it's supposed to be, and it's very heartening to hear that some of it has been reconstructed. One day in Damascus, too, Sunni, Shi'a, Christian, and Alawite kids will be playing soccer in the street together once again, as they always used to. May it be soon, and may there be Jewish kids in the mix as well. In the meantime, Ramadan karim to all.