Journey to Srebrenica
The Bosnia Journey (13)
Friday, 12 Dhul-Ḥijjah 1447 AH
By Dr Muhammad Akram al-Nadwi
Oxford
We set out at daybreak—eight o’clock in the morning—toward Srebrenica on two coaches that parted the Bosnian mountains so gently they seemed afraid of rousing the profound hush enfolding the land. The cold was mild yet pierced the soul more than the body, and loose clouds clung to the peaks. The road wound through dark forests, the pines arrayed on the slopes like silent sentinels guarding a memory that refuses to die.
I sat in the first coach among my companions. Hearts, ahead of tongues, had already begun the conversation, and questions rained on me as a soft drizzle patters on a windscreen: questions about faith when the earth, vast as it is, feels tight; about the signs of the Last Hour; about the mystery of trials that descend on the believers, and why people of truth are tested though the light of certainty shines in their breasts. In the eyes that questioned lay a hidden unease—scarcely visible yet deeply felt, like the chill before sunrise—the unease of a generation watching a world in turmoil and asking where mercy can be found amid this towering heap of pain.
The journey felt long—not by distance but by the weight it laid on the spirit. The deeper the buses drove into the mountains, the deeper the silence became, until even our own voices seemed to echo inside our chests before reaching the air. After an hour and a half I moved to the second coach and found faces that mirrored the first—young people whose eyes carried questions older than themselves and sorrows they had not made but had inherited from this turbulent world.
Nature around us was beautiful to the point of pain: crystal rivers, villages resting between hills like painted scenes. Yet the heart could not yield to that innocent loveliness, for the mere name “Srebrenica” turned greenery into mourning robes and the breeze into the long sigh of bereaved mothers.
The nearer we drew, the clearer we sensed that we were moving not toward a location but toward an open wound in humanity itself. In that tranquil spot, now dozing among the mountains, thousands of Muslims were slaughtered unjustly; men and boys fell because their very names attested they were Muslim. There an entire city was abandoned by the world, its massacre watched as if human blood could be reduced to a passing headline.
The grief that filled us was no fleeting sadness; it was a silent shattering. We felt the earth beneath our feet preserve beneath its dust an ancient groan, and we imagined the surrounding trees had witnessed cries no one heard. Whenever we glimpsed a white cemetery spilling over a green slope, it seemed the graves themselves spoke—not with words but with that heavy silence speech cannot bear.
Only then did I understand our journey to Srebrenica was not a visit but a confrontation with the meaning of human pain, with the enduring question: how can man reach such cruelty, and how does faith stay alive amid all this ruin?
Yet amid the sorrow we felt something else: a secret vow that blood is never forgotten, that tragedies meant for burial remain alive in the conscience of the free. For that reason Srebrenica is not a city of death alone; it is everlasting witness that oppression may triumph for an hour, but it can never erase truth so long as a heart remembers, a tongue narrates, and a spirit refuses to forget.
We entered Srebrenica at about eleven. The sky lay under grey clouds like funeral cloth spread on the town for thirty years and never lifted. A small city leaning against the eastern Bosnian mountains in majestic silence: no urban din, no market bustle, but a stillness reminiscent of graves once the mourners have gone.
Dense trees surrounded it like aging guards protecting a memory heavy with tears and blood. One might believe the rocks kept children’s screams in their crevices and that the evening wind returned to the valley the echoes of those ancient cries.
Before the war Srebrenica had been a quiet resort of mineral springs, a place of rest and ease. Life flowed there peacefully, as in small villages that know only labor’s fatigue and the simplicity of living—until the hand of man, harsher than that of time, turned that calm corner into an open gash upon history’s face.
In July 1995 the town fell after a long siege, fear devouring hearts the way fire devours dry wood. Then came catastrophe—beyond mind’s imagining and tongue’s describing. Men and boys were rounded up: a son torn from his mother’s hand, a brother from his brother’s embrace, a father from children who thought soldiers would merely question them. The victims bore no arms, sought no war; they wanted simply to live, but in those days belonging to Islam was accusation enough for death.
More than eight thousand Muslims were killed within days, until the land filled with corpses and the forests with fugitives fleeing from death into death. Many women were driven to humiliation, rape and exile, bearing children, memories and pain on the long roads of displacement, while the world watched on cold screens as though the blood were not human but a passing item in the late-night news.
We reached Potočari—a name that now signifies an endless human wake. In the genocide-memorial museum silence was so heavy it choked the breath. Even our footfalls seemed out of place, as though no sound should rise above the voices of memory. On the walls were photographs of men once laughing, now numbers on death lists, and of children whose greatest pre-war worry was getting home before dark.
A documentary was shown—those few minutes felt an age of pain. We saw men separated from families at gunpoint, their pale faces foreseeing the end. We saw mothers clinging to sons the way a drowning woman clings to driftwood, until cruel hands wrenched them away, and something fell in the mother’s heart never to rise again. We saw children gaze at soldiers with innocence, unable to grasp why humans become beasts: some still smiling, thinking it soon over; others crying from hunger or fear, unaware death stood steps away.
When footage of buses packed with women and the elderly appeared, a painful hush fell on us. One brother bowed his head long, ashamed at humanity’s impotence; another wiped a quick tear; a third sat frozen, for grief beyond a limit paralyses body and tongue.
As for me, a weight descended on my chest until I almost suffocated. What tore me most was not the dreadful tally of dead but the bitter sense that the whole world was present—yet did nothing. The UN was there, soldiers were there, cameras were there, all humanity was there—except mercy. Conscience itself seemed that day to stand idle, watching the slaughter with a coldness fit only for stone.
We went out to the cemetery, and only there did we grasp that the film was but a pale shadow of truth. Thousands of white headstones stretched in rows whose end the eye could scarcely reach, as though the earth had sprouted a forest of white marble. Beneath each stone lay a house demolished, a mother bereaved, a child who slept one night and never woke again.
Wind passed among the graves, stirring grass like the breaths of the dead. Reading a name or a birth date stabbed the heart anew: here a youth not yet seventeen; there a father in his forties awaiting his children’s growing; there an old man past sixty who thought a long life would spare him—yet he fell like the young.
There we saw the poverty of all words. No sermon can contain such pain; no book can bear such sorrow. Language itself weeps for its impotence.
I walked among the graves, recalling Allah’s words: “Think not of those slain in the path of Allah as dead; they are alive with their Lord, well provided.” A sorrow-tinged serenity slipped into my heart. The place brimmed with death, yet also with a hidden meaning of life: as though the martyrs’ spirits still guarded that silent valley, whispering to every passer-by that oppression may kill bodies but never truth.
We left the cemetery changed. Srebrenica etched a scar upon our souls and taught us some cities are not merely visited—they are carried in the heart for life.
Next we went to a nearby mosque for Friday Prayer. Small and unadorned, yet an awe filled its corners, as though prayers uttered in its darkest hours still clung to walls and roof. We entered in heavy tranquillity, each walking as if afraid to wake a sleeping grief.
Dr Abu Zayd ascended the minbar. His voice was gentle yet bore the weight of long pain. He spoke of patience born from the heart of calamity; of memory and the duty not to let injustice fade into an old report. Nations, he said, do not die when defeated but when they forget; those killed here asked only that their names live on in conscience.
At times his voice sank to a whisper, then trembled back, as though the words themselves were weeping. I have never seen humility like that prayer. Faces were worn by what they had seen, hearts laden with what they had heard; prostration seemed longer than usual, as though people found in the earth a refuge to ease their souls’ burden.
After prayer we went to a small restaurant beside the mosque. Its windows looked on green mountains standing in a stillness that stirred sorrow, as though nature pursued its ancient beauty, oblivious to tragedies under its shade.
We sat, yet our conversation was no longer what it had been. The many questions of the morning were gone, replaced by a long silence broken only by scattered words. Each withdrew into himself, alone with pain.
One stared afar, pondering life’s fragility; another contemplated justice, asking in silence how one finds security in a world where innocents are murdered and killers live on untroubled; a third sat motionless, still seeing the endless white graves.
Even the few subdued laughs were hesitant, seeking the place’s permission to emerge. They were not laughter of joy but tentative attempts to lighten sorrow’s weight.
In a few hours Srebrenica had altered something within us all. We arrived with reports we had read; we left with a wound we had seen.
We departed around four. The sun drooped behind the mountains, casting pale sorrowful light over graves, houses and roads, as though the day itself prepared to depart in reverence. The buses rolled slowly; Srebrenica receded, but not from our hearts.
Leaving, I felt not that I exited a city but that I left a long lesson in human suffering: how man may descend to the depths of savagery, and how faith, despite everything, stands upon the rubble, unbroken.
Some cities are visited for pleasure, some for knowledge, others leave no trace. Srebrenica enters the heart like a wound and remains—not only because of its cemeteries, but because there one sees humanity’s fragility when it abandons mercy, and the grandeur of the human spirit when it endures the nearly unendurable.
We drove back to Sarajevo as night slowly draped the Bosnian mountains. The coach was unusually quiet; only engine and tyres against the damp road were heard. Some brothers, overcome by fatigue, leaned on windows; others stared into silent darkness, fearful those feelings would vanish amid life’s ordinary din.
We reached the hotel at seven. Everything there seemed as we had left: lights, streets, passers-by. But we were not as we had been, for we carried within us something of Srebrenica—its deep sorrow, its heavy silence, its indelible memory.
Night deepened; traffic ebbed; the city seemed to rest from the weight of the day. I turned to some work, yet the heart was elsewhere—something of Srebrenica still hung in the soul.
I prayed Maghrib and ʿIshāʾ in my room—longer in humility, deeper in presence. Whenever I raised my hands in supplication, the white graves of Potočari returned, and I felt words too narrow for what the soul held. Some journeys change not only what we see but how we look at life itself.
Later we dined in the hotel restaurant. Faces showed fatigue, but spirits, though weary, were still awake, bound to the day’s experience. Professors from the Peace Institute joined us; we discussed Qurʾānic verses in a conversation of hearts, far from dry debate.
The Institute then held its farewell session for the students. Director Abu Farhan spoke words of gratitude and affection; teachers and students shared memories of the journey. I spoke of the journey’s benefit, of the company of scholars and the righteous, of how one may read much of history and faith yet grasp their realities only when seeing them with his own eyes, living them with people who remind him of Allah when he forgets and steady him when his heart wavers. The greatest gain from travel, I said, is not the number of lands seen but the imprint the road leaves upon the soul.
The gathering was quiet and moving, tinged with the sadness of parting and the sweetness of memory. Each speaker made me feel the journey had been not merely movement between cities but a hidden passage within souls.
The session ended after half past ten. We retired to our rooms, heavy with fatigue yet far from sleep. I sat a while at the window, contemplating Sarajevo’s silence and recalling the mountain road, the white graves, the faces on the coach, the imam’s words.
Thus the day ended—beginning with questions on the road, closing with silent contemplation. Between the two, Srebrenica stood in the heart as a wound that will not heal, a lesson the soul will never forget so long as life remains within it.
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