There is nothing unusual in the fact that a religious official of the Islamic Community and a priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church hang out.
This is how Branimir Borovcanin, priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and imam Ensar Vila, both employed in Mostar, begin the interview.
The two forty-year-olds have been friends for years, and lately, they have been united by their love for football.
Borovcanin is also a teacher of Orthodox religious education in several schools in Mostar. He has been living in Mostar for about fifteen years, with a little over 4.000 inhabitants of Serbian nationality.
Vila is an imam in the suburbs of Mostar, where the majority Bosniak population lives. According to the latest census from 2013, there are about 46.000 Bosniaks living in Mostar.
How did sport bring the effendi and the priest closer together?
The Mostar priest and the effendi play together in a football club. It is a project of the Mostar Universal Sports School ”Fortuna”.
They are both soccer players on the senior team that plays in the local soccer league.
”It is a completely normal, natural thing. We see it in the world, we see it here too, that people of different nationalities, and religions, play together, train together, have their own goals, and go towards those goals. We also have our own goal here. So, we also have a religious basis for such a thing, regardless of which religion it is, whether it is Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Islam, i.e. these monotheistic religions,” imam Vila stated.
Branimir Borovcanin, the priest of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Mostar, points out that sports should connect people, not divide them.
”Ensar and I somehow came into the public eye to try and connect people in this way, but it is nothing new. We have known each other for many years, this cooperation between the Islamic community and the Orthodox Church has been going on for 15 years, both in the Republika Srpska (RS) and in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH),” priest Borovcanin points out.
Cooperation between the Islamic community and the Serbian Orthodox Church in Mostar
Priest Borovcanin and imam Vila point out that the cooperation between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Islamic community in Mostar has been going on for years.
”God created everyone differently, we have to respect each other’s differences and accept each other as such in the full sense of the word,” Borovcanin emphasized, Radio Slobodna Evropa writes.
E.Dz.
