Understanding Medjugorje : A Khaldunian Approach to a Marian Apparition

Sociologists have generally treated the reports of the Marian apparitions at the Bosnian village of Medjugorje (starting in 1981) as religious phenomena. The later eruption of war in that region, on the other hand, was cast as an ethnic conflict – albeit one that split on supposedly religious lines. This discursive divide stems from the standard sociological treatment of ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’ as being fundamentally different sorts of things. In the standard view, “religion” has to do with beliefs and organizations, while ‘ethnicity’ is a matter of tribal, ultimately biological, heritage. Unlike Western sociologists, Ibn Khaldun famously applied the same conceptual resources to religion and to ethnicity, seeing them both as potential sources of “groupfeeling”. Both could sustain group identities in the face of conflict and change, and in the same way. This article evaluates the Khaldunian approach by placing “the miracles at Medjugorje” in the context of southwestern Bosnia’s locally constituted ‘ethnic’ identities. It tracks the complex ways in which both religion and ethnicity were used to heighten group divisions. It ultimately concludes, however, that the Khaldunian approach does not adequately capture the dynamics of either the ‘miracles’ or of the instrumentalism that drove the Bosnian conflict.

1 "Understanding Medjugorje" pass on to everyone. Peace and forbearance among God's people, the priests, and all the people of the world. (Bax, 1990, p. 66) The apparitions continued daily, first on the hillside, then later in the church rectory, during which the Virgin transmitted teachings about both Christianity and about the world to her believers. Calling herself the "Queen of Peace", she typically urged people to pray, fast, confess, and take communion. From the beginning, villagers reported miraculously swift healings, similar to those experienced in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which was at that time growing in influence in both America and Italy. (Indeed, the parish priest, Father Branko, had attended a Renewal meeting in Italy just two years before, during which he supposedly received visions of the special relationship between the Holy Mother and his parish. See Bax, 1990, p. 66). Within a short time, the evening meetings on 'Apparition Hill' had grown to a few thousand people, mostly locals.
Yugoslavia in 1981 was still a Communist state, under a good deal of central control, so official repression started almost immediately (Bax, 1990, p. 67). The six visionaries were investigated, access to the hill was closed, parish religious services were disrupted, and the church collection was on occasion confiscated. This had the unwanted effect of publicizing the apparitions, so that ever larger numbers of people heard about them and made pilgrimages to the village. Franciscans from abroad began organizing visits, which brought a tremendous amount of money into this previously backward region. Recognizing this, the authorities backed off -and ultimately constructed their own tourist complex at the edge of town (Bax, 1990, pp. 73, fn11). By the early 1990s, an estimated ten million pilgrims had visited, sometimes over 100,000 per day (Markle & McCrea, 1994, p. 197). Travel agents set up package tours, which included Masses in English and visits with the visionaries.
The visions continue today, though in diminished form. Accounts vary as to how many of the visionaries -now adults -continue to receive daily messages. 2 A recent message, delivered on April 25 th , 2009, is typical: Dear children! [said the Virgin Mother.] Today I call you all to pray for peace and to witness it in your families so that peace may become the highest treasure on this peaceless earth. I am 2 Markle and McCrea (1994)  your Queen of Peace and your mother. I desire to lead you on the way of peace, which comes only from God. Therefore, pray, pray, pray. Thank you for having responded to my call. 3 From the first, scholars generally treated the reports of these apparitions as religious phenomena. The visionaries were all staunch Catholics, their visions corresponded to Catholic beliefs, the content of the teachings was orthodox, the local church was in an area of a long-standing Franciscan missionizing, and so on. The millions of pilgrims who visited the site in the 1980s, along with journalists, Vatican religious inspectors, and others framed the apparitions in a language of "miracle", "charism", "prophecy", and "renewal." Sociologistsat least those writing up to the early 1990s -used the language of "pilgrimage", "religious organization", "religious competition", and "religious revitalization" (Mestrovic, 1991, pp. 136-162;Bax, 1990;Berryman, 2001).
Not all of this reportage was positive, for there was considerable behind-the-scenes wrangling between the visionaries, the local priests, and diocesan officials. This was perhaps inevitable, given the sheer numbers of visitors. Much was made (by the sociologists) of the split between the local Franciscans and the ecclesial hierarchy, the latter of whom ultimately declared the apparitions "unsubstantiated". Michael Sells reports that The increasingly wealthy Franciscans refused to cede control of several disputed local parishes to diocesan authorities. The Bishop of Mostar denounced the Medjugorje visions as a fraud.
At one point militias attached to the Medjugorje Franciscans seized the bishop, held him overnight, beat him, and ceremonially stripped him of his ecclesiastical insignia. The Medjugorje Franciscans were accused by critics of engaging in cult practices and sexual exploitation. The Franciscans accused the Bishop of similar depravities, threatened to blow up the cathedral of Mostar, and barricaded a disputed church in nearby Capljina against any effort of the Bishop to assert diocesan control. (Sells, 2003, p. 319) This is heady stuff, seemingly suitable for Grade-B movies, the tabloid press, or American daytime television, were it not for the context: beginning in 1992, an ethnic war tore apart this region of the former Yugoslavia.
Serbs, Croats, and (so-called) "Bosnian Muslims" struggled for control of Bosnia-Herzegovina from March of that year until November, 1995, when NATO intervention and the Dayton Accords brought an end to the fighting. a marker of ethnic primordialism, not of religious practice and belief. As the joke went at the time, the only difference between the three groups is which religion they didn't practice. Still, people would kill for these differences, which were seen as masking deeper gulfs. As Michael Sells (2003, p. 309) notes, "some survivors … had not viewed themselves as religious or even thought about their religious identity until they were singled out for persecution because of it." (I shall return to this remark below.) Though by no means primordial, inter-ethnic conflict extends at least to the founding of the Yugoslav state after World War I. The conflict was mainly between Serbs and Croats, the former of whom had had their own state prior to the war, while the latter had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their division was a matter of state identity, not biology or deep history, though all three were imagined by late-19 th and early-20 th century nationalist ideologues to be co-terminous (Anderson, 1991). 5 Croat dissatisfaction with Serbian dominance in the Yugoslav kingdom, and especially with the king's attempts to strengthen the central state, led to various ethnically-charged political assassinations. After invading in 1941, the Germans divided the country, setting up a puppet state in Croatia controlled by the nationalist Ustaše militia. In the next several years, and in the context of a bitter war against both Serbian Chetniks and Tito's Partisans, the Ustaše killed several hundred thousand Serbs plus tens of thousands of Jews and Roma (Simic, 2009). The victorious Tito government set up a memorial to these dead on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp. Despite that government's use of the rhetoric of "Fascists" and "Partisans" to describe the war-time conflicts, this memorial was read by many as a Serbian commemoration of Croatian atrocities -and a disregard of the atrocities that had been committed by other sides (Ignatieff, 1993, chapt 1). 4 For a history of the wars, see, inter alia, Silver and Little (1994), Cigar (1995), Tindemans et al. (1996), and West (1996). See also Ignatieff (1995). 5 Robert Borofsky (2000) points out a parallel between the nationalist supposition that each 'people' had its own language, culture, history, and body type -and thus deserved its own state -with the four-field structure of American academic anthropology, which emerged in the same era. Those fields are linguistics, cultural anthropology, archaeology (the history of those without writing), and bio-physical anthropology.

"Understanding Medjugorje"
The fact that Tito was himself a Croat dampened ethnic tensions for a while, as did the disproportionate economic development of Yugoslavia's north, where the bulk of the Croats and Slovenes lived. This balanced Serbia's relative political control, which was exercised by a Communist Party formally open to all. By the 1960s, however, the government succumbed to pressures to recognize the Yugoslavia's various ethnic components, both demographically (through identification on the national census) and institutionally, by devolving some power to Yugoslavia's regions.
The categorization of Bosniacs as "Muslims" stems from the 1968 constitutional change -the first formal identification of religion with ethnicity. The category "Bosniac" was not available, but the category "Yugoslav" was, and was mainly chosen by urbanized elites and by those who had married across ethnic lines (Sekulic, Massey & Hodson, 1994). These categories shifted with Yugoslavia's disintegration during the 1990s. Montenegrin Muslims, for example, are reportedly evenly split about whether to identify themselves as "Bosniak" or "Muslim" (Dimitrovova, 2001). The first term connects them to a country in which they do not live, and the second connects them to a religion that they often do not practice. Such are the choices that people were forced to make in this region.
Medjugorje was no stranger to these pressures and to this conflict. Though located quite close to a Bosniac-dominated part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Medjugorje is also only a few kilometers from the Croatian border. The village served as a Ustaše stronghold during World War II and "was the site of some of the most gruesome atrocities" (Sells, 2003, p. 319). Beginning in 1992, Croatian Army and civilian militias launched a concerted attack on Bosnian Muslims and Serbs living in the region. Their destruction of the town of Stolac, for example, was systematic, methodical, and precise. Catholic homes, businesses, and shrines remained untouched, but the non-Catholic heritage and property were thoroughly destroyed. Foremost among the mosques destroyed … was the Emperor's mosque … one of the three most ancient in B[osnia-]H [erzegovina]. … Eight other mosques were destroyed, including other historic works from the Ottoman period. Also … the Orthodox church of Holy Assumption … as well as ten residential areas, four urban neighborhoods, the bazaar area, … three main libraries, two public galleries of paintings … [and so on]. As in other campaigns by Catholic and Orthodox militias, the precision with which the target heritage was sought out and destroyed indicated the participation of an educated elite as advisors, including, according to reports, local Catholic art historians and professors. (Sells, 2003, pp. 317-318) 5 "Understanding Medjugorje" Bosnian Serbs launched similar attacks on Catholics and Muslims in other areas, including killing several thousand Muslim men at Srebrenica and scattering them in the surrounding fields (Carmichael, 2006, pp. 283-285). Such ethnic cleansing goes beyond mass murder; it amounts to the systematic erasure of a people's cultural heritage and being. 6 II 7 Ibn Khaldûn built his work around three key ideas: a distinction between nomadic and sedentary peoples; the importance of al 'assabiyyah 8 or "group-feeling" in each of these people's fortunes; and the role of religion -specifically Islam -in transforming or augmenting group-feeling. In the Kitâb al-'Ibar, his history of the world (usually known as The Muqaddimah, from its introduction: Ibn Khaldûn, 1377-99), he used them to explain the rise and decline of various Moslem kingdoms. Ibn Khaldûn saw history as a cyclic struggle between barbarism and civilization -"tribes" and "cities," to use a popular shorthand (Lechner, 1994). In his vision, nomads are typified by "Badâwah": "bedouinity" or "desert attitude". They live a rude and savage life, forced by their harsh surroundings to endure with little and work hard for what they get. Individuals cannot survive here, and are thus of no consequence. The tribe works as a unit, especially in response to outside threats. Compelled to courage and fortitude, its members support each other against all comers (Ibn Khaldûn, 1377-99, vol 1, pp. 249-58) .
"Hatharah" -"town-dwelling" or "sedentarisation" -on the other hand, typifies settled peoples, who are civilized, stable, and rich. Agriculture, trading, and such livelihoods let them accumulate wealth. The resulting softer life gives them softer characters, so they lack nomadic bravery. They think more of themselves and less of their neighbors, turning to magistrates and rulers to defend them both against their fellow citizens and against hostile outsiders. They depend on laws, not persons. In short, their living makes them weaker, so that they depend on social institutions for support (vol 1, pp. 249-50, 257-60). 6 The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) considers "ethnic cleansing" a crime against humanity, not as severe as "genocide". A few Bosnian Serbs were convicted of "genocide", Croats of at most "ethnic cleansing", and Bosnian Muslims of "breaches of the Geneva Conventions". See the ICTY website: http://www.icty.org/. Deaths to each group were in reverse proportion. 7 A previous version of the material in this section can be found in Spickard (2001). Dhaouadi's (1990) transliteration rather than Rosenthal's (1958), largely to avoid the latter's more complex diacritics.
6 "Understanding Medjugorje" Ibn Khaldûn argued that these two social types live in tension with each other. Harsh life makes tribes strong and fierce, which enables them to conquer their softer neighbors. On doing so, they become rulers, who settle down and take on the civilized habits of their subjects. After a couple of generations of sedentary life, they have lost their unity, and so fall to the next barbarian wave. Khaldûn saw the history of his native Maghreb, of Islam, and indeed of the Mediterranean world since Roman times as a cyclical history of conquest. Tribes overwhelmed cities, became civilized, and were overwhelmed by other tribes in their turn.
Cyclical theories of history (e.g., Toynbee, 1934Toynbee, -1961Spengler, 1918Spengler, -1922 typically have a motor, and Ibn Khaldûn's is no different. The differing requirements of desert versus settled life make tribes and citydwellers unlike one another -and these differences shape history. Yet it is not so much individual character that distinguishes tribal from city people, as their differing al 'assabiyyah. Usually translated as "group-feeling," "esprit de corps," or "spirit of kinship," al 'assabiyyah denotes the emotion that leads group members to support one another. Derived from the Arabic root 'assab, "to bind," Ibn Khaldûn uses it to mean blood relationship in general, partisanship for the blood relatives, mutual partisanship and the vital force of a tribe or people which is expressed in common will. (Dhaouadi, 1990, p. 325) This group-feeling ties tribal people together; for Ibn Khaldûn, that is especially true for nomads. Lacking economic resources and even a secure livelihood, nomads must depend on their group or die. Some scholars thus see in al 'assabiyyah a substitute for the strength and security that richer societies provide (Al-Jabri, 1983).
Yet, Ibn Khaldûn did not see complex societies as having something that nomads lack; on the contrary, he claimed the opposite. City dwellers not only lack the personal fortitude found among nomads, they also lack their strong group-feeling and their common will. This makes it harder for them to respond to emergencies, which leads to their eventual defeat. Law and armies compensate somewhat for weak al 'assabiyyah, but they cannot replace it. Nomads' superior group-feeling and lack of regard for outsiders allows them a single-minded brutality that ultimately prevails. But Ibn Khaldûn says that it does not prevail for long. The nomads' victory brings booty, wealth, and rich living. This weakens their al 'assabiyyah, for which they substitute laws, mercenary armies, and so on. Ultimately, they become weak enough to fall to others.
At root, this is a centripetal (or center-focused) theory of group formation -one of two basic models of group behavior (see Thye and Lawler, 2002). In this model, groups form by internal attraction: members feel connected to one another and support one another out of this connection. Alternatively, groups can form by division: i.e., as a result of inter-group conflict, which leads each party to consolidate out of fear and for self-7 "Understanding Medjugorje" protection. Most modern theories take the latter route, emphasizing either intergroup competition (e.g., Hannan, 1979) or reactions against the pressures of modernity (e.g., Hechter, 1975;cf Nielsen, 1985).
Émile Durkheim (1893) famously emphasized the former. Like Ibn Khaldûn, he posited two polar types of society based on people's practical lives, though he reversed their attractive valence. Where Durkheim saw simpler societies tied together by external laws and compulsion ("mechanical solidarity"; see Giddens, 1978), Khaldûn saw tribes as knit from within. Where Durkheim saw complex societies as strengthened by their internal interdependence ("organic solidarity"), Khaldûn saw them as weakened by their lack of common will.
Most notably, where Durkheim found social solidarity problematic for simpler peoples, tracing what linkages they have to common ideas, Khaldûn saw tribes as mores strongly tied together by group-feeling. 9 Again, group-feeling is grounded in the requirements of practical life. Describing the economic development of cities, Ibn Khaldûn wrote: When civilization [population] increases, the available labor again increases. In turn, luxury again increases in correspondence with the increasing profit, and the customs and needs of luxury increase. Crafts are created to obtain luxury products. The value realized from them increases, and, as a result, profits are again multiplied in the town. Production there is thriving even more than before. And so it goes with the second and third increase. All the additional labor serves luxury and wealth, in contrast to the original labor that served the necessity of life. (vol II, What decreases, here, is the willingness of people to give up their luxuries for the group -the willingness to take risks and accept hardship as that group struggles for power. People are not all in the same situation, and it shows. In Ibn Khaldûn's view, this is a fatal weakness. It leads to the continuing cycle by which tribes conquer cities, become civilized, weaken, and are conquered in turn. This is where religion enters Ibn Khaldûn's model. He saw religion -specifically Islam -as an independent source of group-feeling. Islam, he said, could counteract a group's particularism, lending it the strength and unity that it needs to triumph (vol I, pp 305-6, 319-27). He used this insight to explain the Arab conquests -which had been wide-ranging, sudden, and -given his reading of Arab social life -unexpected. In 9 Solidarity's emotional side appears in Durkheim's later work (1915), where it supports the sacred ideas that he says prop up the social order. For Khaldûn, the emotional bond comes first; ideas may support it, but also undercut it -and are secondary in any case. 8 "Understanding Medjugorje" his description, the early Arabs were the most barbarous of peoples, because their life as camel herders kept them in the most nomadic condition. They thus had strong group-feeling, courage, and fortitude, but were the most remote from civilization. Their group-feeling was limited to blood relations, and their warfare produced pillage and ruin, not empire (vol I, pp 251-2, 302ff).
Islam, with its emphasis on good conduct and discipline, helped overcome this savagery. It expanded Arab group-feeling to encompass more than kin, allowing the growth of royal authority (which Khaldûn saw as the natural result of group-feeling). This would normally have lowered their al 'assabiyyah, yet Islam kept it high. The group-feelings of various tribes and clans did not vanish, but were submerged into a wider unity that made the Arab empire possible (vol I, 284-5, 305-6, 313-27). Prophetic religion proved a good proxy for kinship -and a stronger force than city-dwellers' armies and laws.
Soon, though, the natural decline of group-feeling set in. Having conquered, the Arabs took on civilized habits and lost their al 'assabiyyah. City life lowered their common will below the point that Islam made any difference. Their empire split into kingdoms, whose dynasties rose and fell with the rise and fall of various tribal solidarities. Seljuqs, Almoravids, Turks, Berbers, and others came to power and then were absorbed or swept away in the pattern of invasion and conquest that Khaldûn traced back 1000 years. Religious group-feeling came to be but one among scores of group-feelings that typified the ethnically and territorially diverse Moslem world.
Regimes rose or fell, peoples conquered or faced away in a complex dance of these many 'assabiyyaht (vol I,vol II,. Ibn Khaldûn's work is thus not just a history of nomadic conquest; it is the first sociology of a multiethnic society, one in which religion played a key but varied role. Khaldûn saw religion as a parallel means of solidarity, alongside kinship, ethnicity, and so on. All were active in both tribes and cities, but in different strengths and combinations. The key element of his sociology, for our purposes, is that it puts ethnic groupfeeling and religious group-feeling into the same mix. This explains a lot about the events at Medjugorje that standard sociology cannot.

III
In Bosnia, the public dividing line between "Croat", "Serb", and "Bosniac" was "religion" -but this was treated as a marker of ethnicity, not a matter of personal belief or practice. Standard sociology sees "religion" and "ethnicity" as being fundamentally different sorts of things. "Religion" is imagined to be a matter of beliefs and of personal participation in religious life -increasingly an individual choice -while "ethnicity" is believed to be a matter of biological breeding and tribal allegiance. Objectively, it was hard to distinguish between the three 9 "Understanding Medjugorje" warring Yugoslav groups. All spoke the same language, possessed the same blood, hair, and skin types, andindeed -had interbred for hundreds of years. Biological difference was an illusion. Nor were the various groups divided by residence, though different villages had differently balanced populations. Even their pasts were not as separate as later nationalist ideologies led outsiders to believe (Silber & Little, 1994). That's what surprised the world: that generations-long neighbors would turn on one another, murderously. This was not supposed to happen in modern times.
Standard sociology does see a connection between religion and ethnicity, but one that is intrinsic to neither of them. Put succinctly, it sees them both as artifacts of a 'traditional' past. Western sociology was born out of an effort to understand Europe's industrialization (Giddens, 1976), and did so by distinguishing "modernity" from "tradition". This took various forms in the classic sociological writers: Marx's "feudalism" versus "capitalism", Maine's "status" versus "contract", Tonnies' "Gemeinschaft" versus "Gesellschaft", Durkheim's "mechanical" versus "organic" solidarity, and Weber's efforts to describe the uniqueness of the West.
Modernity is supposed to lead people away from religion (Wilson, 1966;Berger, 1967;Dobbelaere, 2002; but see Berger, 1999;Berger, Davie & Fokas, 2008). Institutional differentiation and state expansion move religion to private life, while religious pluralism makes supernatural belief implausible; how, after all, could so many different religions be true? Modernity creates ties between formerly unlike peoples, bridging the social gaps that had previously sheltered religious belief. These gaps also -independently -sustained tribe-like group identities, which modernity is also imagined to erode. Standard sociology depicts modern people as individualistic, cosmopolitan, universal in outlook, tolerant, oriented toward rationality, self-reflective, and willing to break traditional ties for the sake of personal advancement (Giddens, 1991). Modernization theory, in particular, sees such attitudes expanding along with economic development (Rostow, 1960;Inkeles & Smith, 1974). Religious and ethnic particularisms are supposed to get in the way of such progress. Standard sociology treats them as vanishing along with the traditional world.
The eruption of religio-ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia and elsewhere produced a crisis for the proponents of a smooth transition to an individualized, secular, post-ethnic world (Ignatieff, 1993). This wasn't supposed to happen, especially in places like eastern Europe, where societies were 'on the road to modernity'. Some observers attempted to salvage their basic theories by treating religious and ethnic resurgence as anti-modernist responses to the social disruption that modernity brings (Lechner, 1993;Marty & Appleby, 1991;Marty & Appleby, 1997). Others took refuge in talk of ethnic primordialism (Kaplan, 1993;Kaplan, 2000;Kimmel, "Understanding Medjugorje" 1996; but see Simpson, 1996) -though why this would have religious overtones was left unexplained. Yet, even on this score, ethnic violence should not have erupted in Medjugorje, which had played host to so many outside visitors. The religious tourism that had so connected that village the outside world should have inoculated the villagers against conflict. Clearly, the standard sociological approach failed to account for events on the ground.
Unlike Western sociologists, Ibn Khaldûn famously applied the same conceptual categories to religion and to ethnicity, seeing them both as potential sources of "group-feeling". He focused not on tribal peoples' "traditionalism", but on their willingness to sacrifice for one another. He saw religion not as a matter of belief, organization, and rite, but as a force that similarly encouraged people to cooperate. Both ethnicity and religion could accentuate group-feeling. Both could sustain group identities in the face of conflict and change. Most notably, they could do so at any point in history -for his was a cyclical theory, not one imagining 'progress' from 'traditional' and 'modern'.
A Khaldûnian sociologist would argue that it makes sense to see the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje and the ethnic violence of the 1990s as part of the same social process. Despite their overt message of peace, the apparitions heightened Catholic identity and solidarity at a time of disintegrating state power. Coming in a border region, economically backward and ethnically mixed, the apparitions amounted to a supernatural affirmation of Catholicism's special status. Precisely because the region was backward before the influx of tourist money, clan groups were stronger. Farming was hard and resources were scarce, which forced families and clans toward self-reliance. Prior events had presented inhabitants with a conceptual world in which "Croat" and "Catholic" were seen as synonymous -even if this was not historically accurate. 10 Is it any wonder that group-feeling was heightened as Catholicism became more important?
As Sells (2003, p. 319)  Later messages dropped this theme in favor of calls for prayer, fasting, and the conversion of unbelievers. It is not hard to see how the latter might justify the forced expulsion of Serbs and Bosniacs, who were increasingly defined by their non-Catholic status. Heightened Croat/Catholic group-feeling mobilized this opposition to "Understanding Medjugorje" "outsiders", in the context of a declining Yugoslav state. As that state evaporated, religio-ethnic conflict burst into the open.
The issue here is group-feeling, not 'tribes' conquering 'cities' -though that is the result on which Khaldûn concentrated in his history of the Muslim world. For Khaldûnian sociology, the question is one of the extent to which various groups are tied together, along with the sources and results of that centripetal solidarity.
The rigors of life in southwestern Bosnia united families and clans, but did not bind them into larger groups.
Indeed, we know there was considerable hostility between Croat-Catholic clans (Bax, 1995, pp. 108-114); a Khaldûnian would look for similar conflict among Serbs and Bosniacs. Among the Croats, at least, clan groupfeeling was high, but of limited scope. This is where religion enters the picture.
The "miracles at Medjugorje" made Catholicism more important in this region, and Khaldûnian sociology would expect this to create greater intra-clan cooperation. This was apparently the case. The events themselves were framed in a Catholic idiom, under the supervision of the local Franciscan order. Various local clans and families worked with outside Catholic groups to develop the tourist trade. They presented themselves as Catholics to the pilgrims, such that this became their public master identity. The net result was to highlight the equation of Catholicism with Croatian ethnicity -exactly the submerging of particular loyalties into religion that Ibn Khaldûn found so important for Islam's triumph.
A Khaldûnian sociologist would also highlight one further development: the effect that the apparitions and the subsequent deluge of pilgrims had on local Catholicism. Prior to the 1980s, Medjugorje was mostly a village of women. As was the case in many of Yugoslavia's economically less-developed regions, many of its men worked in Italy and Germany as guest workers, sending home remittances to support their families. Village religious life revolved around women's prayer groups, not around the church. Women held religious status, and -according to anthropologist Mart Bax (1995, p. 60) -"It was widely felt that without their efforts … the Virgin Mary would not have appeared." As is true in many places, popular Catholicism was not uniquely churchcentered, which means that it was a much more eclectic than during the later pilgrimage period. (As Meredith McGuire (2008) has recently noted, this is a common pattern in religion as it is actually lived.) It was, in fact, less oriented both to orthodoxy and to boundaries, though no village woman would have said this to church officials directly (Bax, 1995, pp. 53-65).
The massive influx of pilgrims did more than bring wealth to the region; it also re-centered popular Catholicism on the Church. Women's status declined, both because economic opportunities brought men back from abroad and because outsiders focused their attention on the visionaries, the priests, and other local officials. "Understanding Medjugorje" They portrayed the region as more uniformly (and orthodoxly) Catholic than it had been, heightening local Catholic identity. Non-Catholics could not participate in the economic boom, so were displaced. All this heightened Catholic group-feeling, in Khaldûnian terms. This is not to say that the Marian apparitions are responsible for -much less caused -the ethnic cleansing. That is not how a Khaldûnian sociologist would put the matter. Instead, religious solidarity and ethnic solidarity are of a piece, in the Khaldûnian view. This is particularly so where ethnicity is defined along religious lines, whether or not the people involved are "religious" in terms of their personal beliefs, prayer life, and so on. It is the feeling that matters, and the sense of group identity. Unlike standard sociology, a Khaldûnian approach would see an intrinsic connection between religion and ethnicity. And it would not be surprised by the eruption of communal violence. The Medjugorje case recommends it, on these grounds.

IV
Khaldûnian sociology tells us interesting and useful things about what happened at Medjugorje, but we still have to ask ourselves if its picture is true. Is it actually the case that both religion and ethnicity were sources of groupfeeling in this region, and that this group-feeling contributed to the massacres, ethnic cleansing, and other events about which I have spoken? I am afraid that, in this case, the answer is "No". Let me explain why.
There are, conceptually, two ways to describe group formation. Groups can form by attraction: the center-focused force to which I referred earlier in this article. Or they can form by division: as a result of group conflict, which leads each party to consolidate out of fear and for self-preservation. Was the Bosnian conflict in Medjugorje primarily a result of centripetal solidarity -i.e., forces that bound people together -as Ibn Khaldûn proposed? Or was ethnic division there fed by divisive violence in a self-perpetuating spiral -a process that created groups by setting people against one another, without regard for associative feeling? An analysis of the role played by elite actors in creating the conflagration indicates the latter. I shall address this issue in four related points.
Point One: As the Yugoslav state imploded in the late 1980s, various leaders played up ethnic divisions as a way to hold onto power. Slobodan Milošević notoriously parlayed an ultra-nationalist 1987 speech in Kosovo into election as President of Serbia, leading that country throughout the 1990s wars (Silber & Little, 1994, p. 37ff (1995, pp. 108-114) reports on an extended inter-Catholic clan feud that ended with the annihilation of the local clan that had run much of the pilgrimage tourism -hotels, taxi and bus transportation, and the like. That group's "crime" was its willingness to work with governmental authorities (often Serbs) to protect its investment.
Economic factors trumped ethno-religious loyalties in this case. It is hard to see much difference between this clan feud and a second clan feud in the nearby village of Gradšika that Bax recounts in a later work (2000b)one that did cross religious lines. That feud, between a Catholic Croat clan and a clan of "Muslims of Croat descent", was similarly economic in origin and similarly carried out. Reality on-the-ground does not allow us to embrace any neat Khaldûnian picture.
Point Four: As Bax also points out, the Communist state had long used "Serb" and "Croat" as categories by which to administer the Medjugorje region, though it called them "Partisan" and "Fascist", rewarding and punishing its citizens for the actions of their parents during the Great War (Bax, 1995, pp. 119-126). Croatian villagers paid taxes to Serb officials, saw new development channeled to Serb villages, and suffered official depredations at the hands of Serbian police. They were unofficially barred from public employment, which meant that many were forced to emigrate for work, either to Western Europe or to the United States. Is it any wonder that they resented this treatment, based solely on their historical status, which they increasingly came to read in 'ethnic' terms? Is it any wonder that they welcomed the Marian apparition as a source of both pride and cash? Is it any wonder that they used their newfound independence to retaliate across the 'ethnic' lines that governing elites had drawn around them?
We are not dealing here with an ethnic primordialism. 'Serbs' and 'Croats' have not been fighting for centuries, as was claimed at the time in the media. "Catholic", "Orthodox", and "Muslim" have not always been firm lines drawn around various groups in the region, nor have they always been the most salient social barriers.
Yes, there have always been dividing lines here, but they were usually cross-cutting, and of differing strength in different eras.
But at this place, at this time, 'ethnic' and 'religious' divisions were available as tools that regional and national elites could use to expand their political power. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are a classic case of how such elites can set groups against one another. Medjugorje's divisions were not the result of Khaldûnian 15 "Understanding Medjugorje" group-feeling; they stemmed from deliberate policies. Group identification was led actively to war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. Religiously-based group-feeling did not have to enter the picture.
This does not mean that Ibn Khaldûn's approach is wrong, much less useless. As I have noted, it is one of the few approaches that puts religion and ethnicity into the same conceptual basket, forcing scholars to gauge their empirical relationship. And these two factors are related, intimately in this case; seeing how this happens represents considerable scholarly progress. Khaldûn's approach also recommends against the standard sociological representation of 'tradition' as static and 'modernity' as dynamic. Clearly, that is an inappropriate way of framing the Bosnian conflict as well. It is, I believe, useful to look for the presence or absence of groupfeeling in social conflicts -something Khaldûn's approach recommends.
In this case, however, groups were shaped from the outside, through conflict, rather than centripetally, along both religious and ethnic lines. I suspect that Ibn Khaldûn himself, the part-time (and not totally successful) politician, would draw useful conclusions from seeing how it was done.

CODA
There is one further element to consider, though I do not have space here to do more than mention it for further exploration. As noted above, Ibn Khaldûn presents a cyclical theory of 'civilization', in which sedentary life leads to the decline of group feeling, inviting invasion by more unified barbarians. Mart Bax, whose work on Medjugorje I have already cited (1995; 2000b) has proposed using a contrasting theory of civilization to explore the barbarism that descended on southwestern Bosnia, and on Yugoslavia generally, during the early 1990s (Bax, 1997;2000a;2000c). He builds on the work of Norbert Elias (1939a;1939b), who saw civilization as the growth of individual self-constraint, brought about by people's need to live with one another. As Bax summarizes the core of Elias's argument, Due to a wide range of 'factors', state formation being a major one, in the past thousand years more and more people in Western Europe have become ever more dependent on each other in even more respects. As a result, they have been forced to take each other into consideration and keep their own emotions, such as rage or tendencies towards violence under control. This external or social constraint has gradually become virtually automatic … [It is] expressed in all kinds of prohibitions. (Bax, 1997, p. 164) Elias sees "barbarism" and "civilization" as intimately intertwined; Bax therefore proposes to examine the Bosnian violence as a process of "decivilization" -not exactly the return of the repressed, but at least the reversal of mannered self-control. Rather than assume Bosnians' innate brutality -an idea underlying some 16 "Understanding Medjugorje" primordialists' claims -he proposes to treat 'civilization' as an accomplishment, but one that can be reversed under certain social conditions. Ibn Khaldûn similarly saw civilization and barbarism as interconnected, though through the medium of group-feeling. Would it not be useful to explore the connections and contrasts between these two theories, perhaps as applied to other recent instances of (supposedly) civilized peoples' descent into mass killings?
In this article, I have explored but one aspect of Ibn Khaldûn's work -his parallel treatment of ethnicity and religion as sources of center-focused group solidarity. That treatment is valuable, even if, in the Bosnian case, the groups in question proved to be constituted more by their instrumentally-manipulated divisions than by their internal attachments. It would be similarly useful to compare Ibn Khaldûn's approach to the dynamics of civilization and barbarism with other scholarly approaches.