ABSTRACT
The institute's manuscript collection was considered to be one of the richest of its kind in the Balkans, containing precisely 5,263 codices in Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages dating from the eleventh to the early twentieth century. According to Norman Cigar's analysis, from the 1980s some Serbian Oriental scholars had offered misinterpretations and distortions of Islam and the conditions of the Bosnian Muslim community and what it wanted, contributed to the genocide directed at Bosnian Muslims 'by making the process intellectually respectable among all the strata of Serbian community'. Wayne Vucinich, an American historian of Bosnian origin, observed in 1955, it was 'refreshing to see that, despite a rigid appli-cation of the Marxian formula to all historical developments, Yugoslav historians do reach opposite conclusions and hold divergent views'. Polemics between Sarajevo and Belgrade ranged from mere philological issues over the broader assessment of the value of Arab/Islamic traditions of learning and literature, the reception of Edwards Said's 1978 book Orientalism..
