work hoping to find enough quotations to validate their own views. According to Pavlović Serbian nationalists use it as a historical justification in their attempt to keep alive their dream of Greater Serbia, Croatian nationalists as the ultimate statement of the Oriental nature of South Slavs living east of the Drina river, while others view the Mountain Wreath as a manual for ethnic cleansing and fratricidal murder. Montenegrin independentists largely shy away from any interpretation of Njegoš's poetry, and only on occasion discuss its literal and linguistic merits. Timothy Winter, a leading British Muslim convert and scholar of Islam, maintains a view that The Mountain Wreath draws on ancient, violently Islamophobic sentiments. He views Ottoman rule over medieval Christian Serbia as an effective guard against crusading warriors of Western Catholicism, stating that the poem views "Muslim's repeated pleads for coexistence simply as satanic temptations, the smile of Judas, which Metropolitan Danilo finally overcomes celebrating the massacre at the end". Michael Sells, an American professor of Islamic History and Literature of Serbian descent shares a similar view, stating that the poem, a required reading in all schools in prewar Yugoslavia is notable for its celebration of ethnic cleansing. In his view, it "denotes Slavic Muslims as Christ-Killers, and plays a significant role in ethnic conflict and Bosnian War of the 1990s", pointing out that The Mountain Wreath is memorized and quoted by radical Serb nationalists of the 1990s. According to British Jewish reporter and political analyst Tim Judah "there was another side to The Mountain Wreath far more sinister than its praise of tyrannicide. With its call for the extermination of those Montenegrins who had converted to Islam, the poem was also a paean to ethnic cleansing ... it helps explain how the Serbian national consciousness has been moulded and how ideas of national liberation are inextricably linked with killing your neighbour and burning his village." Regarding the claims about the poem's influence in ethnic cleansing, Pavlović argues that it suffices to say that, at present, some 20% of the Montenegrin population is of Islamic faith, and that Montenegrins of the Islamic faith and their socio-cultural heritage have been in the past and are at present an integral part of the general matrix of Montenegrin society, as seen in Montenegro demographics. Pavlović argues that Njegoš the politician was trying to accomplish the restructuring of a tribal society into a nation in