Lorens Listo’s name may not headline the world’s sports pages, but on the streets of his native Mostar he is hailed as a champion among champions in a sport that is central to the Bosnian city’s identity: high diving.

Mostar is home to the Stari Most, a 16th-century Ottoman peaked bridge that spans the river Neretva and, at its highest point, stands 79 feet (24 m) above the water.

The picturesque town has become famous for the diving competition from the white bridge, rebuilt in 2004 and a symbol of reconciliation after it was destroyed by Bosnian Croat artillery in 1993 during the Bosnian war.

Listo won the competition’s head-first diving category for the eleventh time on Sunday with his trade-mark swan dive, before a crowd of about 5,000 people. It was the 451st contest held since the first in 1556.

“Jumps are the identity of Mostar,” he said. The plunge from the bridge is a ritual for local youths to signal their transition into manhood. It is also a major tourist attraction, and a unifying force in a divided city.

Croats and Muslims, known as Bosniaks, live on opposite sides of the river and tensions linger from Bosnia’s 1990s war that saw fierce fighting between the two communities. But post-war, Croats and Bosniaks come together for the diving contest.

“Jumps connect both sides because we are together, looking forward to see who is winning. Boundaries are just in people’s mind, they actually don’t exist,” he said.

Approaching 40, Listo has a muscular physique, adorned with tattoos on his arms and thigh, and a buzz-cut hairstyle.

“I could say that everything that I do, my business, my life, my family, everything is dedicated to jumping off the bridge for at least 18 years”, he said, adding that he saw diving as a second full-time job, rather than a hobby.

Listo, who works as the local director of a fuel company, says the threat of injury hangs over the sport. “We fly, we don’t just jump,” Listo said, adding he had broken a finger and injured his back over the years diving from the bridge.

Others have not been so lucky. Listo said a handful of people have died jumping from the bridge over the years, though never during the competition. Listo’s friend Andrej Beuc also died last year diving in a different competition in Bosnia.

A leader of Germany’s opposition Greens who has Turkish roots has received death threats after he pushed for a resolution approved last week by the German parliament that declares the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces a genocide.

Turkey recalled its ambassador to Germany in protest against the resolution. Ankara accepts that large numbers of Christian Armenians were killed on Ottoman territory during World War One but denies the killings amounted to a genocide.

Cem Oezdemir, one of the initiators of the resolution, has received death threats via Twitter, Facebook and email – some of them from Germans with Turkish roots in Germany and others from Turks in Turkey, said Julia Jorch, a spokeswoman for the Greens.

She said Oezdemir often received insults from right-wing extremists and Turkish nationalists and sometimes death threats but the number of these had surged in the run-up to and after the resolution, which parliament approved last Thursday.

On Monday Oezdemir was defiant, saying: “Votes in the German parliament are not dependent on which authoritarian ruler they make happy and which they don’t.”

On Sunday Erdogan lashed out at the German parliament for passing the resolution and suggested that Germany was being hypocritical given its own history.

“Look Germany, I am saying this again; first you will be held accountable for the Holocaust, then you will be held accountable on how you killed and destroyed more than 100,000 Namibians in Namibia,” Erdogan said at the graduation ceremony of a university in Istanbul, according to comments published by the state-run Anadolu agency.

During Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich six million Jews were murdered and in the early 1900s, when Namibia was a German colony, Germans carried out a campaign of slaughter there among the Herero and Nama tribes.

“You are the last country who could conduct a parliamentary vote for Turkey on the so-called Armenian genocide. We have no issues, no problem in our history on this topic. Our history is not one of massacres. Our history is one of compassion and mercy and that is our difference,” Erdogan said.

Germany has long acknowledged its guilt for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities and began in 1952 to pay compensation to Israel. In 2012 Berlin said it would pay a lifelong monthly pension to Jews who spent time in concentration camps or ghettos or who survived the Nazi regime by living in hiding or under a false identity.

Germany is home to a large ethnic Turkish community and is also an important trade partner for Turkey.

Faith Matters is launching its paper that offers a brief insight into the secular reforms of the Ottoman Empire in order to analyse and debunk claims by extreme groups like Al Qaeda of it being an Islamic Caliphate, strictly governed by Shariah Law. The Ottoman Empire is often presented, by such groups as a model political system upon which to re-build a global Caliphate. Osama bin Laden marked the decline of the Ottoman Empire as the fall of Islam – that the Islamic world “has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years” and that “the righteous Khilafah will return with the permission of Allah”. Through the implementation of an Islamic legal and political system, extreme groups who mis-use the beauty of Islam call for the rejection of liberal values and the current systems in place which do not fundamentally clash with Islam.

The report authored by Hussain offers a new challenge to these claims, arguing that the Ottoman Empire bares little resemblance to the model proposed by such groups. In focusing on the period known as the Tanzimat (1839-1876), Hussain shows that the Ottomans were in fact attempting to secularise their laws and state institutions rather than implementing religious laws into State laws.

These are some of the key findings in the report which show that:

• Homosexuality was decriminalised
• Ottoman society in general moved away from punishments such as stoning
• The death penalty for Apostasy was not implemented

Extremists often bypass these facts and use a warped interpretation of history in order to weave their own narrative into mainstream debate; using their own projected picture of a perfect Ottoman society living under a deeply rigid mis-interpretation of Shariah Law in order to argue for the building of a modern day Islamic Caliphate. Those who spin this historical account help to prop up a narrative used as an ideological basis for extremism. The attacks of 9/11 were even marked by Bin Laden as “a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous Caliphate”. Until now, their account has been met with little intellectual resistance.

This important paper is the first of its kind to expose and dismantle such a historical account of the Ottoman Empire. Alongside the Government’s new Prevent Strategy focusing on extremism in schools, online and at universities, Hussain creates a vehicle upon which to tackle extremists who adopt this historical narrative in order to justify their intolerant and right-wing ideology.

By debunking one of the fundamental layers of these narratives, this paper provides an opportunity for debate and discussion within the public sphere. It also supports those civil society organisations and policy makers who defend liberal democratic values that underpin communities in Britain and also provides another tool for Muslims to counter the extremely small yet vocal groups who espouse such a warped interpretation of the Ottoman Empire and the Khilafah. We also hope that it counters those who lump all Muslim communities together and who undermine the history of majority Muslim countries as places where pluralism was alive and thriving. Extremism comes in many shape and forms and affects many communities. We hope that our work can continue to counter it, whether Far Right (including groups like the English Defence League and the British National Party) and others like Al-Muhajiroun.