3 - Change

Summary

Are there slaves on Arabian markets? Is it true that prostitution is rampant in Jeddah’s dens of vice and debauchery? What is the meaning of Islamic rites? What do Hajjis really do in Mecca and Medina? These questions seemed to be ubiquitous among the fierce Yugoslav public of the interwar period, together with debates on Muslim women’s clothing and education, the plausibility of translating the Qur’an into local languages, or seemingly more mundane discussions on the permissibility of the gramophone. In the decades following the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, the annexation in 1908 and the period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–41), different facets of Islamic belief and practice were opened to scrutiny, not only in the local Bosnian press, but also in Serbian and Croatian publications. This caused anxieties and tensions over who had the right to interpret and (re)present Islam. The Hajj was a frequent topic of these debates which drew in Muslim and non-Muslim participants engaged in defining and describing Islam and its role in the society.

This chapter will address the encounter of ritual and print within the framework of change, by examining the presence of the Hajj on the ‘market of news’, the importance of Islamic geography in the light of new local and global dynamics, and the transformation of the Hajj ritual’s meaning in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. To do so, it will shift back and forth between different decades to highlight these specific issues. Unlike the previous chapters, where the focus was on premodern Ottoman Bosnians, sometimes in conversation with their Muslim scholarly predecessors or contemporaries, this chapter will feature Bosnian Muslims in argument with each other, their non-Muslim critics, Orientalists, ideological enemies or, simply, broader competing concepts of various backgrounds that imposed themselves on the way in which the Hajj was perceived. The media, understood here as both genres and venues of publication, created new possibilities for different participants in the public sphere, but at the same time flattened the discourse under the influence of homogenising and reifying modernist discourses on Islam.