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Disrupting Boundaries between Traditional and Transnational Islam: Pious Women's Engagement with Islamic Authority in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2020

Andreja Mesarič
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Abstract

The contemporary Islamic landscape in Bosnia-Herzegovina is often depicted as marked by fault lines between different Muslim groups, many of which are described as products of foreign intervention. This paper argues that this image does not reflect the multiplicity of Islamic discourses and practices, and the many ways that Bosnian Muslims engage with, promote, and resist them on the ground. It explores how pious Muslim women can move between different approaches to Islam over time, engage with a range of Islamic actors simultaneously, and draw on their teachings selectively or situationally without necessarily claiming group membership. By engaging with a range of actors making competing claims to authority, women contribute to both the pluralization of Islamic authority and the continued relevance of authoritative actors. The paper argues that paying attention to pious women's practices allows us to challenge crude characterizations of the transformations of Islam in Bosnia and question the narrative of distinct Muslim groups at odds with each other.

Type
Post-Communist Islam in a Post-9/11 World: The State of the Religious Marketplace
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 7 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2020

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References

1 The names of all interlocutors have been replaced by pseudonyms.

2 I use Bosnia in lieu of Bosnia-Herzegovina for reasons of convenience.

3 I follow Anne Ross Solberg’s usage of the term neo-Sufi for describing religious movements that are historically rooted in Sufism but have a looser organizational structure, such as the Gülen movement. See Anne Ross Solberg, “The Role of Turkish Islamic Networks in the Western Balkans,” Südosteuropa 55, no. 4 (2007): 429–62.

4 For a sample of this literature see Xavier Bougarel, Islam and Nationhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Surviving Empires (New York, 2018); Ahmet Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” in Jocelyne Cesari, ed., The Oxford Handbook of European Islam (Oxford, 2014), 429–74; Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy, eds., The Revival of Islam in the Balkans: From Identity to Religiosity (Basingstoke, Eng., 2015); Arolda Elbasani and Jelena Tošić, “Localized Islam(s): Interpreting Agents, Competing Narratives, and Experiences of Faith,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 4 (July 2017): 499–510; David Henig and Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, “Recasting Anthropological Perspectives on Vernacular Islam in Southeast Europe,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22, no. 2 (2013): 1–11; Ina Merdjanova, Rediscovering the Umma: Muslims in the Balkans Between Nationalism and Transnationalism (Oxford, 2013); Kristen Ghodsee, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton, 2009).

5 I conducted fieldwork over several visits between 2006 and 2014.

6 For more on the latter see Andreja Mesarič, “‘Islamic Cafés’ and ‘Sharia Dating’: Muslim Youth, Spaces of Sociability, and Partner Relationships in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 4 (July 2017): 581–97.

7 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

8 For a similar approach see David Henig, “‘This is Our Little Hajj’: Muslim Holy Sites and Reappropriation of the Sacred Landscape in Contemporary Bosnia,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4 (2012): 751–65.

9 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, 1978).

10 Xavier Bougarel, “Farewell to the Ottoman Legacy? Islamic Reformism and Revivalism in Inter-war Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain, eds., Islam in Interwar Europe (New York, 2008), 317; Christian Moe, “Administriranje islamskih pitanja: Opći uvod i slučaj Bosne i Hercegovine,” Novi Muallim 10, no. 38 (2009), 104.

11 For discussions on the colonial nature of Habsburg rule in Bosnia see Clemens Ruthner, Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Ursula Reber, and Raymond Detrez, eds., WechselWirkungen: Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Western Balkans, 1878–1918 (New York, 2015).

12 Bougarel, “Farewell to the Ottoman Legacy,” 327.

13 Radmila Radić, “Islamska verska zajednica 1945–1970. godine,” Forum Bosnae 32 (2005): 99–134; Fikret Karčić, Islamske teme i perspektive (Sarajevo, 2009), 29–30; Xavier Bougarel, “From ‘Young Muslims’ to the Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a Pan-Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Islamic Studies 36, no. 2–3 (1997): 540–43; Cornelia Sorabji, “Muslim Identity and Islamic Faith in Sarajevo” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1989), 143–46.

14 Moe, “Administriranje islamskih pitanja,” 107; Esad Hećimović, “Politischer Islam mit bosnischem Migrationshintergrund,” in Thomas Schmidinger and Dunja Larise, eds., Zwischen Gottesstaat und Demokratie: Handbuch des politischen Islam (Vienna, 2008), 191.

15 “Ustav Islamske zajednice,” Islamska Zajednica u Bosni i Hercegovini, at http://www.islamskazajednica.ba/component/content/article?id=43:ustav-islamske-1997 (accessed October 29, 2017). Bosniak (Bošnjak), a term denoting ethno-national identity, was adopted as the official name for Bosnia’s Slavic Muslim population in 1993. On this, see Hećimović, “Politischer Islam,” 187; Dunja Larise, “The Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Nation Building by Muslims/Bosniaks in the Western Balkans” Nationalities Papers 43, no. 2 (March 2015): 203–4. In this paper, I tend to use Bosnian Muslims unless I am explicitly referring to ethnicity or reporting others’ use of the term. This is because Muslims involved in the processes I describe include migrants from other parts of the Balkans as well as converts. Furthermore, not all Bosniaks identify as Muslim in a religious sense.

16 Xavier Bougarel, “Bosnian Islam as ‘European Islam’: Limits and Shifts of a Concept,” in Aziz Al-Azmeh and Effie Fokas, eds., Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence (Cambridge, Eng., 2007), 96–124; Christian Moe, “A Sultan in Brussels? European Hopes and Fears of Bosnian Muslims,” Südosteuropa 55, no. 4 (2007): 374–94; Christian Moe, “‘Is Multi-Cultural Man Circumcised?’ Bosnian Muslim and European Identity Discourses,” in Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Levent Tezcan, eds., Konfliktfeld Islam in Europa (Baden-Baden, 2007), 261–81; Andreja Mesarič, “Muslim Women’s Dress Practices in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Localising Islam through Everyday Lived Practice,” in Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy, eds., The Revival of Islam in the Balkans: From Identity to Religiosity (Basingstoke, Eng., 2015), 103–21.

17 The IC also has departments (mešihat) in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, former Yugoslav republics with sizeable native or migrant Bosniak populations. This reflects its position as a pseudo-national institution catering to all Bosniaks, including those living outside Bosnia’s borders. It is significant that the seat of the Serbian mešihat is not in Belgrade but in Novi Pazar, a provincial center in the region of Sandžak, which has a large native Bosniak population. It is also noteworthy that the IC’s reach is not felt in those post-Yugoslav states where Albanians form the majority of the Muslim population.

18 Stressing continuity with Ottoman heritage could be understood to serve an additional purpose. With the IC’s pro-European stance, it could be said its Other is not as much an essentialized west as it is the communist past. This is a past in which previous incarnations of the IC have been implicated in various ways, from supporting a government ban on women’s face veiling and decreeing its own ban on Sufi orders in the 1950s to its at times uncomfortable relationship with Islamic revival currents in the 1970s and 1980s. Emphasizing continuity with Ottoman administration is therefore a way of distancing current IC structures from their predecessor’s complicity with communist governments. For the veiling ban see Senija Milišić, “Emancipacija muslimanske žene u Bosni i Hercegovini (Poseban osvrt na skidanje zara i feredže)” in Enver Imamović, ed., Urbano biće Bosne i Hercegovine (Sarajevo, 1996), 137–43; Radić, “Islamska verska zajednica.” For the ban on Sufi orders see Henig, “This is Our Little Hajj,” 755–56; Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 449. For Islamic revival in the 1970s and 1980s see Fikret Karčić, “Preporod Newspaper: An Agent of and a Witness to Islamic Revival in Bosnia,” Intellectual Discourse 7, no. 1 (1999): 91–97; Bougarel, “From “Young Muslims” to the Party of Democratic Action”; Sorabji, Muslim Identity.

19 Ahmet Alibašić and Nedim Begović, “Reframing the Relations between State and Religion in Post-War Bosnia: Learning to be Free!” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 19, no. 1 (February 2017), 19–34.

20 For a sample of the literature on the pluralization of Islamic authority see Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, 2004); Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London, 2004); “Authority and Islam,” a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (March 2007), ed. Frédéric Volpi and Bryan S. Turner; Carool Kersten and Susanne Olsson, eds., Alternative Islamic Discourses and Religious Authority (New York, 2013).

21 For government actions after 9/11 see Darryl Li, “A Universal Enemy?: ‘Foreign Fighters’ and Legal Regimes of Exclusion and Exemption Under the ‘Global War on Terror,’” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 41, no. 2 (2010), 355–428; Christian Moe, “The War on Terror and Muslim Opinion-Making in Bosnia,” in Anne Stensvold, ed., Western Balkans: The Religious Dimension (Oslo, 2009), 91–183.

22 For an overview of transnational actors see Eldar Sarajlić, “The Return of the Consuls: Islamic Networks and Foreign Policy Perspectives in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 11, no. 2 (June 2011): 173–90; Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina”; Alibašić and Begović, “Reframing the Relations.” For more detail on Turkish actors see Anne Ross Solberg, “The Role of Turkish Islamic Networks”; Anne Ross Solberg, “Islam, Turkey and the Western Balkans,” in Anne Stensvold, ed., Western Balkans: The Religious Dimension (Oslo, 2009), 51–89; Kerem Öktem, “Between Emigration, de-Islamization and the Nation-State: Muslim Communities in the Balkans Today,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 11, no. 2 (June 2011): 155–71.

23 Bougarel, Islam and Nationhood, 209; Moe, “Administriranje islamskih pitanja,” 106; Mustafa Prljača, ed., Rezolucija Islamske zajednice u Bosni i Hercegovini o tumačenju islama i drugi tekstovi (Sarajevo, 2006).

24 Sarajlić, “The Return of the Consuls,” 183; Alibašić and Begović, “Reframing the Relations,” 29–30.

25 Alibašić and Begović, “Reframing the Relations,” 25. The IC also runs a madrasa in Zagreb, Croatia, and both a madrasa and Faculty of Islamic Studies in Novi Pazar, Serbia.

26 Elissa Helms, “‘The “Nation-ing’ of Gender? Donor Policies, Islam, and Women’s NGOs in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in “Ethnographies of Postsocialism,” a special issue of Anthropology of East Europe Review 21, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 85–93; Moe, “Administriranje islamskih pitanja,” 107; Alibašić and Begović, “Reframing the Relations,” 29.

27 Ibid., 26.

28 Ibid., 30.

29 Bougarel, Islam and Nationhood, 208–209; Sarajlić, “Return of the Consuls,” 185.

30 Moe, “A Sultan in Brussels,” 384.

31 Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 446, 459; Sarajlić, “Return of the Consuls,” 180.

32 Henig, “This is Our Little Hajj”; David Henig, “Tracing Creative Moments: The Emergence of Translocal Dervish Cults in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 69 (Summer 2014): 97–110; David Henig, “Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of ‘Other’ Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 4 (October 2016): 908–34; Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 449–50; Catharina Raudvere, “Claiming Heritage, Renewing Authority: Sufi-orientated activities in post-Yugoslav Bosnia-Herzegovina,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (2011).

33 Henig, “Tracing Creative Moments.” For a similar argument in the context of Russia see Lili Di Puppo and Jesko Schmoller, “Here or Elsewhere: Sufism and Traditional Islam in Russia’s Volga-Ural Region,” Contemporary Islam (2019), at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562–018–00434–3 (accessed February 28, 2020).

34 Henig, “This is Our Little Hajj.”

35 For a similar view see Raudvere, “Claiming Heritage.” The IC established a research Institute for the Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks, which can be seen as part of these efforts.

36 Andreja Mesarič, “Wearing Hijab in Sarajevo: Dress Practices and the Islamic Revival in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22, no. 2 (2013): 12–34.

37 For a sample of the literature on culture see Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” in “Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” a special issue of Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1992): 6–23; Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” in Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, 1991), 137–62; Gerd Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London (Cambridge, Eng., 1996); Ulf Hannerz, “Reflections on Varieties of Culturespeak,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (September 1999): 393–407. For ethnicity and nationhood see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London, 1993); Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.

38 Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.

39 Henig, “This is Our Little Hajj.”

40 For more on this organization see Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 451; Bougarel, Islam and Nationhood, 206–7.

41 For more on the Islamic symbolic geography of Sarajevo see Mesarič, “Muslim Women’s Dress.”

42 Elissa Helms, “‘Politics is a Whore’: Women, Morality and Victimhood in Post-War Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Gerlachlus Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society (Burlington, VT, 2007), 235–53.

43 In popular use, the title reisu-1-ulama is commonly shortened to reis.

44 Field notes, Sarajevo, January 2008.

45 For a similar view see Moe, “Administriranje islamskih pitanja,” 108.

46 James Bourk Hoesterey, Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru (Stanford, 2016).

47 For a sample of the literature discussing these issues see Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York, 2015); Larisa Kurtović, “‘Who Sows Hunger, Reaps Rage’: On Protest, Indignation and Redistributive Justice in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15, no. 4 (December 2015): 639–59; Monika Palmberger, “Ruptured Pasts and Captured Futures: Life Narratives in Postwar Mostar,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 66 (Summer 2013): 14–24; Catherine Baker, “Prosperity Without Security: The Precarity of Interpreters in Postsocialist, Postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Slavic Review 71, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 849–74.

48 Hafiz denotes someone who has memorized the Qur’an in full.

49 He is now employed by the Islamic Community of Montenegro, a counterpart to the Bosnian IC established in the 1990s, and continues to hold talks in Sarajevo as part of his tours. On Bugari see Raudvere, “Claiming Heritage.”

50 Women first gained access to formal Islamic education at the Sarajevo madrasa between 1933 and 1947/48. The madrasa began re-admitting female students in 1978. See Catharina Raudvere, “Textual and Ritual Command: Muslim Women as Keepers and Transmitters of Interpretive Domains in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina,” in Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach, eds., Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (Leiden, Netherlands, 2012), 268–69; Zilka Spahić Šiljak, “The Confluence of Islamic Feminism and Peacebuilding: Lessons from Bosnia,” Samyukta: A Journal of Gender & Culture 17, no. 1 (2017), 167. Several other madrasas admitting women opened in the 1990s.

51 Raudvere, “Textual and Ritual Command”; Senada Tahirović, “Muslimanska teologinja u BH. društvu: pozicija i uloga,” Novi muallim 40 (2009): 26–35.

52 Raudvere, “Textual and Ritual Command.”

53 Hilary Kalmbach, “Islamic Authority and the Study of Female Religious Leaders,” in Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach, eds., Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (Leiden, Netherlands, 2012), 1–27; Hilary Kalmbach, “Social and Religious Change in Damascus: One Case of Female Islamic Religious Authority,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 1 (April 2008): 37–57; Jeanette S. Jouili and Schirin Amir-Moazami, “Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority among Pious Muslim Women in France and Germany,” in Anitta Kynsilehto, ed., Islamic Feminism: Current Perspectives (Tampere, Finland, 2008), 57–90.

54 Spahić Šiljak, “The Confluence of Islamic Feminism.”

55 Raudvere, “Textual and Ritual Command”; Cornelia Sorabji, “Mixed Motives: Islam, Nationalism and Mevluds in an Unstable Yugoslavia,” in Camillia Fawzi El-Solh and Judy Mabro, eds., Muslim Women’s Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality (Oxford, 1994), 108–27; Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, 1995).

56 The IC has moved away from the term bula in favor of muallima (teacher). Bula has developed negative connotations and is sometimes used as a derogatory term for any woman wearing hijab. It is also associated with vernacular Islam, while muallima has scholarly connotations.

57 On tradition as the main source of authority historically available to bulas see Raudvere, “Textual and ritual Command,” 269. On charismatic authority as the main avenue to religious authority open to women more broadly see Kalmbach, “Social and Religious Change,” 41–42.

58 For more on the link between education and mothering in the Bosnian context see Mesarič, ““Islamic Cafés” and “Sharia Dating.” For Middle Eastern and west European contexts, respectively, see Kalmbach “Social and Religious Change,” and Jouili and Amir-Moazami, “Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority.”

59 Helms, “The “Nation-ing” of Gender?”; Moe, “Administriranje islamskih pitanja,” 107; Alibašić and Begović, “Reframing the Relations,” 29; Alibašić, “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” 450–51; Raudvere, “Textual and ritual Command,” 262.

60 Alibašić and Begović, “Reframing the Relations,” 29–30.

61 Bulas and muallimas can lead devotional prayers (zikr) but not ritual prayers (namaz). See Raudvere, “Textual and ritual Command,” 270–71, for discussion of a fatwa adopted by the IC that requires the Sarajevo Faculty of Islamic Studies to keep within Hanafi tradition and its implications for the understanding of female leadership and women serving as imams.

62 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, 2005); Kalmbach, “Islamic Authority”; Kalmbach “Social and Religious Change”; Gisele Fonseca Chagas, “Muslim Women and the Work of da’wa: The Female Branch of the tariqa Naqshbandiyya-Kuftariyya in Damascus, Syria” Middle East Critique 20, no. 2 (2011): 207–18; Jouili and Amir-Moazami, “Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority.”

63 Peter Mandaville, “Globalization and the Politics of Religious Knowledge: Pluralizing Authority in the Muslim World,” in “Authority and Islam,” a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (March 2007): 111.

64 For a sample of the literature discussing this see Jocelyne Cesari, “Islam in the West: From Immigration to Global Islam,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 (2009): 148–75; Roy, Globalised Islam; Volpi and Turner, “Introduction: Making Islamic Authority Matter,” in “Authority and Islam,” a special issue of Theory Culture & Society 24, no. 2 (March 2007): 1–20. For a perspective discussing this concept in relation to the Balkans see Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy, “Islam in the post-Communist Balkans: Alternative Pathways to God,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15, no. 4 (December 2015): 457–71.

65 Bendixsen, Synnøve. The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin (Leiden, Netherlands, 2013); Jouili and Amir-Moazami, “Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority”; Frank Peter, “Individualization and religious authority in Western European Islam,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 17, no. 1 (August 2006): 105–18.

66 For a similar line of argument regarding young Muslim women in Germany and France see Bendixen, The Religious Identity; Jouili and Amir-Moazami, “Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority.”

67 Mamdani, Mahmood, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Roy, Globalised Islam.