“Islamic cafés” and “Sharia dating:” Muslim youth, spaces of sociability, and partner relationships in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

The paper explores forms of sociability and partner relationships among pious young Muslims in Sarajevo with a focus on the emic concepts of Islamic cafés (hospitality establishments perceived to operate according to Islamic moral principles) and Sharia dating (premarital relationships perceived to be sanctioned by Sharia). It draws on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in different spaces of Islamic worship, learning, and sociability. This paper places the renewed interest in Islam within the context of a post-Dayton Bosnia characterized by complex and impractical government structures, lingering post-war grievances, and a brutal transition to a neoliberal capitalist economy. Although it acknowledges the continuing relevance of Islam as a resource for Bosniak nation building, it suggests treating the Muslim faith community as overlapping but distinct from the Bosniak community. By focusing on gendered interaction and partner-seeking strategies, this paper explores how young members of this faith community contextually negotiate their Islamic beliefs with mainstream local expectations of conventional behavior. The paper argues that believers’ varying responses to this predicament can be observed as an example of the localization of Islam, but they do not constitute a return to local, traditional gender roles and marriage practices, nor are they an introduction of foreign cultural patterns.

Edep: ethical imagination and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammed

“…Thus, certain aspects of orthopraxy are influenced by the personalized interpretation of individual authorities, in this case, a formative element to the inculcation of Sufi adab among his community members. This essay argues that the reformulation of Sufi adab both as an idiom that connotes spiritual manners and an everyday behavior constitutes a critique toward global Islamist politics, and it serves as an important ingredient in local proselytization efforts in Bosnia for Bosnian Muslims who in the last two decades have taken a deeper interest in religion (Abazović, 2012;Mesarič, 2017Mesarič, , 2020Kostadinova, 2018).…”