“This is our little hajj”: Muslim holy sites and reappropriation of the sacred landscape in contemporary Bosnia

Abstract

Bosnian Muslims’ understandings of Islam and relationships with the sacred landscape have undergone significant transformations since the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. I explore these transformations as I analyze discourses and debates on what constitutes “correct” Islamic tradition in Bosnia today, when Muslim practice has been exposed to a global Islamic orthodoxy and entangled in new supraregional hierarchies of power, values, and moral imagination. I specifically focus on how intracommunal Muslim politics intertwines with contemporary Bosnian Muslim shrine pilgrimages.

Land, fertility rites and the veneration of female saints: Exploring body rituals at the Tomb of Mary in Jerusalem

“…22 Both sites are under the control of minority faiths in religiously and ethnically fractured societies. For this reason, aspects of each shrine's rites are inextricably linked to the political and territorial disputes that inform the hegemon-minority struggles in the Balkans (Zimdars-Shwartz, 1991;Herrero, 1999;Baskar, 2012: 51;Henig, 2012) and in Israel/ Palestine. Most of the rituals in Gethsemane Church evoke female symbols and womb-tomb experiences, like the simulation of childbirth.…”

Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

“…The Naqshibendi brotherhoods in the Bosnian territories have thus endured the vicissitudes of the past three centuries, persisting as most other dervish brotherhoods in Bosnia vanished or significantly diminished. The Naqshibendi order endured largely because of its close links to the national Islamic body that solidified during the socialist era and was maintained by its post-Yugoslav Bosnian successor, the Islamic Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina ( Islamska Zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine ) (see Bringa 1995: 220ff; Henig 2012: 758). The ban on dervish orders in Bosnia-Herzegovina issued by the Islamic Community in 1952 had severe effects on many brotherhoods, with the exception of the Naqshibendi, whose closeness to the Islamic Community protected them.…”

“…Genealogical modes of connectivity are closely intertwined with sonic and graphic modes. In Rifa'i lodges, songs of reverence ( ilahija ) sung by dervish disciples convey stories of links and relations between the prophet, Sufi saints, and local dervish figures who are considered “friends of God” ( evlija ), such as Hajdar-dedo Karić (Henig 2012: 754–56), Yūnus Emre, Haci Bektas Veli, or Baki Shehu. Furthermore, genealogical chains of succession ( silsila ) are materialized in graphic objects (diplomas, certificates, or idžazet ) that circulate together with persons across linguistic and nation-state borders, thickening historically forged transregional connections in the present.…”

“…He has become an amateur historian by systematically collecting accounts of sheikhs who fled from communist Yugoslavia to Turkey, Syria, or Lebanon in the 1950s, several of whom he had met during his recent visits to dervish lodges across southeast Europe. Sheikh Azmir and his disciples have also founded a small local heritage trust that documents regional oral history and renovates local, dervish-related sacred sites (see Henig 2012). These activities enable the sheikh and his disciples to reconnect with a transregional dervish ecumene that has been silenced, erased, or omitted from nationalized Islamic historiographies, but is very much a part of dervish historical consciousness.…”

On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology

“…If the precarious world is speaking to us in heightened ethical registers, anthropologists were further interested in its proliferating Christian charismatic religious forms. Although a number of articles focus on a variety of religious practices ranging from Islamic (Adely ; Clarke ; Henig ; Mittermaier ) to indigenized Catholic (Tassi ), Siberian Buddhist (Bernstein ; BuckQuijada 2012), and popular Hindu (Singh ), the biggest cluster focuses on evangelical Christianity both far (Chua ; Eriksen ) and near (in the United States and England; see Brahinsky ; Engelke ; Jones ; Luhrman ; McGovern ). Two articles in particular speak to some of the themes raised in this review.…”