This dissertation presents findings on book ownership in Ottoman Sarajevo based on the examination of 59 inheritance inventories recorded in the city court registers (sijills) for the period from... Show moreThis dissertation presents findings on book ownership in Ottoman Sarajevo based on the examination of 59 inheritance inventories recorded in the city court registers (sijills) for the period from 1707 to 1828. It includes a case study of one particular book owner, kadi Ṣāliḥ ‘Izzat Ḥromozāde from Sarajevo, who endowed his book collection in 1828. The findings are placed in the wider social and cultural context of Ottoman Bosnia and the questions of literacy, education, the role of libraries, informal channels for the transmission of knowledge, the use of different languages and scripts, the role of scribes and bookbinders in a largely manuscript culture, and the introduction of print. The dissertation draws on the manuscript of the Chronicle of Mullā Muṣṭafā Basheskī (d. cca 1802), as the major narrative source for the period. It also gathers and presents the references to written culture in Bosnian oral poetry and various folk customs revolving around the use of books in order to illustrate one of the many interfaces between the written and spoken word and to demonstrate the range of functions books could play in a largely oral and illiterate society. Show less
Rather than forming an actual terrorist threat, Muslim warriors in Bosnia have become prominent challengers to Bosnian Islamic leadership. By propagating Salafi teachings which target the forms of... Show moreRather than forming an actual terrorist threat, Muslim warriors in Bosnia have become prominent challengers to Bosnian Islamic leadership. By propagating Salafi teachings which target the forms of Islam practised by the Bosnian Muslims, this former ally came to be seen as a threat—not only because their presence fuelled stigmatization of Bosnia as a potential terrorist hotbed, but also because their Salafi ideas go against the very essence of Bosnian Muslim identity Show less
Islamic feminism/s as forms of consciousness, thinking, and practice are ascendant, yet in many places they still all too often go unnoticed. In Bosnia rising generations of Muslim women and men... Show moreIslamic feminism/s as forms of consciousness, thinking, and practice are ascendant, yet in many places they still all too often go unnoticed. In Bosnia rising generations of Muslim women and men emerging from an atheistic past and the horrors of war are finding their own way back to Islam. In the process, and with a heightened awareness of justice and sensitivity to gender, they are coming to Islamic feminism as voices from Sarajevo tell us. Show less
The Bosnian Young Muslims, a reformist Islamic movement that emerged in Sarajevo in 1939 and - officially - ceased to exist ten years later, is even today subject to many controversies. The... Show moreThe Bosnian Young Muslims, a reformist Islamic movement that emerged in Sarajevo in 1939 and - officially - ceased to exist ten years later, is even today subject to many controversies. The attempts to characterize this movement include a whole range of contradictory designations, ranging from hostile approaches in which the members of the movement are depicted as pan-Islamist terrorists whose activities aimed at the overthrow of the Yugoslavian state and establishing of an Islamic order, to sympathetic views in which it is presented as a basically democratic movement established on Islamic humanitarian principles that tried to resist the dictatorial communist regime of post-war Yugoslavia. Show less
