Amila Buturović was born in Sarajevo; in 1986 she went to Canada for postgraduate studies, where she remains until today. She is now a full professor of the history of religion and culture in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, specializing in Islamic studies. In Sarajevo, she graduated from the Department of Oriental Studies and then earned a master's degree and a doctorate from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Her scientific research work covers issues of the relationship between culture and religion, mystical teachings, the culture of death, and the transmission of knowledge. Among numerous scientific studies, translations, and essays, she is the author of Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Death, Tombstones, and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016); Stone Speaker: Medieval Tombs, Landscape, and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (Palgrave, 2002), a study translated into Bosnian-Croatian under the title Kameni govornik (Zagreb, 2018); then co-editor with Irvin C. Schick of the anthology Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture, and History (I.B. Tauris, 2008); and editor of a special issue of the Canadian literary magazine Descant entitled Bosnia and Herzegovina: Between Loss and Recovery (2013). He is now working on a new project on the culture of health in the Ottoman period in BiH, with an emphasis on inter-professional and integrative treatment practices. She lives in Toronto with her daughter, two dogs, and a cat. For Tacno.net, he talks about the position of religion in the modern world, the attitude of liberal elites towards religion, the culture of memory, and what the emergence of the Coronavirus means for global society. Interviewed by: Amila Ramović and Amer Bahtijar Professor Buturović, we are witnessing a global epidemic of the Coronavirus. How are Canadians reacting to the emergence of the virus, are citizens behaving responsibly, is there panic? Are you satisfied with the behavior of the authorities? The reaction here is going through similar stages as in other parts of the world—from disbelief and hesitation to forced acceptance of increasingly strict measures of distancing and isolation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is self-isolating after it was determined that his wife tested positive for the virus, addresses the Canadian public every morning and very undoubtedly sends instructions, along with a whole team of experts, on behavioral measures. When the epidemic started, every province in Canada had its crisis headquarters, and there was no immediate synchronization. Now they have already focused on sending the same message to all citizens regardless of local circumstances; phone lines have been opened with crisis centers in several languages. The precautionary measures are not as strict as in BiH, and we are not as disciplined as you in BiH. Toronto, where I live, is one of the busiest cities in the world, and it was clear that measures had to be implemented much more decisively to avoid the disaster that befell Italy, or now New York. So far the death rate is less than 1%, mainly thanks to the good health service, but the situation changes daily like elsewhere, and it is very difficult to take a stable position. In 2003, Toronto was in the focus of SARS, so hospitals and staff are quite prepared and experienced, but their ability to react now depends mostly on the behavior of citizens. I have to admit that the Canadian health system is showing its positive sides, learning from previous mistakes, but it is impossible to predict how things will unfold until the end of April when the contagion is supposed to culminate. A few days ago, Trudeau announced a lot of good help for people who have lost their jobs or have no income due to the pandemic. However, it is clear to everyone that the recovery from COVID-19, especially if it lasts, will be long and uncertain, and that this is probably the most expensive crisis the world has ever faced. The conversation has already started here on how to prevent further stratification of society and use the opportunity for changes and the creation of a cleaner economy and environment. Power is in good hands, that is. The crisis is in good hands; even the political and fiscal conservatives have moved closer to liberal politics regarding the necessary interventions. Everyone agrees that this is no time for political bickering. You left Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1986, how did that happen, and where did your journey take you? Towards the end of my studies at the Department of Oriental Studies and English Studies in Sarajevo, I applied for postgraduate studies at several universities in North America. The Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal offered me excellent conditions and a scholarship through the Aga Khan Foundation, enabling me to attend and complete first my master's thesis in 1988 and then my doctorate in 1994. During those eight years of postgraduate studies, I worked research in several related fields and resided in various parts of the Islamic world, from North Africa to Indonesia. I have always been interested in the fluid relationship between religion and culture, and I have done so through the study of medieval Arabic manuscripts and material heritage from Spain and the Middle East. This interest later spread to the Ottoman Empire, specifically to Bosnia and Herzegovina. What I greatly appreciated from my postgraduate studies was the disciplinary openness, so I could regularly attend classes in various subjects—world literature, critical theory, comparative religion—and I made a lot of use of that. Today you are a full professor at the Department of Humanities at the prestigious York University in Toronto, how did your career develop? After completing my doctorate, I worked temporarily at a couple of universities and colleges in America and Canada. Given that it coincided with the war period in BiH, a series of personal losses in the closest family, and a general state of unrest and uncertainty, it was very important for me to find a job that would provide me with the conditions for professional progress but also a sense of existential security, which was not at all simply at a time when very few universities offered places for academic specialists in my field. I was fortunate that a position opened up at York within the Department of Humanities and the Religion and Culture Program. I completely found myself in that job description, which called for an interdisciplinary approach to religion and culture with an emphasis on context as much as text and an open historical and geographical focus. As I found out later, they received more than a hundred applications from North America and Europe, but the committee liked what I had to offer both in terms of research work and pedagogical vision. I am still at York; it is the third-largest university in Canada with more than 50,000 students. I am surrounded by a very dynamic college, and regardless of the various bureaucratic difficulties that working at such a large university entails, I am full of praise and gratitude for this professional environment. In your research, you often deal with Bosnia and Herzegovina and its historical culture. What is she an example of, and is it possible to broaden the perspective by looking at Bosnia, if we speak from the position of your expertise in the fields of cultural history and religion? Unfortunately, because of the last war, Bosnia and Herzegovina has become a negative example in the world media and global discourse. Of course, that image was connected to some of its previous historical moments, especially the Sarajevo assassination, but also the general attitude towards the Balkans as an insufficiently Europeanized and unstable region filled with animosities and explosive narcissism of minor differences. As it often happens in societies that are long-term subordinated to stereotypes and prejudices, we ourselves contribute to that image, accepting it as a fateful truth or worse, as a genetic predisposition. The need to problematize that stereotype came somewhat from personal experiences, since I noticed changes in people's attitudes when they heard that I was from BiH, but also for professional reasons, because historical sources from the pre-modern period indicate to me something different and often the opposite. Finally, in order for mutual intolerance and alienation to exist, there must also be closeness. Quarrels are always conditioned by a dose of intimacy. Arguments directed against BiH and the entire region stem mainly from European societies in which historical differences were systematically eradicated through centuries of religious wars or assimilated, and their current immigration policy crisis indicates the depth of collective confusion and xenophobia. Our internal differences have never been denied, but we in BiH, and in the Balkans in general, mainly under the pressure of myths about unity and purity of national identity, have a schizophrenic attitude towards our own differences—the concept of neighborhood, coexistence, and mixing collides with the fear of mixing with other and different people, which cyclically fuels violence. Examples of such tragedies abound in modern history. In the pre-modern era, when nationalism in this modern sense was not a determinant of identity, the sources speak of a completely different dynamic where other determinants, such as economic hardships, kinship relations, or regional affiliation, had priority. Although it is true that people in the Ottoman Empire were grouped by confessional affiliation (which also confirms that diversity was woven into the system itself), we see based on various sources from BiH—oral traditions, notes from everyday life, poetry, customs and rituals, medical records, legal writings, and theological treatises—that everyday life was solidly built from mutual solidarity and orientation towards each other. That complex and polyglot cultural and historical heritage that we inherited from the pre-modern period, both material and immaterial, has not been equally included in the history textbooks. On the contrary, textbooks are dominated by narratives of separation, based on modern national myths projected onto the past about where one belongs and where one's roots come from, but also academic disciplines that have only recently begun to open up to each other and enable a conversation between Byzantology and Ottoman studies, European study of Balkanology, Slavic Studies and Oriental Studies, study of religion and theology, etc. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a collection of its historical epochs that can be considered separately and disassembled according to the needs of certain disciplines, but a diachronically and synchronically connected network of religious cultures, customs, and symbols that makes the most sense if approached with the recognition and recognition of all its elements in the context of their mutual diversity but also attachments. Historically speaking, this binding is sometimes productive and sometimes, unfortunately, destructive. The question is how to disable these destructive urges as much as possible, change the narrative about the past and thus the future, and emphasize elements from historical culture that can serve as a positive example, for us and for other societies that are struggling with diversity that they are not used to and which are inevitable in this age of globalization. The book Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Death, Tombstones and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam since c.1500 (Ashgate, 2016) deals with the culture of death and memory, and this was witnessed by the exhibition Memories in Stone set up in cooperation with the Aga Khan Foundation in Toronto in 2017. and last year in the National Museum. What are your observations and conclusions and why are they important for understanding Bosnian identities? For a long time, I have been interested in the culture of memory, in which the concept of death, disappearance, and oblivion occupies a large place. I turned to the material culture of cemeteries in BiH to examine how they record memory and forgetting through various historical eras. On the one hand, old cemeteries are physical remains of the past; they do not belong to the modern memorial culture of monuments, which is intended to direct cultural memory towards certain people, moments, and events. Ordinary cemeteries do not have that purpose; they are primarily there to connect the dead with their descendants, who keep them in their memory through rituals and visits. On the other hand, cemeteries are at the same time public property of all the people who live around them and the generations that will inherit them in the future. So, cemeteries are both private and social property. Intimate and public space. As such, they tell us much more than biographical information carved in stone. I was interested in how death is commemorated how the dead are remembered in the transitional period from the Middle Ages to the Ottoman era, and how confessional and demographic changes are reflected in funeral culture. This includes not only the method of burial but also shifts in the culture of memory, literacy, confessional and inter-confessional relations, customs, oral tradition, etc. I was most intrigued by the so-called transculturation, the term of the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, according to which contacts between cultures simultaneously lead to the loss and gain of various segments. After coming into contact with Ottoman funerary architecture and epigraphy, which itself went through a long period of maturation in terms of style and form before arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we lost some elements from medieval funerary architecture but also added something to the Ottoman standard. At the same time, as the confessional groups differentiated themselves under the millet system, the Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims, and Jews began to mark death separately but also borrowed some elements from each other. Until the 18th century, we saw significant spatial postmortem intimacy between various confessional groups; it was not unusual to rest together or nearby, to carve similar epigraphic and iconographic motifs, and to share oral traditions about heroes, unusual phenomena, fairies, and edicts, unlike the modern period, when the division among the dead on a confessional basis is much more noticeable. The reach of collective memory thus reaches and renews itself among the population that shares a common space, life, and death, regardless of religious identity. Death did not separate people, and it can be assumed that life did not separate them to the extent that national historiographies record it. In larger urban areas, of course, it is different because they are more directly influenced by imperial forms. What is religion in today's secular world and what is the role of religious identities and religious communities? One of the big questions in contemporary critical theory and political practice is what constitutes a secular society and who represents secular values. Are we talking about a non-religious or an anti-religious worldview? Do we mean a tolerant, pluralistic, humanistic, modern, European order by secular society? Or we are talking about the so-called privatization of religion, its suppression behind the doorstep, or even more extreme, the prohibition of religious activities and the use of religious symbols? It is quite clear that there is no single definition and role of the term secular, and therefore no single role of the sacred in the current world. Sociologist Joan Scott cites discrepancies in the process of political programs of secularization in the West, according to which, for example, in the French version, secularism protects citizens from religious institutions, and in the American version, secularism protects religious communities from state institutions, as well as states from religious ones. In India, secularism is meant to be a barometer of balance within communalism and is currently threatened by the disruption of that balance by the ruling BJP party. Bearing in mind the different interpretations of the relationship between the secular and the sacred in contemporary history, it is clear that the theological item of the Enlightenment, according to which religion and religious institutions should have been completely suppressed from the public space over time, has not been realized. Jurgen Habermas, after the terrorist attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, introduced the term postsecularism in order to recognize and understand the increasingly present and active role of religion on the world stage. Although the term is now used in several senses, each alludes to the fact that the modernist program of secularization is neither complete nor unidirectional and that a new, more inclusive understanding of the dynamics between the secular and sacred domains of life is needed. Jacques Derrida somewhat sarcastically asked whether the deliberate farewell to religion in modern times meant 'farewell' or 'to God' ('adieu' or 'a-dieu'), arguing that secular thought indisputably embeds a religious/spiritual component within itself as much as the religious one carries the secular one in it so that we do not harbor illusions that one will ever completely eradicate the other. Secularism is a response to religion, and for it to exist, there must be religion in some form. Before the 16th century, the meaning of secular did not stand in opposition to religion. With St. Augustine, the term'saeculum' in the sense of the 'worldly' domain was part of the divine cosmos; it was not equal to it but had different functions. We find similar attitudes in Islamic thinkers, including the political theorists Ibn Qutayba and al-Mawardi, who demarcate secular and religious authority. 
How then should we reexamine the tension between secular and religious institutions and worldviews? The connection between the secular and sacred domains should therefore be dialogic, not antagonistic. Modern societies, with few exceptions, are based on a secular order, and this is not in question even for the most committed believers. But like secular institutions, religious institutions also have a contextual value; they can play an important role within the environments in which they are represented. Just as secular institutions are not progressive by definition, so sacred ones are not automatically regressive, regardless of what is often attributed to them. They do not have to be reduced to a blind preservation of tradition and a return to the past, but to be proactive—let's remember the role of 'liberation theology' in South America in the 1950s and 1960s and the related branch in the Palestinian theological movement after the intifada in 1980 or the role played by the Anglican priest Desmond Tutu in the fight against apartheid in the Republic of South Africa. There are also African-American resistance movements against white nationalism, Islamic SRSP socialists in Somalia, Sufi activists in the anti-colonial struggle in Sudan, etc. During this pandemic, we see a similar range of roles played by religious institutions, from those who ignore recommended distancing and precautionary measures and continue with ritual gatherings to those who reject fatalistic narratives about divine will and point to the importance of respecting science and medicine to take care of us, but they call for religious teachings about love for one's neighbor through support, conscientiousness, humanistic ethics, etc. In addition, these crises often lead to what psychologists Christina and Stanislaw Grof called spiritual emergency, namely, the urge and need for some kind of salvation in moments of crisis when one's own life or the life of the closest is threatened, which places faith and sacred institutions in a very important place in the current situation. In Canada, the importance of including religious communities and leaders in the collective fight against the pandemic has been discussed from the very beginning. And considering that in Canada, according to the latest estimates, about 15-20 different religions and denominations are represented, we are talking about the engaged cooperation of religious communities with secular health and other state institutions in the care of those who do not have the opportunity to face the crisis on their own of this scale. How can BiH be considered here, not only from one's perspective but also from comparative issues of identity, especially if we are talking about a society that has come out of the war? Each of these questions is contextual, and it would be impossible to blindly impose some external mold on the conditions in BiH, but parallels and paradigms can be drawn on several sides. We are a deeply wounded society that has survived great violence, emerging from collective trauma, so healing is essential at every level of individual and collective being. This is where religious institutions should have the greatest share, where all sacred powers should be engaged. Unfortunately, in our country, the secular order is greatly threatened precisely because of the intertwining of religious and political identity. In post-war BiH, what caused the disintegration of BiH, and what caused the war and genocide to continue and even deepen? As our national identities are primarily based on religious identity, politics is heavily wrapped in religious cloaks. Croats are Catholics, Serbs are Orthodox, and Bosniaks are Muslims. A simple but extremely dangerous equation that prevents the formation of a truly civil, secular, and democratic society deepens identity politics and fuels a certain type of national theocracy. It is advocated by nationalists, some of whom are devout believers and some 'infidels', but it is significantly opposed by many important critics from religious and theological as well as secular circles. The voices of those critics are united because they are fighting for the same order regardless of the direction from which they approach it. I think the most relevant argument for us is Edward Said's argument, which claims that in the 20th century, the polarity between secularism and religion is less important than the polarity between secularism and nationalism because in many parts of the modern world, nationalism has taken on sacred rhetoric. According to Said, belonging to any nationalist movement is the greatest betrayal of the secular order. In his case, the distancing from the politics of the PLO was based on the attitude that progressive intellectuals and critics must operate through a certain amount of skepticism towards all totalitarian ideas and movements, that is, not only towards religious institutions, which he considers relatively benign compared to national movements based on homogenistic identities. On your portal, this common resistance to nationalism as a blind quasi-theology in Said's sense can be seen very well from both directions of action and thinking, secular and sacred. The common enemy of conscious secularists and believers is identity politics. So, we are aware of how thin the line is between religion and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That line must be strengthened as a matter of urgency; religious institutions must move away from political institutions and continue to act through what is imperative for them, namely, the preservation of the spiritual health of individuals and the community, gathering around the moral principles woven in the scriptures in earthly life, responsibility towards oneself and the environment, respect for one's own life and that of others, and, accordingly, coexistence. No religion does not demand this from its devotees. Love, patience, modesty, mutual attention, and morality are fundamental humanist principles of all sacred teachings; they should be actively engaged in this time of post-war crisis and especially in this time of pandemic. How do you comment on the implicit antagonism towards religion in the liberal intellectual elite? Although this is not always the case, for many it stems from a rather uncritical acceptance of the thesis that the secular vision of the world is neutral and, as such, more progressive, open, and speculative. This is essentially Marx's thesis about religion as an opiate that denies us the possibility of critical thinking about ourselves and society and that alienates us from the power of self-knowledge and a more objective understanding of the world. Marx, of course, extended this to all kinds of homogenous identities, including ethnos, which obscures the uncorrupted, authentic, and neutral core of our being. The Canadian philosopher (and my former professor) Charles Taylor calls such a setting the subtraction theory, according to which secularization epistemologically implies the removal of sacred allegories and illusions in the name of a more direct, objective understanding of life and the creation of a neutral civil society within liberal democracies. Taylor sees this as a great weakness and shortsightedness of the secular mind and believes that the connection between the two epistemologies, sacred and secular, would be much more productive if it were not antagonistic. And indeed, this polarization that causes mutual denial and intolerance needs to be reexamined. The contradiction between secularity and sacredness is not of the same nature as the contradiction between theories within the natural sciences, where new theses and evidence require the negation of previous ones. In this meeting of worlds, the reference to the other and the different, even when they seem completely contradictory, opens up space for more subtle narratives. Those narratives exist; they are best seen in creative work, i.e., art, music, and literature, where the connection of contemporary principles of life with traditional symbols and allegories woven into religious teachings is often questioned. When we read today's writers, even those like Salman Rushdie who categorically reject religion and religious authorities, we see that these are not anti-religious statements, but works that are deeply inspired by the symbolism and semantics of religious traditions. Certain branches of contemporary theological thought see such creative work as significant developments for the epistemology of religion. For example, a newer field in academic theology considers movies and literature as important forums for contemporary biblical exegesis. Larry Kreitzer, a leading theologian in the field, calls it reverse hermeneutic flow, where, unlike traditional theology, in which scripture is taken as a reference for interpreting the world, the world presented in literature and film is taken as a reference for interpreting biblical narratives. Something like that should also happen in the opposite direction. Humanistic thought is there to consider and understand us as historical subjects whose lives are limited but whose thoughts are metahistorical, and to lead us to knowledge above and beyond existing knowledge. Guides for such journeys of the mind and the articulation of new knowledge are present in both secular and sacred words. The task of the intellectual elite from the humanities and social sciences is not only to preserve the freedom of their opinion, which they consider a secular imperative but also to critically examine their understanding of untruth and inauthenticity, which they usually attribute to religion. Authenticity and truth are, after all, always historically conditioned and, as such, cannot be considered the transcendental essence of any worldview or identity, be it sacred or secular. In a recent article for Tacno.net, Professor Ćurak predicts that after the last global Coronavirus pandemic, people might have more sympathy for dictatorships and dictators. Sympathy for the greater power of the state is already visible because it saves the irresponsible individual. Canada is a multi-ethnic society like BiH, what experiences of that society can be valuable for BiH? Professor Ćurka's predictions easily come true, and we are already seeing some steps in that direction in Hungary, Italy, and the USA. I am equally, if not more, concerned about what the Israeli historian Yuval Hariri predicts for the 21st century and which is closely related to the developments surrounding this pandemic, which is totalitarianism based on biotechnological achievements. The technological revolution, as he calls it, leads to the fact that whoever manages the biometric database can take complete control over individuals and society. So the enemy is not someone concrete against whom we will build a wall like in Israel the wall against the Palestinians or Trump's wall against the Mexicans, nor will we be surrounded by WORRIES as was the slogan in Tito's time, but it is invisible and amorphous, which means that only those who have access to biotechnology information can define who we should fight against, when, and how much. Dictatorship on that basis makes us helpless. All societies must face the enormous changes this pandemic is causing. Indian writer Arundhati Roy calls this pandemic a portal that opens and allows us to question the machinery of liberal democracy and the capitalist order. A virus that doesn't care about the accumulation and flow of capital, economic power, the unequal distribution of raw materials, or identity politics prompts us to decide whether to repair the machinery that brought us to this apocalypse or to build a new one. And indeed, on the one hand, we have a unique opportunity to change the narrative about self-knowledge, connection, the importance of science and knowledge, cooperation, and solidarity, regardless of regional, historical, and political circumstances. We are returning to that, if not neutral, then open human beings who can now organize in a different way, open other doors, start a new narrative, and learn from our own and others' mistakes to build a more stable future on this planet and with this planet. When we look at the news these days, we see how many religious leaders appeal to their devotees to stick to the results of scientific research, and how many medical workers, politicians, and ordinary citizens looking into the abyss of uncertainty call for salvation for themselves and their loved ones. We can hope that it is possible to bridge the divide between various teachings, ideologies, and identities. This is a unique moment. Sociologists use the term liminality for that heterological space that appears during the transition from one state to another, a period in which the new identity has not completely crystallized but which marks a categorical break with the old one. In Qur'anic idiom, it is called barzakh, a barrier that separates worlds and identities. Once you enter that space, there is no going back. Sufi thought, which is fundamentally humanistic as well as theistic, elaborated this notion of barzakh as an epistemological and creative intermediate space, or strait, where new knowledge emerges based on old experiences, where mistakes committed cannot be corrected or denied but are not returned to. , and where the shift is not a departure towards something completely new but a return, through creative thought and work, to something that is already inside us and that is fundamentally better. So, we are not at our core neutral, as modern secular thought dictates. In this sacred conception, which originates from all the scriptures represented in our space, we are at our core the best we can be, but we have forgotten that. Perhaps this Sufi culture of memory, according to which we are not sinful but forgetful, provides an answer to this global crisis because it orders us to remember ourselves and recover the intellectual and spiritual potential that lies primordially, forgotten, within ourselves. Recently, the writer Semezdin Mehmedinović returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina and told you in a conversation on social networks that it is time for you to return. Are you thinking about returning to BiH? I always appreciated Semezdin as an exceptional writer, and now also for the courage he mustered when he decided to return. I think that many in the diaspora also secretly wish for that for themselves. In my case, so far I have resisted the way another writer and friend of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rabih Alamedine, sums it up, saying, "Homeland is where I belong but I don't fit in, and here is where I fit in but I don't belong." It's a little bit of a psychological obstacle, but also quite a pragmatic one, but one day shortly, I hope, that obstacle will be removed, so with Semezdin, over coffee, I will urge other friends and colleagues to take the same step.
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