EUROPE NEVER EXISTED WITHOUT ISLAM "Bosnian Islam is not a small tradition, nor a peripheral Islam, nor any heterodox Islam. It is Islam enriched not only by the domestic, oral tradition of our peoples but also by the highly intellectual, creative, and professional achievements of actors from this region recognized throughout and outside the Ottoman Empire, and we should be proud of it, actively preserve it, and not reject it as something heretical and inauthentic." Amila Buturović is a professor at York University in Toronto. Her field of research includes the intertwining of religion and culture, especially in the context of Islamic societies. Her last research was related to the culture of death in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with issues of continuity and discontinuity of eschatological sensibilities, epigraphic texts, and commemorative practices. She also deals with the theories of translation and polyglossia, which she wrote about in the context of Arab-Islamic Spain and the Ottoman Balkans. The books Stone Speaker: Medieval Tombstones, Landscape, and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (2002), Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Death, Tombstones, and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam since c. 1500. (2015), and the collection Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture, and History (2007), in which she was co-editor with İrvin C. Schick. STAV: In the book Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory, you wrote that you enjoy discovering all the threads of the complex cultural fabric that makes Bosnian Islam simultaneously exclusive and inclusive, universal and idiosyncratic, static and dynamic, local and cosmopolitan. The term Bosnian Islam has been emphasized a lot lately, but rarely does anyone know how to explain what it is. BUTUROVIĆ: In academic studies of comparative religion, the terms great tradition and small tradition have long been used, and are still used, to distinguish between local cultural currents that influence and modify according to local needs the fundamental principles and theological principles of a particular religion, especially the world-wide ones, the so-called universal religions such as Christianity and Islam. Sometimes the metaphor of a tree is used to convey that image, according to which there is supposedly a stable body of religious principles that resists historical and geographical currents, and then that body branches and creates a wide canopy that shows how each environment filters, i.e., modifies these principles and contributes to the diversity of religious tradition. According to that differentiation, those local, i.e., popular forms of belief and expression of faith, should not be identified with what is a centrifugal and permanent feature of religious tradition. There are other but similar analytical categories. Thus, for example, some of the leading European orientalists, including the late Aleksandar Popović, call Islam in the Balkans (as well as Islam in Central Asia) Islam périphérique, Islam from the periphery, reflecting the same belief that there is an axis (center) in which true Islam exists and the periphery where there is some watered-down, popular, and syncretic Islam—a metaphor similar to that of the tree, corpse, and crown. I fundamentally disagree with such categories because I think that, however analytically attractive they may seem, they ignore the fact that all religious norms appear in a certain historical context and not in a vacuum, that orthodoxy is also historically conditioned, that there is no religious tradition, that it is not subordinate to the forces of homogenization and the authorities of certain institutions, and that all these actors and norms are the product of a specific epoch. The so-called big and small traditions are constantly interwoven and shaped, just like the center and the periphery, and they often change. In this sense, the term Bosnian Islam suggests a dynamic connection between what the Ottomans brought as Hanafi Islam (but already in a reformed Ottoman version) and how it was received and enriched through the contributions of people from our region at all levels of Islamic thought—jurisprudence, theology, Sufism, literature—to ritual practice and professional/craft activities. Islam was not just blindly copied into the local environment but underwent a positive transformation that allowed the Ottoman Empire to be much more dynamic than is usually expected from large empires in which metropolises are the main center of intellectual and religious events and the provinces are only a pale shadow. Thanks to many of our compatriots, as well as people throughout the Empire, the Ottomans were able to connect various administrative units, to be adorned with more intellectual centers than just large cities and metropolises, and to invite individuals from various parts of the Empire to contribute in a way that reflects regional differences. As is the case with intellectual exchanges, some of it crossed the borders of the Empire: for example, intellectual contributions to Persian thought, not only among Bosnian scholars but also among those from other parts of the Balkans, which can be seen from the manuscript legacy in the archives in Bosnia, Bulgaria, or Macedonia. In addition, it should be emphasized that spiritual and religious authorities were distributed among several spheres of influence, from madrasahs to legal madhhabs and Sufi tariqas, and they sometimes interfered and sometimes did not. Such differences were not treated as a source of weakness. The American historian Aaron Rodrigue believes that the principle of diversity, not identification, was the basis of the Ottoman state, and we can add that this principle enabled the creation of regional versions of Islam, especially among the "new" Muslims, who at the same time immersed themselves in Ottoman Islam and broadened their horizons. Without the need to romanticize Bosnian Islam as something unique and unrepeatable, it should be considered the product of those dynamic exchanges between broader imperial principles and local and domestic sensibilities, which make up the Ottoman cosmopolis. Bosnian Islam is not a small tradition, nor peripheral Islam, nor any heterodox Islam. It is Islam enriched not only by the domestic, oral tradition of our peoples but also by the highly intellectual, creative, and professional achievements of actors from this region recognized throughout and outside the Ottoman Empire, and we should be proud of it, actively preserve it, and not reject it as something heretical and inauthentic. STAV: Is it too free to say that understanding and living Islam as Bosniaks do would be perhaps the most acceptable for Europe? How interesting is Bosnian Islam to Europe? BUTUROVIĆ: Many analysts and some academics speak biasedly about us as European Muslims who practice European Islam, and academic supporters of that name (Balić, for example) emphasize its historical inseparability from the concept of Europe. However, we know that even that concept of Europe is not stable, that it can be defined ideologically, politically, and historically in several ways, and that a lot of it is a matter of self-worth, i.e., feelings of superiority or inferiority. Now perhaps the more popular name is Balkan Islam, i.e., Islam in the Balkans, as some form of connecting the Middle Eastern and Western European trajectories of "Islam." Regardless of which of these names we accept, we should keep in mind that such terms arise from the need to belong to something greater than ourselves. In this case, it is Europe. However, emphasizing that we are more acceptable than other Muslims in Europe is ethically problematic because it creates a hierarchy among the citizens of Europe; it supposedly considers us more digestible than other Muslims, and I think that it should be used very cautiously in the name of that ideological position or completely thrown out. Let's remember that Europe never existed without Islam, because when you add 700 or more years of Arab-Islamic civilization on the Iberian Peninsula and some 500 years of the Ottoman Empire in Southeast Europe, with multiple spheres of mutual influence, it is clear that the current narrative of European exclusivity is based primarily on ideology, not on history. STAV: Besides the Balkans, the continuous presence of Islam in Europe was for the longest time on the soil of Spain. Can parallels be drawn? BUTUROVIĆ: There are parallels, but they don't exactly match. On the one hand, there is the issue of continuity that must be emphasized, as I mentioned a moment ago. The presence of Islam and Muslims on this continent is a centuries-old historical fact, older than the very idea of Europe as we now know and conceptualize it. In Spain, the Islamic influence was primarily Arab, secondarily Berber, and in the Balkans, Ottoman. As much as we talk about "Islam" in both cases, its cultural forms are quite different, starting from the sociolinguistic system to religious and civilizational frameworks. It should not be forgotten that Islamic culture in Spain was in a certain way localized, politically partially detached from the eastern part of the Arab empire, regardless of many points in common, and that it developed in a unique, but somewhat idiosyncratic way, with a significant presence of Christian and Jewish influence. The balances of political power were changing, and, apart from a relatively short period after the conquest in 711 until the fall of the Umayyad Emirate in 929 and several later attempts at Islamic reintegration of homogenization through Berber incursions, there was no strong centralized government. The creative spirit and mutual exchange of knowledge were made possible precisely because of such political fragmentation and the continuous contact of different cultures, and such an unstable situation often led to an extremely high level of creative activity in several extremely rich centers such as Cordoba, Toledo, and Seville. The maturing of Judeo-Muslim-Christian culture, in which Sephardic Jews participated as well as Arabs, Berbers, and Castilians, is reflected in architecture, aesthetics, literature, cuisine, religious practice (e.g., mystical currents in all three religions), and the intellectual field. In the Balkans, power was centralized much more clearly; the sense of belonging was drawn in the administrative cartography itself so that at the same time there was perhaps more stability but also separation due to the unequal distribution of power. In both cases, it must be said, that there was a cultural-religious polyphony that essentially characterized these regions. Convivencia, as it is used as a term for coexistence in Spain, also existed in the Balkans but had, due to objective political and administrative conditions, a different expression and meaning. However, both spaces have exceptional value for the issue of contact between cultures, cultural polyphony, immediacy, and intimacy, which included not only inevitable contact in such a small space but also drawing on the same resources, both material and immaterial, relying on mutual communication in every day as well as professional life. We know that in our country many trades/guilds included craftsmen and workers from all religious groups, and that people borrowed ideas, materials, and goods from each other, which can be seen in handicrafts, architecture, epigraphy, cooking, oral lectures, etc. This must be studied further, and it is only possible—and here again, I return to the various academic towers and jealousies—if Slavic studies, Balkan studies, Ottoman studies, and comparative religion are disciplinary integrated if nationalist and outdated disciplinary paradigms are broken out of academic endeavors if we let the historical text speak for itself before relegating it to just one of the disciplinary, ideological, and political camps. This happens more and more in the study of Spain and its rich but deeply mixed cultural heritage, and it must happen in the study of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as the entire Balkans. STAV: Continuing the question about Islam in the Balkans, more specifically Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is always tangible to talk about the spread of Islam. In the contemporary context, it is most often discussed one-dimensionally within the framework of pamphlet nationalist statements. What is rarely talked about are the internal conflicts of the first converts to Islam. How did the first Muslims feel? It was necessary to change the whole view? What was that experience like? BUTUROVIĆ: Thanks to the administrative machinery of the Ottoman Empire, we can systematically and in detail follow the process of Islamization of these regions. So far, this has been done seriously and methodically thanks to our domestic Orientalism, which gave us top experts and a rich archive for examining this phenomenon. Of course, registers and lists do not give a complete picture, and, unfortunately, we will never be able to reconstruct it in the absence of memoirs, narratives, and diaries of the first converts. It is not even a matter of personal experience but more of a theoretical one: what kind of identity is created by the process of accepting a new faith? Is this process a transition from one religion to another, is it intra-religious, i.e., within the same faith, but to some other form of it, or is it a transition from disbelief to belief? We usually only have in mind a statistical issue that has ritual and administrative value, and only then a broader socio-historical one, while these internal differences are not so important. However, accepting a new religion, in any form, is a complex and long process, not a one-time ritual act that immediately places you in a new social group. So the issue of conversion, its circumstances, and even causality is only a part of a much more complex picture that, in addition to the demographic one, has its own psychological, personal, and private dimensions, which, unfortunately, are not available to us due to the lack of appropriate sources. Narratives of this type that exist are a rich treasure, but they are often written polemically, so they have a wider public historiographic function, although they are very valuable for opening up those new vistas. That is why I approached the gravestone as a valuable, albeit incomplete, source of such information, considering that epigraphic and iconographical images of this type are probably the most authentic expression of ordinary people in the context of their time, their immediate family, and the community that buries them and continues to live around them. Inscriptions are always a kind of dialogue, spoken in a language and style that leads the community around the dead to stay in touch with them rather than let them be forgotten. In this sense, observing the early Ottoman (Muslim) cemeteries as a reflection of that time is a path, no matter how narrow, into the life of the dead who are otherwise inaccessible to us except possibly as statistics. The inscriptions are like an open window that gives us at least a little insight into them and their coexistence with the environment in which they were buried through written or visual evidence on the tombstone. It is one of the rare approaches to the first generations of Muslims who, through death and its mark, showed how their closest ones, and those who come after them, remember them and how to address them. STAV: We said that you are the author of the book Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory, where the sight is observed as a cultural manifestation. You tried to listen and interpret its polyphonic melody. The encounter between the local medieval tradition and the new Ottoman-Islamic one certainly resulted in interesting hybrid forms. Are there cases where the local population adopted Ottoman visual norms, e.g. the way of marking the place of the deceased with a nishan, but did not accept Islam? BUTUROVIĆ: Hybrid forms lasted a very long time and, in a certain way, still exist. The characteristics of the Ottoman gravestone are uprightness, slenderness, and a turban, which differed from our large, mostly lying monoliths. Amorphous and hybrid forms appeared all over Bosnia and Herzegovina during the first and second centuries of Ottoman rule, all the way up to the 18th century, when funerary architecture began to be differentiated in a very clear way between religious communities and physically separated. Until then, there was a culture of flexibility, both in terms of physical intimacy and in terms of symbols. In addition, through research in village cemeteries and abandoned old necropolises throughout BiH, I realized that there is a different but extremely important type of cultural hybridity. Namely, the lack of inscriptions, which is a very common phenomenon, enables the telling of different stories and legends about these silent monuments, and thus the adoption of such monuments by the local population, regardless of religious affiliation. The stone becomes a living text that is told and retold, and these stories and oral traditions represent a treasure of knowledge. So, the greatest value of that polyphonic melody is that it is multidirectional and that it is always a source of knowledge and tradition for those who find cultural value in that corpus. Unfortunately, with the urbanization and excavations of such locations, the cultural heritage is more and more endangered, and the significance and essential hybridity and polyphony are lost. STAV: You were one of the editors of a notable collection on the place and role of women in the Balkans. Unfortunately, the orientalist stereotype still prevails here, but can you, as someone familiar with this, say whether the woman of the Ottoman-era Balkans was passive and isolated from society? BUTUROVIĆ: The woman was passive and isolated, but that is not the whole story. Namely, stereotypes are not only a product of Orientalism; it is a historical fact that women's access to public space was extremely limited, but of course, this is not only the case with the Balkans or the Ottoman Empire, but with the whole world. What is mine, i.e., what prompted us as editors to create an anthology about women, is the double isolation of women: on the one hand, her historical status is poorly researched because her voice is hidden and often completely extinguished in the sources we have at our disposal. On the other hand, until recently, academic interest did not place women high on the list of priorities. We were aware that many researchers, studying various writings and manuscripts from the Ottoman period, occasionally came across interesting data or anecdotes about women that confirmed, problematized, and even broke the stereotype of her complete isolation, but they did not have the opportunity to publish it adequately. So, it is not only a matter of historical situation but also academic prejudice. Interest in the neglected segments of society, from women to children, minorities, and other marginalized groups, has only recently begun to appear in the last few decades, and only now is a discourse maturing that can blur the boundaries that separate the center from the margins, men and women, and the mainstream and secondary actors of historical changes. Just listing them is not enough; the whole hermeneutic framework should be developed to get a complete picture of the status of women and their relationship to the public and private spheres of Ottoman society. In addition, gender as an analytical category acquires special importance in studies of religion, where the basic assumptions of religious principles are reexamined, according to which the subordinate status of women is not only a social fact but a reflection of the cosmological order. There, feminist revisions focused not only on exposing but also breaking the normative role of women and men in the scriptures and theological interpretations of them, so that her role as a victim of the cosmological system could be transformed into a positive role of a historical actor. STAV: There are numerous domestic and foreign studies on tesavwuf and dervishes of the Balkans, but women are rarely mentioned in this context. Do we have influential women dervishes in the Balkans in the history of Sufism? BUTUROVIĆ: Sufism, i.e., tasawwuf, enabled the expansion of the boundaries of religious authority and hierarchy that had been created and maintained by traditional Islamic institutions and where women had no access. This was particularly reflected in the question of gender relations so that from its very beginnings, Sufism enabled women not only to actively participate but also to position them as mentors and guides on the spiritual-ritual path towards God. Of course, there was no total reversal in gender relations, but there were significant developments. Unfortunately, here too we have the problem of sources to make a slightly clearer picture because historiography was once again a male activity. However, even the sporadic mention of influential women points to this essential fact in the recognition of their spiritual authority. Women in Sufism, just like men, found a way to enrich their spiritual lives and created communities, sometimes independently of men. We know that in the Balkans there were the so-called "Sisters of Rumelia," a mystical movement with origins in Asia Minor that spread to the Balkans in the 17th century. In Bosnia, they were called bažijanije and are mentioned as authorities on spiritually religious topics and activities. The prayer for the "Seven Sisters" was part of the ritual practice in BiH until recently, and we know that one of those seven sisters was the wife of the famous Sheikh Kaimija, who was the guardian of a special temple in Sarajevo. Asiye Hatun was also famous in Macedonia, whose meditations and dreams were recorded in the writings of the Halvetian sheikh from Skopje. Among the Bektashi, the influence and activity of women for the entire community was significant, as can be seen from the anthology of their spiritual poetry, Bouquet of Roses (Gül Deste). To emphasize again, the lack of sources prevents us from creating a more complete picture of the dervish activities of women in the Balkans, but we have enough data to indicate their long-term influence. (http://stav.ba)
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