Religion, Prosperity, and Imagining Bosnian Islam
by Zora Kostadinova, UCL
One of the main interests of Takhayyul Project is to establish connections between multiple imaginaries that otherwise separate political, religious, and social groups. In this blog entry, I would like to reflect on two different ways of studying Islam and religious imaginaries in the same geography, discussed as a part of the Takhayyul Seminar Series.
Two of the seminars for Takhayyul project at the Institute of Global Prosperity were devoted to the significance of Bosnia-Herzegovina in globalisation and Islam. One of the successor states of the former Socialist Yugoslavia with a majority Muslim population, the Bosnian historical legacy stretches through two Empires, the Ottoman, who ruled for over five centuries, and then the Habsburg from 1878–1918. In the 1990s, Bosnia suffered the worst fate with the collapse of Yugoslav State Socialism. The aggression against its sovereignty mounted by her two immediate neighbours, Serbia and Croatia against the Bosnian Muslims, resulted with a prolonged three years’ war and this recent tragic history has generated a lot of academic interest, and especially so in Islam.
The Bosnian war which attracted foreign mujahadeen fighters from the Middle East, became the first site on European soil where jihad was waged. The anthropologist and human rights attorney Darryl Li who opened the seminar series with his recent book: The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (2020) charted the experiences of jihadi soldiers who travelled to Bosnia in solidarity with Bosnian Muslims. Though Li’s work is not an ethnography of jihad per se, and the Bosnian jihad makes up for only one chapter among the other international involvements or he analyses, the ethnography of jihad serves as an initiation into deconstructing other international solidarity movements or the “universalisms” that Bosnia has been a part of.
As the geographical site to many different universalisms ranging from the Yugoslav led brotherhood and unity, the Yugoslav involvement in the Non-Alignment Movement, the United Nations peacekeeping mission during the Bosnian war 1992-1995, humanitarian intervention and the War on Terror, Bosnia generates a fruitful ground for an ethnographic investigation of universalists projects. Li traces the life stories of the mujahadeens who have come to contact in one way or another with all these movements. Through following their life stories, he unpacks the framing question of his work: who has the right to speak in the name of the universal and how can we make sense of the violence deployed in universalist causes. In positing this thesis, he proposes that one fruitful way in engaging in the analysis of jihad is to approach it as a form of universalism as well. Thus, the jihadi soldier, familiar to us as the “universal enemy” does not necessarily hold an inherent hostility to human values, but rather he is known as such because he is declared to be one by the legitimate actors and states involved in other forms of universalisms such as the Global War on Terror or the United Nations peacekeeping Forces in Bosnia during and after the war. With this, Li challenges the established norm that universalism is a practice owned by sovereign nation-states and international bodies. Instead, he argues that universalisms can be anthropologically investigated as practices of solidarity among people who self-organise to pursue a cause of universalist claims without an attachment to sovereign nation states.
In his analysis Li shows how each movement of solidarity is undermined by splitting across lines of race. Islam is racialized not only in the war on terror but also on the field among the jihadi and Bosnian soldiers themselves whereby the splitting is evident through the good/bad Muslim dichotomy. This dichotomy though initiated by the jihadi soldiers who constantly reinterpret Bosnian Muslim practice as “not correct” is juxtaposed to the Bosnian solders’ observations that Arab Islam is foreign to theirs. Thus, the dichotomy of good versus bad Muslim acquires a racial overtone, whereby what “good” stands for is inherently European Islam, thus automatically orientalising the Islam of the Arab other. Racial imaginaries and hierarchically ordered operations of power, can be equally traced among UNPROFR force that is meant to keep the peace in Bosnia. The Global South makes the bulk of its force while their leaders are white European. On their end, the UN soldiers who come from the countries like Egypt and Pakistan, also engage in a double-dealing messaging home and abroad. Though under the umbrella of the UN, their home countries news somewhat presents a message that Pakistanis are also engaged in some form of “fighting on behalf of the umma”. Thus, what should be a project of universal solidarity, is in fact showing to be reproducing age old hierarchies along the lines of race and othering, the workings of Empires rather than solidarity. With this, Li presents an open question: who is the universal enemy to the movements of solidarity? The logics of Empire underlying many international involvements of solidarity or the jihadi soldier whose intervention in armed violence in solidarity with his fellow Muslims conducted in the name of the umma?
The legacy of the jihad during the Bosnian war, reverberates to this day mostly through debates that take places in Bosnian Muslim institutions on what makes “real” and “correct” Islam. The splitting of the good/bad Muslim in some ways can be partially traced to the clashes in Islamic practices between the foreign and domestic Bosnian fighters. The legacy also attracted the kind of interest in political Islam which prior to the war Bosnia has not been familiar with, reducing Bosnian Muslim lives, to the international audience, to the political sphere.
However, if we reduce Muslim lives to politics, then what does remain of the religious experience? This was the framing question of our second seminar by the anthropologists David Henig in his monograph Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (2020). As the title of his book indicates, his work is written against the identarian discourses prevalent in Bosnia today, which are tied into the ethnonational identity. In fact, studies on Islam in Bosnia until recently were too preoccupied with Islam and the new post-war Bosniak nation state, but Henig shows that ordinary people engage in living Islam (often overlooked by the grand identarian projects) through the works of ethics and everyday local solidarities. Unlike Li, Henig draws the attention away from the larger projects of the “umma” and to the local village community in central Bosnia, where continuity of various local Islamic practices ask us as anthropologists to pay attention to the true religious experience and works of piety, which often shies away from the political and the ethnonational. Henig makes us acutely aware of the ways in which the locality of religious experience is defined through the historical consciousness of villagers. The latter is deeply embedded in the legacy of the Ottoman Empire as well as the historical clash of various geopolitical interest that have taken place in Bosnia.
Henig reflected on the realities in which the work of anthropology of Islam is taking place, on the margins of Europe and shows how the war is one of many layers which shades the present life of Muslims, but it is not the only defining one. In a time of rising Islamophobia, whereby the debates about Muslims in Europe are reduced to immigration and integration, zooming the lens on the everyday lives of Muslims in the Bosnian countryside, the discussion focused on how the shifting geopolitics of the Muslim world have not erased the locality of religious experience which is all too often lived as history.
This paints a stark contrast between Li’s jihadists whose imaginary of the umma is Global and universal on one hand, and Henig’s local Bosnian ordinary villagers whose imaginary of the umma does not play a prominent role in their everyday lives, but rather the local jamaat (community) is what makes the immediate community of believers. Tracing the practice of Islam across generations, Henig’s work shows how stories of the past told in the present offer a continuous genealogy of a local Islamic worldview which is intimately tied to the greater realm of God’s grace and destiny. Here, history offers itself up as a trope of potentiality in remaking everyday Muslim lives through the various tragic ruptures and critical events of Bosnia’s recent history.
But what does it mean to live in the present with the past, and how does that informs the local understanding of living Islam? Henig’s unique contribution to the studies of Muslims in general, and the Anthropology of Islam in particular is to be located through how local history and religious experience are intertwined. This moves his arguments away from the major theoretical debates that ensued from the Talal Asad’s famous formulation of Islam as a discursive tradition. Henig shows that, when researched from the point of historical consciousness, the work of Islam in everyday lives of Muslims reveals an understanding of lived Islam beyond the discursive tradition, and back to what really matters – the local moral worlds of practitioners.
Henig’s interlocutors are constantly referring to history, and to the awareness of their locality as a site for major geopolitical clashes, such as empires, socialism, and even the Global War on Terror which Darryl Li so meticulously researched. In each one of these ruptures and critical events, we can compare the supposed solidarity of various Muslims in Li’s “universalism” versus Henig’s locality of experience and draw the conclusion that the real work of universalisms happens very locally. In Henig’s ethnography we see local communities bound to one another in everyday solidarity as an expression of God’s mercy and grace. Thus, the green shop market owner is generous to offer his surplus fruit to local less fortunate neighbours for free, hoping that he will be rewarded with Divine sadaka in return. These ordinary acts Henig calls “ethics of proximity” and they are real and tangible.
In this sense, ethnographies show how the lives and stories of ordinary peoples stand against the grand narratives of universalisms, nations, Empires and grand identarian ethnonationalist projects.
The imaginary of Empire is another angle that differs in these two works. While Li shows the U.S-led Global War on Terror to act as an Empire in her pursuit of Islamist soldiers who engage in Global jihad, as well as the undertones of race involved in projecting the image of the jihadi as an “universal enemy” who is simultaneously of a certain race, Henig’s interlocutors, whose historical consciousness draws to a great degree from the Ottoman Empire engage in religious rituals involving various shrines, prayer for rain (among other things). These Islamic practices are legacies of the five centuries long Ottoman rule, and they have often been challenged as “inventions” by the conservative Islamic circles in the country, which became way more vocal after the war. Thus, Li’s foreign fighters many of whom settled in Bosnia after the war, founding several communities, have also installed a version of Islam not familiar to the local Bosnian Muslims that Henig writes about. Thus, the work of history in mediating religious experience, opens a new imaginary in the study of the Anthropology of Islam: that of Islam as a lived religion, which is often far removed from discourses and power (Henig), and yet so very close to it (Li).
