A Muslim Reformist in Communist Yugoslavia

The Life and Thought of Husein Đozo

Sejad Mekić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315525839
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

A Muslim Reformist in Communist Yugoslavia examines the Islamic modernist thought of Husein ?ozo, a prominent Balkan scholar. Born at a time when the external challenges to the Muslim world were many, and its internal problems both complex and overwhelming, ?ozo made it his goal to reinterpret the teachings of the Qur'an and had?th (prophetic tradition) to a generation for whom the truths and realities of Islam had fallen into disuse. As a Muslim scholar who lived and worked in a European, communist, multi-cultural and multi-religious society, Husein ?ozo and his work present us with a particularly exciting account through which to examine the innovative interpretations of Islam. For example, through a critical analysis of ?ozo's most significant fatw?s and other relevant materials, this book examines the extent of the inherent flexibility of the Islamic law and its ability to respond to Muslim interests in different socio-political conditions. Since ?ozo's writings in general and his fatw?s in particular have continued to be published in the Balkan lands up to the present, this monograph should help shed some light on certain assumptions underlying modern Islamic thought and consciousness found in the region.

1
Bosnian Muslims

A historical background

“We live in the borderland between two worlds, on the border between nations, within everyone’s reach, always someone’s scapegoat. Against us the waves of history break, as if against a cliff”.

(Meša Selimović, Derviš i Smrt)

Introductory remarks

Various historical documents verify that Bosnia enjoyed its own medieval state. For example, the famous charter for the people of Dubrovnik from 1189 AD confirmed Bosnia as an independent state.¹ The medieval Bosnian state functioned in accordance with the standards of customary law and state protocols typical of the time.² A plethora of arguments and counterarguments surrounds the circumstances of medieval religious practice in Bosnia. According to Fine, an independent Bosnian Church had been established in the 11th century, outside the jurisdiction of either the Catholic or Orthodox Churches.³ What all historians seem to agree on is the point that no strong Catholic, Orthodox, or the so-called Bogumil (Bosnian) Church organisations existed in medieval Bosnia.⁴ When the Ottomans conquered Bosnia in the mid-15th century, the Bosnian peasants dropped their allegiance to the weak and disorganised Christian churches and adopted the faith of their conquerors.⁵ Thus, a native Slavic-speaking Muslim community emerged and gradually became the largest of the ethno-religious groups in the country. During the four centuries of Turkish rule (1463–1878), Bosnia and Herzegovina⁶ experienced a prolonged period of general welfare and prosperity.

Since it is not possible to offer a full insight into five centuries of Islam in Bosnia in only one chapter, what follows is an attempt to place the Muslim community of Bosnian and Herzegovina into a historical framework. Among other issues, the present chapter will look at the forms and motives of conversion to Islam, organised religious life and political turmoil. Certain aspects of the ways in which Bosnian Muslims responded to the Habsburg occupation will be discussed as well. Bosnia’s experience over the past seventy years is incomprehensible without an appreciation of its Yugoslav context. In order to examine the position of Islam in communist Yugoslavia, one has to understand the uniqueness of Yugoslav Communism and its attitude towards religion in general and towards Islam and Muslims in particular.

Perhaps it should be underlined that this is not a detailed historical account, but only an attempt to synthesise some specific aspects of the works already done. Although historical in approach and broadly chronological in organisation, this chapter frequently reaches back and forth in time to draw comparisons and identify long-standing historical traditions.

Ottoman Bosnia and the process of Islamisation (1463–1878)

General overview

In the spring of 1463, the Turkish armies, led by Sultan Mehmet II, invaded and rapidly conquered Bosnia. After the conquest, the Turks proceeded to introduce their own social structure, military and feudal systems and a strictly centralised government.⁷ A number of cities, such as Sarajevo and Mostar, were established and grew into major regional centres of trade and urban culture. Some historians, like Nedim Filipović, have termed the towns as the most vital core of the material and spiritual culture of the Ottoman civilisation.⁸ In the Ottoman social structure with strongly urbanised characteristics, everyone had a fixed place. Hence, no significant clashes along ethnic lines existed in the Ottoman Bosnia. Adem Handžić notes that “the central government encouraged the building of ‘Sultan mosques’ in the area were a larger town was to be developed”.⁹ Along with the mosques, which bore religious significance, there were other endowments of educational, social and cultural importance. Almost every village had a religious elementary school called mekteb for the study of the Arabic script and the Qur’an.¹⁰ According to M. Begović, two-year mekteb education was obligatory for all children, male and female. Religious secondary schools (madrasas) were founded in almost every larger town.¹¹ Very talented students from certain madrasas in Sarajevo, Mostar and Prusac went to higher Islamic institutions in Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus.¹² Some of them made a lasting impression on the Ottoman culture, emerging as mystics, scholars and celebrated poets in the Turkish, Arabic, and Persian languages.¹³ Reflected in the clothing, literature and architecture, a specific cultural heritage thus developed in Bosnia. The religious teachings spread by the Ottomans were typically traditional, especially in the field of Islamic law and spirituality. For instance, the ḥanafī madhhab was an official juridical school for the application of Islamic law, whereas Sufism was the model to be followed in spiritual matters.¹⁴

According to A. Handžić, the population of towns was predominantly Muslim.¹⁵ Although the entire Balkan region came under Ottoman control at some point during the empire’s existence, Islam spread throughout the region unevenly.¹⁶ For example, whereas in Bosnia and Albania, people converted en masse to Islam, in the other Balkan regions, people remained Christian.¹⁷ The question of why Bosnia and Albania converted en masse to Islam under the Ottoman Empire while the other countries in the region remained Christian was the subject of much scholarship in the wake of the Balkan war that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991. In the following section, in light of the existing historical accounts, I discuss the context and the key motives of the mass conversion of Bosnians to Islam.

The context and form of the conversion

Orthodox Christians and Jews who lived within the Ottoman Empire were defined as members of recognised, self-governing religious communities (Millet s).¹⁸ Because the Catholic Church did not belong to an empire-wide community, particular local Catholic communities received imperial charters from the Sultan giving them the status of a “protected peoples” (ahl al-dhimma).¹⁹ In the case of Bosnia and on the request of the Bosnian Franciscans, the Sultan Mehmed II issued an imperial edict (Ahdnama) on28 May 1463 at Milodraž (a plane field in central Bosnia) promising the Bosnian Catholics the right to life, faith, culture, and ethnic identity.²⁰

Balkan scholars agree that Bosnian Muslims are descendants of South Slavs who converted during the four-hundred-year reign of the Ottoman Empire.²¹ They disagree, however, about who converted and why.²² In Croatian and Serbian historiography, the Bosnian Muslims as a nation were primarily defined as people who had broken away from their original religious and ethnic roots (Croat-Catholic and Serb-Orthodox) and had later denied it by refusing to accept that they are either Serbs or Croats.²³ Noel Malcolm has argued that “none of the concerned groups has been able to advance conclusive ethnographic claims on today’s Bosnian Muslims to the exclusion of all other counterclaims”.²⁴ It is reasonable that some Bosnian Muslim theorists have been particularly keen to ascertain that Islam was present in Bosnia well before the Ottomans conquered the land.²⁵ However, on the account that the historical evidence of these possible contacts is very weak, most Bosnian Muslim scholars, including Ðozo himself, dismiss such a thesis.²⁶ Nevertheless, as Malcolm puts it, “contact is one thing whereas mass conversion to Islam is another”.²⁷

Without a doubt, the best source of information on the actual process of conversion to Islam in Bosnia is the Ottoman defter s, that is, the cadastral registers that recorded property ownership and categorised people by religion.²⁸ The earliest defter s,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• A note on transliteration and pronunciation
• Introduction
• 1 Bosnian Muslims: a historical background
• 2 Husein Ðozo: his life and works
• 3 Ðozo’s approach to Qur’anic exegesis
• 4 Ðozo’s legal theory
• 5 Ðozo’s fatwās and the methodology of his iftā’
• 6 Ðozo’s theological thought
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index