CULTURAL HERITAGE OF ISLAM

Džemal Čelić

(...) On the background of religious-ideological premises of the Qur'an and hadith, and in the vast of the spread of Islam (today practically on all continents), in the encounter with very different older cultures and civilizations, there emerged a wealth of cultures, distinct depending on regional, linguistic, traditional and other determinants, though with a common denominator. It is Islam. It is for this reason that the topic of “cultural heritage of Islam” could not be acceptable for a two- or three-hour-long discussion if it were not restricted, in this case to Yugoslav, or more specifically to our Bosniak-Muslim relations. (...)

In our regions, as a segment of much broader Ottoman-Islamic civilizational circle, Islam built on older pre-Islamic traditions of Bosnia (in the broadest sense) and penetrated practically all the pores of local private and public life, of both Muslim and non-Muslim population. The language we speak, which has been deprived of its logical historical name due to aggressive polices of the East and the West, would be virtually useless without everything that has been built into it under Islamic influence (and which is mostly reduced to the term 'Turkish loanwords') and we can therefore to a large extent consider it as the cultural heritage of Islam. Unfortunately, in the constellation of social relations over the past hundred year or so, it has not been studied at all, and it can easily happen – whether we want it or not – that it will become forgotten and replaced by an eastern-Serbian or western-Croatian variant.

Literary creations of Bosniaks-Muslims in their own language, written in Bosančica (Bosnian Cyrillic), Arebica /Bosnian variant of the Arabic script/ (Aljamiado) and, over the last hundred years, mostly in Latin and occasionally in Cyrillic alphabet, and particularly oral folk literature, are often at a high creative level; to this day, however, they have been insufficiently discussed and therefore poorly known. In the 19th century, the road to European recognition of Serbian folk poem was paved by “Hasanaginica”, a Muslim ballad which aroused interest of Goethe, Byron, Pushkin and many others; however, Muslim epic and lyrical poetry has not followed the same roads to become part of world spiritual heritage.

Contribution of Bosniaks-Muslims to literature in Oriental languages, as well as to a broad spectrum of social studies and science where they have left their stamp, have to a large extent remained unknown, untranslated and unpublished. Some names and their works – let me only mention Hasan Kjafi Pruščak or Omer ef. Novljanin – can be read in German or in another European languages for a long time already, but very rarely in their own country. They cannot be found in textbooks, nor in encyclopedias (one should certainly study composition of councils, central editorial boards, lists of editors in central editorial boards of some encyclopedias to get a clear idea of many things). Our contemporary authors, who write in the so-called Serbocroatian or Croatoserbian hardly have much better destiny either.

Fine and applied arts and participation of our people in these areas of creativity are also neglected and left to oblivion. Starting from the aprioristic and wrong assumption that Islam prohibits visual representations, participation of our Muslims in these areas is almost denied. However, it is a fact that it was people from these regions, most notably Nesuh Matrakči and Osman Nakaš (both from the 16th century), as well as very competent art historians such as Nurullah Berk, who have been labeled as decisive figures in the overall development of Turkish-Islamic miniature. Over 100 large illustrations of Hunernama, which were painted by Osman, have a multiple value – historical and artistic. On the other hand, miniature painting by unknown Islamic artists in our Yugoslav collections also testify of significant achievements. At the same time, non-figurative ornamental painting, from decorating books with unvans (titles) to wall decorations in mosques (commendable conservation works in the Sulejmanija mosque in Travnik and Imperial Mosque in Sarajevo) has mostly been unstudied. Still, it all lies in the subconscious, genes and the basis of our contemporary painters as well, and in their works we will often feel rhythms of older Bosniak-Muslim sediments.

The abstract sculptural expression, primarily found on thousands of bašluks (tombstones) were long ago noticed by some non-Muslims (e.g. Pospišil in the early 20th century). Muslims made them, with regional and temporal differences, but also substantially destroyed them as if they had bee ashamed of them. And it is these tombstones that are supreme evidence of our presence in these regions, of autochthony and creative contribution.

We have relinquished applied arts related to wood, metal, textile or leather to the National and some other museums, although they do not pay due attention to them and leave them to deterioration and oblivion; they have even removed, from their set-ups, what was collected and exhibited during Austro-Hungarian administration, and replaced them with exhibitions on other topics.

Although fine and applied arts are part of tangible cultural heritage, we typically include architecture – mosques, houses etc. – under this term. A broad framework for this heritage implies urban culture, which has in this region been under Oriental-Islamic influences for centuries. However, over the last hundred years or so, it has been exposed to the worst forms of the so-called Europeanization and modernization, to such an extent that it has been practically destroyed, despite efforts by individuals, even by institutions, to save what they can through the preservation of the marketplace and parts of neighborhoods in Sarajevo, and integral protection of Jajce, core of Mostar, Počitelj or Stolac. It is not only about physical destruction of old structures, which were sedimented for centuries; it is also about a change in the view of the way of living in given environments, where many established qualities disappear before assaults of crude primitivism.

It is the architectural segment of cultural heritage of Islam in our regions, as well as the segment of literature in Bosniak that testify of the distinctiveness of regional components which have been manifested in Bosnia over centuries. One should not be an expert in architecture, one should only open one's eyes and immediately observe that in the wealth of forms which surround us we can find barely few dozens of monuments which, by their essential characteristics, belong to broad Ottoman-Islamic circle: they include about twenty (out of 1200) mosques, mostly domed, which were most likely built by masters from Constantinople, only three madrasas, about a dozen of turbes (tombs), 3-4 hammams, and 2-3 old bridges. Everything else belongs to local masters and narrow regional schools and can best be seen on residential houses, manufacturing and auxiliary buildings, or shops in marketplaces. One can distinguish three types of Bosnian-Islamic architecture – one which we find across Bosnia (except in Sarajevo and Foča) and which is characterized by the closed cubic form, under steep hip roofs made of shingles, and recently of pepper tiles and some other types of covering; the second type is found in Herzegovina and is distinguished by stone walls and stretched dimensions, under low roofs and covered with panels; The third is Sarajevo-Foča type, under the strongest Oriental influences, also stretched in space, under low roofs with ridge tiles. This type spreads across Sandžak to Kosovo, where it is largely combined with the tower for residence of Albanian population. None of the described types can be found further in the East, which is another evidence of the autochthony of our cultural heritage.

The types which have developed here in residential architecture spread to the architecture of public buildings -mosques and masjids (in about 97% cases), maktabs, madrasas and tekkes, inns and other business facilities. Unfortunately, almost all these documents of centuries-long indigenous creations of Bosniaks-Muslims and their contribution to the cultural heritage of Islam in the broadest sense are decaying unnoticed, unregistered and unprotected. Muslims themselves are destroying them to a large extent; a large number of new, after-war mosques destroyed old ones when they were built.

The culture of living, diet, dressing is in the causal relationship with architectural framework where it proceeds and manifests; it has also been exposed to abrupt extinction, often accompanied with an inferiority complex imposed by many external and internal factors.

Finally, I would like to note that in conversations which we had in Višegrad, Banja Luka and Bihać, we heard about many examples of interpersonal and inter-religious relations based on the distinctive position of our homeland by the border of antagonistic divisions between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, Orthodox and Catholic church, Venetian and Habsburg Empire on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire on the other. In the inevitable living on the margins of the greatest civilizations which existed in this part of the world, our ancestors have made an evident contribution to the cultural heritage of Islam, with their highly tolerant inter-neighbor and interpersonal relations.

Source: 

• Džemal Čelić, „Kulturno nasljeđe islama“, Glasnik Rijaseta Islamske zajednice u SFRJ, LIII/1990, no. 4, pp. 38-41.