BOSNIAN PLURALISM IN THE URBAN SETTING:

INTERFAITH RELATIONS AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE THROUGH THE LENS OF THE OTTOMAN TRADE-GUILDS

Author and photos: Ines Aščerić-Todd, PhD, The University of Edinburgh

Bosnian society has been multi-religious since the beginning of Ottoman rule in the 15th century. While the society of the medieval Bosnian kingdom was multi-confessional, its population consisting of Catholic and Orthodox Christians and members of the schismatic institution of the Bosnian Church, it was still wholly Christian. The Ottoman Empire, however, brought its pluralism with it. Conversions to Islam are noted already within the first few decades of the Ottomans’ arrival, culminating in the 17th century, by which time the Muslims had become the majority religious community. Other communities were also added: groups of Spanish Jews, who fled Andalusia following the fall of Muslim Granada in 1492, made it to Sarajevo sometime around the middle of the 16th century and settled there. Some communities that had already been in Bosnia expanded: because of the Ottoman state’s patronage of the Orthodox Church, in some parts of Bosnia numbers of Orthodox Christians grew during the Ottoman period.

Populations of different religious communities mixed both in rural and urban settings, and there are many instances of villagers of different religious affiliations adopting each other’s customs, such as the popular observance of Christian saints’ days by both Christians and Muslims, or the practice of Christian women hiding from the gaze of outsiders and secluding themselves in the manner of their Muslim neighbours. But the close relationships in which these communities have existed for centuries are perhaps most evident in the urban environment. There, as in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, mosques, churches and synagogues were built – and still stand – next to each other, and their congregations have always lived, worked and socialised in very close proximity to one another. 

 
 

Although the mutual tolerance between Bosnian religious communities can be observed in many spheres of urban life, one of the urban institutions most representative of interfaith cooperation is that of the Ottoman trade-guilds. The Ottoman guild system developed in Bosnia early in the Ottoman period. Some crafts included into this system were a continuation of those that had already existed before the Ottoman era, but many were new and had a distinctly Ottoman or Islamic character. Already within the first two decades of Ottoman rule, Sarajevo alone had at least twenty different, fully established crafts, whose practitioners were organised into guilds, including: blacksmiths, swordsmiths, saddlers, bootmakers, tailors, cotton-carders, bakers, butchers, halva-sellers, and boza-sellers. By the first half of the 16th century, there were dozens more crafts and their guilds in Bosnia, and most Bosnian towns had acquired their Middle Eastern physiognomy, with the crafts’ trading quarters being at their heart.

Like that of guilds generally, the purpose of Ottoman trade-guilds was to ensure the quality and integrity of their craft, as well as to protect the rights of their members. But, unlike, for instance, Western European guilds, which were organised strictly according to the confessional affiliation and regularly banned from their membership those of a different religion or even a different Christian denomination, Ottoman guilds – and all Islamic guilds, for that matter – allowed for mixed membership and there were many examples of religiously diverse guilds throughout the Ottoman Empire, particularly in its multi-religious and multi-ethnic European towns and cities. In Bosnia, the membership of the guilds reflected its plural society and many guilds were fully mixed. For example, the blacksmiths’ guild had Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox membership, the silk-carders were Muslim, Orthodox and Jewish, and the goldsmiths’ guild had members of all four confessions, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and the Orthodox.

The towns’ and cities’ trading quarters were arranged according to crafts, not the religious affiliation of guild members, which meant that craftsmen from different religious communities owned shops next to each other and worked side by side on a daily basis. Respecting established practice, following strict guild regulations, and a good professional relationship with fellow craftsmen were key to the successful functioning of the trading quarters; the religious affiliation of those craftsmen was of secondary importance.

Even though all guilds were subject to a Muslim authority – in the form of the market inspector and the local kadi – guild rules applied equally to all members regardless of their religion. The rights of the minority confession were protected, and in the cases of a majority non-Muslim membership, the latter had a right to elect a non-Muslim head of the guild. Moreover, while Ottoman guilds usually had traditional Muslim figures as their patron saints, in Bosnia purely Christian guilds, or Christian members of a mixed guild, were allowed to venerate their own patron saints and use them as protectors of the guild in place of the Muslim ones.

Guild regulations on professional conduct of craftsmen emphasised ethics, honesty in one’s trade, and mutual respect and cooperation between the members, and these principles were affirmed at guild ceremonies organised for the purposes of the initiation of apprentices into a craft, or the promotion of guild members to a higher grade. The ceremonies were usually performed at annual guild outings in a large garden, sometimes that of a mosque or a Sufi lodge, or in popular picnic areas outside town. Although the rituals performed at these ceremonies were based on Islamic chivalric rites, such as that of the ‘girding of the belt’, all members of the guild took part in them. In order to accommodate their non-Muslim membership, mixed Bosnian guilds adjusted their ceremonies. Thus, all members went to the outing together and jointly took part in all aspects of the ceremony, separating only for the prayers at the end. The Christian and Jewish members of the guilds replicated all parts of the main ceremony including the ‘nasihat’ – the master’s advice to newly promoted craftsmen – and simply replaced any Muslim religious invocations with their own. It was also not uncommon for the Christian members of the guild to take precedence over the Muslim ones in guild ceremonies, as attested by the 18th-century Sarajevo chronicler Mullah Mustafa Bašeskija in the following example: at the outing of the city’s bakers guild in 1776, the Christian section of the guild took the lead in the procession consisting of some 50 guild members, with their masters riding at the front and the Muslim members following behind.

Bosnian trade-guilds in many ways encapsulate the spirit of pluralism of Bosnian towns and cities which lives on to this day, in spite of the disappearance of the Ottoman guild system and the many tribulations which the 20th century has brought to this society.