THE CITY: INTRO

Faith, in the sense of religion, is the basic inspiration of the Islamic culture of classical times, and in those times Islamic culture accompanied the Islamic religion wherever it moved. In the abundance of forms which expressed and conveyed this original relationship, the city occupied a representative position. Its expressive and formative powers had an organic function in the life of Islamic culture, just as they played a representative role in manifesting the Islamic way of thinking, behaving and living. The history of Islam and its origins, a history of the rise of the Islamic faith and activity itself, of the development of Muslim spirituality, civilization and social institutions, which was inspired and defined by its own sources – all these were reflected in the history of the city in its important aspects. 

There is good reason why the classical culture of Islam is labeled as an urban culture. In his Mahomets gesang (A Song on Mahomet), a hymn which is admired as one of the most notable works of his poetic youth, Goethe presented the building of cities as a powerful poetic symbol of the expansion of Islam and the success of Muhammad's prophetic mission. Fernand Braudel, in his Grammar of Civilizations, established that the civilizational value of the “Islamic city” is the very essence of Islamic civilization. According to Braudel, its original civilizational significance is manifested in the early emergence of Muslim settlements, which were built, or acquired a new appearance, in the spaces and processes of the traditional world of Islam, in the speed of their emergence and thorough fulfilment of the essential functions of a city. For this historian of the Mediterranean and of the tangible civilization of the West, it was there that the authenticity of Muslim settlements was revealed compared to those of the West; in their fundamental radiance of the “air” of Islam as a “movement”, in the shared circular space of religion, education, business, children’s games and adults' entertainment, as well as in their acceptance of people and their tolerance, in that “in fact, every Muslim city has its neighborhoods with different races, religions and languages”. Six centuries before Braudel, Ibn Haldun elevated the rise and destiny of cities in the homelands of Islam and the development of Muslim awareness of the importance of cities for life in a civilization to a universal philosophical-historical definition. In his famous Muqaddima he developed the first philosophy of the history of the city, the first comprehensive cultural-historical interpretation of the secular, social causes of the emergence and decline of cities, as the original aspiration and the civilizational destiny of human communities.

Ibn Haldun died at the beginning of the century in which the foundations of the city of Sarajevo and most cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina were laid, the cities which emerged after the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia and which assumed their form in line with the religious ideals and socio-cultural values of Islam. Sarajevo, Mostar, Travnik, Banja Luka and other cities were established during the expansion of the Ottoman Empire as the best visible expressions of its civilizational power and as the most significant fruits and major places of nurture of Islamic culture. Their formation bears the stamp of the Islamic style of urban life in the Ottoman stylization, but in a manner that effectively includes the natural and historical peculiarities of the country of Bosnia. Their location manifested an affirmative attitude toward the natural resources and civilizational heritage of Bosnia; cities were founded on the banks or at the springs of rivers, and by old roads or on intersections of medieval thoroughfares. The ideal of a cheerful life, close relations between people and an arrangement that made life easier were woven into their construction; the cities were constructed as works of architecture “within human reach”, which ensured urban facilities for satisfying the religious, administrative, educational, business, humanitarian and other needs of citizens in their immediate relationships, through the translucent merging of urban and natural landscapes. 

The construction of Sarajevo reveals the basic elements of the construction of a city and the key determinants of man's urban growth in their organic relationship. Sarajevo was founded by the Bosnian Sanjak-bey Isa-beg Ishaković with the construction of a mosque and a residential neighborhood, a water supply system and a bridge over the Miljacka, the governor's palace (sarai) and hammam, a caravanserai and dervish lodge, musafirhana (free accommodation for travelers) and an imaret (charitable public kitchen). However, the external form and internal organization of Sarajevo were provided by Gazi Husrev-beg's waqf goods during the 1520s and 1530s. With a complex of endowments which consisted of a mosque, maktab, khaniqah and madrasa, a bezistan (covered market) and caravanserai, a musafirhana and a hammam, a street with two hundred stores, a water supply system for several dozens of neighborhoods and public fountains, the most famous Ottoman governor in Bosnia established an integral life-giving core for the settlement, with organic ties between the religious, educational, business and administrative functions of the city. Gazi Husrev-beg's vision of Sarajevo, executed in stone buildings and permanent institutions, made Sarajevo a city of people who believed, studied, did business, contemplated, helped each other, traveled, rested and relaxed.

The time of the emergence of Bosnian cities with cultural features was a time in history when the countries of the Christian West took the form of one religion, and when wars resolved the issue of the right to another, different faith. It was the time of the expansion of Christian West and the Ottoman Muslim East in various aspects of the enlargement and mobilization of the urban population. In the West, this expansion included liberating the population and expanding the medieval city structures in a framework of firm religious unity, which did not allow the free participation of members of separate groups, such as Jews. In the Ottoman Empire, the expansion had the character of including the population in the processes of expanding and differentiating city activities, with the participation of members of different religious communities. 

Before that, in the long period of medieval independence, Bosnia, as abanovinaand a kingdom, was a country where communities of members of the Bosnian Church, Catholic Church and Orthodox Church clashed, mingled and survived. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire in Bosnia, the multireligious character of the country was not destroyed or disturbed; rather, it was significantly institutionally protected and localized in the multireligious environment of new cities. In the century of the Augsburg Peace Treaty and its third article – whose realm, his religion – Bosnian cities were environments where Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews lived, cooperated and met each other in their daily lives.