MULA MUSTAFA BAŠESKIJA:

History of Sarajevo would hardly be adequately understood if the diachrony of the city had not included a truly valuable and unique cultural personality of the city who, in a continuity longer than half a century, recorded all major cultural-historical, socio-political and other circumstances of daily life in the center of Bosnia of his time and of this time. Mula Mustafa Bašeskija!

According to the available historiographical data, Mula Mustafa, son of Ahmed and Fatima, was born in 1731 or 1732, in Sarajevo, in Sinan-pasha mahala (neighborhood), close to the downtown. He was nicknamed Bašeskija after the title that he was granted at the time, which referred to a “main” member of janissaries, a veteran, which means that Mustafa was a member of an elite military unit such as janissaries. Besides this nickname, Bašeskija also used names Ašik and Šefki (Ševki), although he later tacitly abandoned the penname Ašik. He was educated to become a qazzaz (a craftsman who works with silk) although, according to available data, he never did this job since for a while, in his youth, he was a muallim (religious instructor) in a sibjan-mekteb (elementary religious school) by the Ferhadija Mosque and he also served as the imam in the jamaat of Buzadži of the hadži Hasan Mosque. In 1760, as he writes on 24 May, he went to Belgrade to take care of the inheritance of his deceased uncle in this city, and was absent from his native town for a longer time. Three years later, or more accurately on 21. 10. 1763, he decided to start a distinctive, even a profitable business of the time, since he already exhibited a tendency for writing and understanding the recording practice. Close to the Gazi Husrev-bey Mosque, by the Clock Tower, he opened a shop for providing legal and intellectual services which, at the time, mostly included writing various letters and applications of individuals to different levels of administration of the Eyalet of Bosnia, or private letters, since quite a lot of inhabitants of Sarajevo of the time could not write such kind of correspondence. That the business flourished is confirmed by the data that Bašeskija later moved the shop, by renting a larger building for his business, and hired some other people skilled in this particular craft.

At a young age, in 1756, Bašekija began to write his Annals, mostly in Ottoman Turkish, in Arabic naskh script, which researchers also refer to as Bosnian Ottoman Turkish due to a strong influence of Bosnian grammar and Bosniak mindset of the author who wrote this work and recorded, over the following half a century and more, all the relevant happenings which significantly determined his native city, or were related to his homeland. Being aware of the importance of memories of the times past, Bašeskija wrote following in one sentence: “Let this provide entertainment and satisfaction to a curious person (ašik) who will, when I'm gone, at another time, look at and peruse this book, this collection”. At the very beginning, he decided to use living legends and remembrances from the immediate turbulent history to write several important notes about happenings in Sarajevo and Bosnia from 1746, with a particular attention to the emergence of jaramazes (rogues), as Bašeskija called them, and the Morić brothers, who have remained in the permanent collective memory of Bosniak culture. He wrote particularly intensively until 1801/1802, when he suffered a stroke. His mother died of stroke in 1772; according to his recordings, he looked after her and provided some data about this event. Since this mental disease crushed him, he recorded events in his chronicle less and less often. Researchers mostly agree that Bašeskija left his last recordings in 1804 or 1805 and, according to data discovered by Mehmed Mujezinović, based on notes left by Bašeskija's son Mustafa Firaki, who was, according to the chronicler, born in 1775, Mula Mustafa Bašeskija died on 18 August 1809. According to what can be found in Firakija's incomplete autographed manuscript of the annals, Mustafa's Mustafa continued the tradition which had been established by Mustafa senior, although the junior was not nearly so successful and consistent in the work as his father. What makes Bašeskija a reliable chronicler of his time is the fact that he always recorded the accurate date – day, month and year, which pertained to the recorded event.

Mula Mustafa's life was by no means easy. The ordeals which he lived through left trace on his life and worldview. Probably the biggest ordeal was the fact that he was outlived only by one son – the above-mentioned Mustafa, and one daughter, although he had ten children, with Safija Čartozan. A particularly emotional section of his Annals includes recordings of the death of some of his children who, like many other inhabitants of Sarajevo, died of different diseases, the most vicious one being plague, which raged Bosnia and Sarajevo at the time. However, according to data by Bašeskija, population died of other contagious diseases as well, such as measles, mumps, smallpox, whooping cough, asthma, as well as of injuries, accidents, wounds and losses in wars and death sentences. According to Bašeskija's data, a year before he became a scribe, in 1762, and in the following three years, almost 15,000 people died of plague in Sarajevo.

In this spirit, when keeping his diary, Bašeskija wrote one of the most successful reflective Bosnian poems in Arabic script, in the form of Bosnian aljamiado literature: “Nut pogledaj sada tko si / Fani da si, ti čuo si. / Poso je to što se čini, / Kako kudret kosac kosi. / Ne ostavlja nigdi nikog, / Iđu čeljad, goli, bosi, / Haman dobar pos'o radi, / Što ko radi, sobom nosi. / Što će biti od tih trica, / Čelo uzmi, dobro prosij. / Zlo namjesto dobro čini, / Zećeš dobro, dobro posij...” (“Now, look who you are / You are transient, you've heard it. / Work is what is being done, / How Grim Reaper reaps. / Does not leave anybody behind. / People go naked, barefoot. / He really does a good job, / Whatever someone does, carries it with himself. / What will happen with these trifles, / Take the front, sieve it well. / Do evil instead of good, / You will reap well, but must sow well...”)

In his chronicle, Bašeskija also wrote several poems in Turkish, and researchers also agree that he recorded five more poems in Bosnian: Zečkova puka; Ramo i Saliha; Da Bog dade da snijeg pade; Ah divojko, bila nosa; Galen prosi gizdavu divojku, which are actually folk oral poems, and the longest and the most interesting among them is Ramo i Saliha, a poem of lascivious-obscene character in an interesting poetic form which strongly corresponds to the phenomenon of understanding the found Bosnian mindset and to the organization of private and public life in Ottoman Bosnia. Finally, the poem depicts a long and unexpected side of sexual life in the patriarchal society of Bosnia of the time, and social and cultural-civilizational achievements (culture of dressing, eating, intimacy and hygiene, current prices of goods etc.). The poem begins with the following verses: “Zagleda se Ramo i Saliha, / na planini, ovce čuvajući. / Gledaše se tri godine dana... (Ramo and Saliha took a fancy to each other, / on the mountain, while tending sheep. / They eyed each other for three years ...)”

Bašeskija was an extremely committed lover of his culture and his native language, and he even underscored in a section of his Annals, that, unlike Bosnian, for example Turkish and Arabic have far fewer forms of words which refer to the verb of movement, or more accurately, to the verb leave, and listed as many as 45 Bosnian forms in the present tense for some verbal lexemes. Although it is a hyperbolized, even a naive view, it deserves to note, in this context, the writer's need to highlight diversity and lexical wealth of his native language which, in this case, is by no means an innocent fact. It is therefore not surprising that in his Annals one can find numerous local toponyms, ethnics by the place of origin, folk Bosnian names for months, important dates and days, animals, plants, meteorological phenomena, occupations, objects, diseases, as well as whole sentences or phrases which were often characteristic of a deceased person whom he recorded among those who died, highlighting in this way one of his traits, or what represented a kind of collectively recognized perception of the person. In this respect, it is worth to note his attitude toward inhabitants of Sarajevo of the time who are in terms of religion mostly described as jehudijas or čifuts (Jews), as well as đaurs (Christians), zimijas (non-Muslims) or ćafirs (infidels), and some others. He named his compatriots Bosnalu and Boşnak in Turksh, the terms which, for him, where synonymous, in researchers' opinion, while he named the language of these inhabitants using terms bosnaca [Bosnadža] and boşnakça [Bošnakča].

It should also be noted that, in his Annals, Bašeskija recorded about 4,000 anthroponyms, mostly male, Bosniak, as well as a number of female and non-Bosniak ones (e.g. Branko, the boss; Risto, the baker) for whom he provided the basic data although at times, if it was necessary and if he had more information, he also presented a fairly broad spectrum of anthropological-cultural determinants, which significantly contribute to understanding of social relations and traits of people of the time. What went on in the history of Sarajevo, mostly in the second half of the 18th century did not go unnoticed in his notes where he described different occurrences, happenings, events, personal destinies, meteorological and astronomical phenomena, fires, floods, socio-political and military happenings, diseases, joys and sorrows. The broad scope of Bašeskija's spirituality and rationality is also confirmed by a large number of recorded stories and anecdotes, teasers and riddles, which additionally enrich the multi-perspective organization and diversity of topics in his Annals. 

All these found their place in the interwoven destiny of the city and people who belonged to the city, whom the active and shrewd participant permanently positioned in the mind of his and future generations and noted, in some formulations, several times listed Bosnian sayings which, in a way, sublime the past, the present and the future of Bašeskija's vision of the world, such as: “There is no wise man to remember!”, although some, as Bašeskija would say, were “strict, grey-haired”.

References

• Filan, Kerima (2003): “Jezičke jedinice na bosanskom jeziku u Ljetopisu Mula Mustafe Bašeskije”, Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju, no. 51, Oriental Institute, Sarajevo, pp. 9–29.

• Filan, Kerima (2014): Sarajevo u Bašeskijino doba, Connectum, Sarajevo

• Huković, Muhamed (1986): Alhamijado književnost i njeni stvaraoci, Biblioteka Kulturno nasljeđe Bosne i Hecegovine, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, pp. 109–114.

• Mujezinović, Mehmed (1997): Mula Mustafa Bašeskija. Ljetopis, Biblioteka Kulturno nasljeđe, Sarajevo-publishing, Sarajevo

• Nametak, Abdurahman (1981): Hrestomatija bosanske alhamijado književnosti, Biblioteka Književno naslijeđe Bosne i Hercegovine, Svjetlost, Sarajevo