THIS WORLD AND THE HEREAFTER

When a child is born the family, according to Islamic customs, organizes a ceremony where, among other things, the adhan is recited to the newborn into the right ear, and iqamah into the left ear, which clearly symbolizes the child's first call to prayer. Some people, though, see a more profound meaning in this custom. The adhan is a call only to Fard, i.e. the obligatory prayer. The adhan is not recited for prayers which are not so obligatory, such as the Tarawih salat or the Eid salat. However, there is one obligatory salat without the Adhan: janaza (funeral). It is where a hidden symmetry can be seen. When the adhan is recited in a newborn's ear – it is actually a call to his janaza. The child starts crying, the mother breastfeeds him, he plays, grows up, has children of his own, while the death adhan accompanies him through life.

Our attitude toward death is determined by the way in which we live. Therefore all religions, with some variations, underscore the importance of the awareness of human finality; in ancient Egypt, for example, every person was bound to find a grave for himself during his lifetime. We read about visits to cemeteries and tombs in fantastic heraldry, historical-adventure fiction, crime novels, ghost and mystery stories, or in the famous “tomb raider” genre; in the history of Muslim devotion, however, this topic has a purely spiritual meaning. Muhammad, a.s. himself went to Medina cemeteries to pray at night, and in his daily speeches he recommended going to the cemetery as a warning. Later Sufi literature developed a distinctive ideal of praying in tombs as an extreme form of “voluntary” devotion. In Blagaj tekke, in the wall, to the right of semahana (ritual hall), there is a recess in the form of a tabut (bier) which dervishes entered and “died” – in accordance with the popular hadith – “before death”. This standing in tabut should be understood both as contemplating man's last purposes and as a patient exercise which was performed day after day.

Today, all this can sound quite bizarre. We are the first civilization, as Michael Hulin nicely notes, which has deliberately abandoned any eschatological perspective. We live in an age where “theology of total death” dominates; people live and die without believing in any hereafter. It is not a philosophy which accepts death as the final absurd but rather as a trivial escape from one's own death. Since you “live only once”, people are focused on  “the naked now”, which is again only a “desperate strategy to outwit death”.

In Bosnia, death has always been familiar, understood, accepted. Or, to use Philippe Aries's attribute, “tamed”. It has been part of life, same as life has been an echo of the posthumous adhan. In recent times, this familiar, tamed death gradually changed into a suppressed, cursed, forbidden death. We are ashamed of death, it is a taboo. Today, one flees the gravitation of a dying person, who no longer dies in the family circle but in the hospital, where death is a technical issue. Today, when death arrives, we are all in a state of improvisation. 

Among Bosniaks, however, the protocol of dying had more or less steady outlines for centuries. When a person is weary of life and senses that their time has come, the first thing they do is “taking off soil”. To take soil off means to do away with the burden of ownership: leave a will, distribute assets to the people close to you, settle accounts, free yourself of what is the heaviest and the most futile. Soil cannot be taken under the soil. 

Man died in the circle of family and friends. When a sick person become bedridden, the ones closest to him say their farewells. Someone by the bed recites the Qur'an, reminding both himself and the dying person of the meaning and goal of life. Death is a transition from this world to the akhirak (afterlife), from the transient to the eternal destination. The dying person's room was a public place where both parents, friends, neighbors and children could freely come. 

Muslims believe that God created man of earth, that he was conceived in his mother's womb out of a drop of seed and arrived in this world, and that he will return to earth, disintegrate and unite with it again. And he will then rise up from earth again and answer for what he did between „the two dusts”. Care of the cemetery, where the body is buried, is left to the nature. A relative lack of maintenance of Muslim cemeteries, both in cities and in villages, is the reflection of the belief that the soul passes to its homeland while the body returns to the nature, which eventually embraces both him and the entire cemetery. This is why Zuko Džumhur describes Sarajevo cemeteries, “ornated with white tombstones in the green grass”, as gardens within urban units. This world and the hereafter are two sides of one coin: this world is a transient but not the only life.

Awareness of death makes us people; however, thinking about death is not within our reach. Therefore, each janaza is an opportunity for the effendi to invite those who are present to finally understand death seriously. Besides, he will ask them to forgive the deceased, whose book has been closed. The body on the tabut boards, wrapped in white sheets, reveals vanity of many things. It is a moment to think about life; the life which the Qur'an describes as leaves which are blown by the wind on a stormy day.