ĆEIF AND MERAK

In the surah Sād there is a powerful image which has never in the Muslim intellectual tradition received the attention which its many layers deserve. Sulaiman, a prophet and the king, watches horses one evening, of whose beauty and excellence the Qur'an says: “... they stood on three legs, and barely touched the ground with the fourth”. While admiring them, the devout king suddenly concludes that he has naively indulged himself in worldly vanities, since any enjoyment, even aesthetic, is pure vanity. He had better use this time to think about his Maker. He admonished himself and chased the horses away. And then suddenly, as if the Revelation itself sank on his heart, he ordered to bring them back to him. He stood beside them and “began to rub down their necks”.

The theme of this Qur'anic parenthesis is permissiveness in, we can say, ontological termst. Is this transient world intrinsically obscure? Are believers, male and female, allowed to enjoy it? Or should they spend their lives devoutly for the encounter with the Maker? In short, should they say “yes” to life or “no”? Having the horses brought back, Sulaiman said “yes”.

Merak and ćeif are two concepts in the culture of Bosniaks by which, in a most specific, most daily sense, they say “yes” to life – life as joy and cheerfulness. Although the “yes” is grounded in the holy text, in real life its length and breadth have ranged from literal delight in devotion to Epicurean ethics of moderate pleasure. One hajji used to recite zikr only on a tesphih (prayer beads) which he had brought from the hajj. Once he forgot to take it with him to the mosque. When other worshippers saw him rummaging through his pockets, they began to toss other tespihs to him. The hajji pushed them aside: “I find no merak in them (I do not fancy them).” It is one pole. On the other pole, there is the phenomenon of relatively controlled enjoyment in what is forbidden, for example in wine; the enjoyment which managed, cunningly and naively at the same time, to evade Islamic prohibition in different historical contexts. Here is a possible example: Amin Malouf says that the relationship between Omer Hajjam and wine was that of respect: never had one thrown the other to the floor. 

In no way do merak and ćeif mean indulging in the trivial, decadent hedonism, particularly in the colloquial sense of hedone (pleasure). They are not part of the individualist culture of self-indulgence that leads to the loss of the notion of things which exceed people. They are not a surrogate for transcendental. They have nothing in common with the contemporary “yolo” worldview which underscores the importance of experience in life deprived of the eschatological perspective. For meraklijas (people who live life to the fullest), people who can oćeifiti (enjoy themselves), entertainment is not above duty, nor is freedom above solidarity. Neither ćeif nor merak mean indulging oneself in hyper-consumer mentality, which uses material items to compensate for a lack of vision, leading people to ultimately consume themselves. It is not a headless focus on the “naked now” where happiness is reduced to a shallow carpe diem, to an unbridled jouissance which urges man to catch the moment, to make use of the opportunity, to drink another glass, with the aim to outwit death.

Merak and ćeif pertain to existential pleasure in something; to controlled, refined, subtle enjoyment. Merak and ćeif are pleasure with a human face; they imply limits, as well as skill, subtle emotions and inspiration. When enjoyment is unbridled and assumes a beastly form, it leaves the semantic field of merak and ćeif. Moreover, merak and ćeif imply a sort of ascetic existential reduction: remove any surplus, which chokes and burdens us, and find pleasure in small things. Both merak and ćeif belong to the ethics of small joys, rather than that of great happiness. 

Antun Hangi, in his book Život i običaji muslimana wrote the following: “Merak is something special, something that, except for our Muslims, probably no other nation in the world knows of. Merak is when you rise into a carefree realm, without knowing at that moment if you are breathing, if you are drinking coffee or if you are chewing tobacco” This “carefree realm” is a realm of freedom which includes the hidden grammar of daily life: food, rest, aesthetics, events, treatments, all the way to religious ceremonies. It pertains to formulae of small rituals, rather than to wantonness of the feast. They arise out of the necessity to make the usual, regular, routine and reproductive both bearable and meaningful and agreeable. However, it is not just relaxation in a hard cycle of work, but rather a distinctive lifestyle, a decision to live in a relaxed, spontaneous way, with the profound awareness of one's own mortality. The world is a big race; one should sit and rest, one should zasvirati i za pojas zađenuti (literally: play /the fife/ for a while, then tuck it on your belt, which means: have a good time if you want, but don't overdo it). 

Today, the nihilist culture of consumerism and narcissism permeates all the domains of human daily life. Human soul has increasingly smaller space for profound and intense joys. What will the social endurance ofćeifandmerakbe remains to be seen. Everyone has a whim (ćeif) of his own, everyone finds a pleasure (merak) in something.Ćeifis freedom, since everyone chooses what he will enjoy in. People understand other people'smerak, the public does not question it. Still, bothmerakandćeifrest on a recognizable system of signs which imply a broader cultural intimacy: listening to the same music, enjoying the same food, same drink, similar worldviews, jokes, rituals, as well as the public morality. That is why they are untranslatable, same as all the concepts from the field of cultural intimacy, and they sublime numerous socio-cultural crossroads and encounters: from Qur'anic apotheosis of moderation through ottoman poetics of resting to Austro-Hungarian barroom gents. This world is indeed transient and futile, but is can be beautiful and agreeable. Remember Sulaiman, a.s., rubbing down horses’ velvet necks in early evening hours.