Overview

This is the first critical and theoretically grounded book-length study of Hajj literature (written texts about the experience of the Hajj) and Hajj practices of Bosnian Muslims. It redefines the ways pilgrimage can be understood and offers new methods for investigating the meaning and importance of Hajj for generations of premodern and modern believers. It also throws light on Balkan communities previously ignored by modern scholarship in Islamic, religious, and area studies. Breaking with the predominant academic trends of focusing on nationalism and ethnic conflict in the region, it instead puts the spotlight on the richness of texts, and visual and archival material, and focuses on genres that challenge the established literary canons.

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9781474494113

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Reviews

Theoretically astute, written with analytical dexterity, and dazzling in its use of a wide range of archival materials, Karic gives us extraordinary insights into the world of hajj as practiced, experienced, and shared by generations of Bosnian Muslims. This is a truly original book that will become a classic for the years to come. --David Henig, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University This is a brilliant and deeply erudite book about the enduring meanings of pilgrimage, ritual, and popular piety in Islam. Here Karic guides the reader through the stories told by Bosnian hajjis over five centuries, following their writings from the Ottoman era through the tumultuous upheavals and wars of the twentieth century. Historians will be particularly grateful for the book's analysis of the geographical, textual, cultural, and even sensorial connections that made up the experiences of hajjis traveling from the edge of Europe toward Mecca and Medina. But more broadly, scholars of religion will encounter a thought-provoking argument that also challenges us not to reduce religious experiences to a set of historically changing material and political circumstances. Instead, it invites us to take the hajjis' stories seriously as a part of enduring religious journeys striving for a transcendent experience that recasts the categories of the past, present, and future. --Edin Hajdarpasic, Associate Professor, Loyola University Chicago

Author Information

Dzenita Karic is a senior researcher at the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She has published articles in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Archiv Orientalni, Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History (Brill), and Cultural History (forthcoming). She has also contributed to the edited volumes Muslim Women's Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond: Reconfiguring Gender, Religion, and Mobility (ed. Marjo Buitelaar, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Viola Thimm, Routledge 2020) and Muslim Pilgrimage in Europe (ed. Ingvild Flaskerud and Richard J. Natvig, Routledge 2016).

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