Recasting Anthropological Perspectives on Vernacular Islam in Southeast Europe

When Tone Bringa published Being Muslim the Bosnian Way in 1995, the book soon became the hallmark of anthropological studies of Islam in Southeast Europe. In the wake of the tragic events in BosniaHerzegovina ensuing from the breakdown of Yugoslavia, it provided much needed intimate insights into the complex entanglement of religion, politico-religious symbolism and identitarian politics in the wartorn country. Furthermore, it complicated the immediate proliferation of the ‘quick solution’ paradigms – clash of civilisations, or ‘old’ ethnic hatred – that had been adopted with ease by many international and local politicians, as well as by scholars working in the region, and that soon became the mainstream of academic discourse during and especially in the years after the war. There is, however, another line of argument in the book that has remained, in our view, unexplored in the scholarship of Islam in former Yugoslavia, and in Muslim Southeast Europe more generally. In Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, Bringa sketched out in great detail the ways Bosnian Muslims articulate and negotiate moral dilemmas, and the very notions of living a Muslim life in the fin de l’epoque of socialist Yugoslavia, and how these were radically shattered by the conflict-driven socio-economic changes as much as by considerable metamorphoses in religious landscape that had predated the socialist disintegration in the region (cf. also Sorabji 1989; Duijzings 2000). At the end of her lucid ethnography, Bringa raised a point that is worth repeating here: The war changes people and it changes their perceptions of who they are. As a reaction to and part of the process of the war and the politics behind it, many Bosnian Muslims are redefining both the content and function of their collective identities, and identifying with a wider world community of Muslims more than before. To what extent these changes signal a more assertive Islamic identity and an extension of a Muslimdefined identity by expanding the use of Islamic discourse and symbols into new domains (e.g., specific Muslim greetings), or a redefinition of Muslim identity, is a subject for further research. (1995: 197–198)