In this article, the author explores the nature of traditional wisdom and the ways it came under attack in the most terrible century of human history. The Bosnian town of Stolac suffered the violent depredations of fascists, Communists, and extreme nationalists, culminating in a veritable orgy of destruction, murder, and expulsion during the 1992 to 1995 war, with the systematic “liberation” of the town of every and any trace of the historical existence of difference or the other. The author sees this situation as arising out of the very nature of modernity, the age of alienation and human arrogance. We have become the slaves of our fantasies of mastery and domination, seeking justification not in the transcendental or the divine, but in the works of our own hands, in utopian dreams of this-worldly perfection, and in group identities in which we hope to hide the smallness of our souls. This work of disconnection, deracination, and ideological deformation has found its most terrible expression in great historical projects of destruction and slaughter in the name of Man, Society, and other false gods. This modern folly has turned us against our own cultures, our common spiritual heritage, and all forms of traditional intellectuality and wisdom. It has stripped us of compassion and respect for the other and of understanding for the different. It has made us deny our most crucial debts to the vulnerable and to the dead.
The sources for these three quotations are the King James Version of the Bible, Arberry’s translation of the Qur’an, and Jones’s translation of Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper, respectively. The same versions are used throughout the text, but quotations from the Bible and the Qur’an have been amended in places by the author to reflect his preferred translations of certain key terms. Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980); and Mak Dizdar, Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper, trans. Francis R. Jones (Sarajevo: DID, 1999).
2.
The Čaršija was the central public area of a traditional Bosnian town, where markets were held, equivalent in many respects to the Roman forum. As such, it was the sacred centre and normally contained the main town mosque. This text is extracted from a full-length treatment of the Čaršija of the town of Stolac: Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, Stolačka čaršija: u vidiku perenijalne filozofije (Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2008; to be published in English as Maintaining the Sacred Center: The Story of Stolac, Bosnia [Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom]).
3.
The praised is simply the literal translation of Muhammad.
4.
Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based On the Earliest Sources ( London : Allen & Unwin, 1988 ), 317.
5.
Muhammad ibn Sa’d, Kitab at-Tabaqat al-Kabir ( Leiden , the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1904/1940), 88-89. Cited in Lings, Muhammad, 327.
6.
Ibid.
7.
The New Mekteb was built at the end of the nineteenth century. It was called "new" because an Old Mekteb already existed as part of the Čaršija Mosque complex. The Old Mekteb was demolished in 1924, while the New Mekteb was stripped of its functions in 1952. There were a further two mektebs in Stolac, the Ćuprija or Bridge Mekteb and the Uzinovići Mekteb. A number of other public and private buildings were used for the same purposes.
8.
Existence has two aspects, the visible and the invisible. The boundary between them is what gives form to the visible, which comprehends all phenomena as signs revealing Unity or the One, whether in descending or ascending order. The revelation of Unity through this duality renders It both infinitely far and entirely near. This Unity is manifest in the vast multitude of pairs, while always remaining what It is-the source and destination of everything. Human being is the epitome of all existence, and so we too are this duality of visible and invisible. Our sense of self is split between the flesh and the Spirit. We and the world, with our visible and invisible aspects, both present the two sides of one and the same revelation of God. As a result, we find ourselves in an unbreakable relationship with ourselves, God, and everything in existence. As we discover ourselves, we come to know the world, and vice versa-as we discover the world, we come to know our own selves. Neither the world nor human being are their own beginning or end. The process whereby we come to know ourselves and the world is quite simply coming to know God through His creation and His self-revelation. Our core is of that same uncreated, universal essence whereby God taught us the names of all things, which He breathed into us as His Spirit. One of the names for the uncreated core of human being is Prime Intellect. It was through this same core that God revealed to us the Call and the Book. The Call and the Book are always one and the same discourse, but they have appeared in history as various Books, the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Qur’an. These various books, which reveal the One and the Same God, act as foci for people, who are consequently "People of the Book." There are as many peoples of the book as there are languages. Each of these peoples is centred upon its book as its connection to its prophet. Each prophet reminds or admonishes those around him of their original oath to God and the praised as the highest moment of humanity: "He has sent down upon thee the Book with the truth, confirming what was before it, and He sent down the Torah and the Gospel aforetime, as guidance to the people, and He sent down the Salvation" (Qur’an, 3:3-4). Connection with any of the prophets is at the same time connection with the praised. This is because all of the prophets have sworn an oath to God to recognise him. This is because he is the seal of prophecy and so for each of the prophets: there is no path to God except through the praised. The Book as the focus around which the people are gathered makes it impossible for any discourse of one of the false prophets to take root amongst a people sharing the same tongue. God sent down the Book to people through His prophet. It reaches them in their own language, but its proper and full interpretation remains with God. The number of people the book reaches is the number of its interpretations. No one can claim absolute or complete interpretation, and we are all called to participate in furthering our interpretations, and so our own selves, on the path back to God. The Book sent down, in which everyone is admonished equally, becomes the touchstone of everything in existence and so distinguishes between human will and failure of will. Each of us is under an obligation to confess the centrality of the Book in his or her individual and collective life. We are all gathered around the Book as the unquestionable authority, from our first steps in the world to our last, as we exit it. This responsibility we each have to gather around the Book cannot be relinquished to any political authority or be rendered conditional on any external social circumstances. It is consequently understandable why every modern ideology involves hostility towards the revealed Book as a focus around which people gather, necessarily with equal rights and duties, dignity and responsibilities, capacity and openness towards the interpretation of the book, in the infinite, various, and constant flow of interpretations. We relate to the Book through the sacred arts of listening, discoursing, writing, and reading. These four arts focus the essence of humanity as the Recitation and the most sublime and most mighty nature of the praised. These acts are passed on and received everywhere-in nature, at home, at the mosque, or in the building actually designated for that purpose. The name of that building is the mekteb. The Communist authorities in Bosnia made a final decision to close the mektebs. They made their demand of leading individuals within the Religious Community. Under the reformist ideologies of the nineteenth century, the political authorities in countries where Muslims lived tried to subordinate the mekteb to the political order and their indirect authority. All such attempts shared the essential requirement that the mediate nature of the Qur’an and the open nature of its interpretation be supplemented by the contents of modern educational systems. It was not easy to find grounds for opposing the mekteb, so the quest for them was like feeling one’s way around a labyrinth. Closing the mektebs entailed a complete inversion of the picture of the world as revelation of Unity focused by the human self and consequently known in its uncreated essence through the process of self-revelation. Fazlija Alikalfić (1910-2004), one of the Communist heroes who helped rid Bosnia of the mekteb, dealt with doubts about the mektebs in 1952 in the following way: "In considering this issue, to strike only at the hygienic and non-educational aspect would be purely palliative, as they may easily respond: ‘If the mekteb is not hygienic, we will paint it!’ This is one aspect of the problem, but we are here to deal with its essence. . . . Muslims conscious of their position must make peace with the fact that the mektebs are an evil and that those who suffer from it by far the most are the Muslims themselves" (Minutes of the Joint Session of the Waqf Council Board and the Ulema of the Islamic Community, held on 28 February 1952; from a copy held in the Gazi Huzref Bey Library in Sarajevo). The mektebs were de facto closed, even though this was concealed for a time by moving them into the mosques. The irreconcilability of these two images of the world, the traditional and the ideological, is clear in this situation. According to the traditional image, the indirect authority of the Community cannot be assumed by any interpretation of the world, and so by any individual or group. In contrast, every ideology is based on the determination of an authority which it is right to impose on all people. According to Halid Hadžimulić of Sarajevo, when the Bosnian mektebs were banned in 1952, Mustafa Merhemić (1876-1959) said that it would have done less harm "had they destroyed all the mosques, including the Bey’s." And the Bey’s Mosque is the most important and most visible symbol of the existence of Bosnian Muslims.
9.
A school was built on the site of the Great Harem. Its front, facing the Čaršija, was made of dressed stone, some of which had been transferred from the fortress. The transfer of stone was halted after a worker, Mujo Hodžić, son of Avdo-aga, was killed. Shattered headstones from the great and the old graveyards were built into the foundations and walls of the school. They were covered over by earth and mortar. On 20 April 2007, when repairs were being carried out to the school roof, one of the workmen, Ahmed Zubović, discovered that the inside of the wall, which had not been plastered in the attic, had been built largely from broken headstones. That same day, in the attic twilight, Amer Medar inspected a part of these walls and found hundreds of pieces of broken-off headstones. It seems reasonable to conclude, in line with this evidence, that the outer school walls were largely put together from the remnants of shattered headstones, which were then plastered over both internally and externally. A large number of these headstones had inscriptions that had been defaced "because of the school." Many such inscriptions from the shattered headstones now lie hidden within the walls. When the entire Stolac Čaršija was destroyed and all the Muslims of the town driven away, in 1993, crosses were introduced into the classrooms of the school and placed, together with nationalist symbols, on the walls in front of the Catholic schoolchildren, to whom the school was now allocated as their exclusive birthright. On the expulsion of the Muslims of Stolac and the destruction of practically all the visible traces of their material culture, see Amra Hadžimuhamedović et al., Crimes in Stolac Municipality (Sarajevo: DID, 2001), and Mehmed Dizdar, Suđeni Stolac (Sarajevo, DID: 1996).
10.
In a letter from the Waqf Office of the Islamic Religious Community of 23 October 1955 (number 2782/55) to the Expropriation Committee of the Executive Council of the People’s Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to which is appended the illegible signature of the director, one finds the following: "as early as 1949, the . . . People’s Committee in Stolac had usurped, without any legal basis or the agreement of the representative bodies of the Islamic Religious Community, the real property of the Waqf, the graveyards, on which were built silos, warehouses, a park for children, and a school." This letter was written six years after the destruction of the three above-mentioned graveyards (Podgrad, the Old, and the Great graveyards), as part of the later legalisation of the crime.
11.
According to certain of my relatives, the first members of my family to settle in Stolac were a father and son. They came there from Unđurovina. Their ancestors had previously lived in the area between Skadar and the Neretva. Their graves were in the Great Graveyard. Whenever members of my family visited that graveyard, as instructed by their elders, they always prayed first for the souls and the memory of those two. Also in that graveyard amongst the graves of my ancestors were Ibrahim, Mahmud, and Salih, military officers and officials (Serdars and Ćehaja) of Stolac, and their many male and female descendants. It was not possible to separate the stories of their lives, so eloquently put before us by their graves and headstones, from love and passion, hope and suffering, and the expectation of the Guided One, who will fill the world with justice and beauty, in place of injustice and corruption.
12.
Derviš Mahmutćehajić (1864-1959), son of Mehmed and Hasnija (née Muftić) and grandson of Mustafa and Fatima (née Bakšić), had seven sons: Mahmut (1900-1926), Azim (1906-1938), Džemal (1907-2000), Mustafa (1912-1982), Zulfikar (1915-2000), Mehmed (1920-2000), and Remzija (1929-1987). While Džemal, Mustafa, Zulfikar, and Mehmed were respected and influential members of the anti-fascist movement and played significant roles in the new government, they were powerless to prevent the killing of two of their close relatives. Muhamed, son of their brother Mahmut and his wife Ramiza (née Kemura), born in 1927, was summarily executed as a member of the partisan movement in 1944. Šućrija, the son of Ćamil and Munta (née Serdarević), born in 1921, was killed in 1945, also without trial. Both killings were carried out by the Communist authorities. In 1995, when my brother Mirsad revisited Stolac for the first time, escorted by members of the international military forces in Bosnia, he found his own two houses and my one house there burnt, along with hundreds of others. My father’s house, in which he and his brothers had been born, as had the children of his brother, Azim, and his own children, had not been burned down. It is possible that the criminals knew that this house had been the repository of the family’s and the town’s cultural treasures, gathered over centuries, and so they had put off its destruction in order to search for its "hidden" treasures. When Mirsad visited the house, there was practically nothing left, no manuscripts or books, no medallions no pictures, no archives, no furnishings of value. The floors and walls had been dug up. No doubt, the criminals had supposed them to contain the valuables they were searching for. Somewhere in this great rubbish heap, amongst the ruins of dug-up floorboards and the things the criminals had not carried away, he found a broken portrait of our grand-father Derviš. When the wreckers had smashed the beautiful wooden frame of the picture, they had rent the canvas right through the old man’s face. Back in Sarajevo, we had stared in dumbfounded silence at this torn picture, from which the old man in the fez had looked down with his mild smile on us, his heirs, in that house built in 1911. Even in this torn picture, the mild but clear eyes of this old man, the son of Mehmed-aga and the grandson of hajji Mustafa, looked as they had looked on us all, as his children, and on the people of his town. The destruction of his house and his entire legacy, and even the desecration of his own portrait, had failed to extinguish the mild but encouraging smile of that warm old man. When his only immediate kin had, at the end of the nineteenth century, given in to pressure and moved East, he had decided to stay and had borne witness throughout his life to his belief in the inviolate right and the indelible obligation of both the living and the dead to remain by the graves of their generations and never to accept that to do so is impossible, as so many have said. Every aspect of his life bore witness to the grounds for trusting in the meaning of the world, human being, and the Book. As far as he was concerned, everything in this world began with the Call, "In the name of God, the All-merciful, the Ever-merciful!" just as it ended with the exclamation, "Praise be to God!"
13.
The Recitation simply translates the Arabic word Qur’an.
14.
The destruction of the Muslim graveyards was only one expression of the great anti-Muslim movement. During both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the Muslims of the Balkans suffered systematic persecution and killing. Their cultural heritage was cruelly destroyed. This persecution and murder was an element in all Balkan national programmes and their realisation. There was no attempt to establish a national state in the Balkans that did not involve the persecution, killing, and baptism of Muslims and the destruction of their cultural heritage in the areas supposed to be that nation’s territory. This suffering was of terrible proportions. Even during periods of respite, this fear still reaches deep in the Muslim soul, because no attempt to establish a national programme is possible, in its "pure" ideological form, so long as Muslims remain within the body of the nation. Because of their individual and collective trauma, they remain incapable of formulating a response to the suffering they have borne. The promises of communism provided a frame for these processes. They carried as their secret content the continuation of the old nationalist programmes to deal with the "Muslim question" by persecution, killing, baptism, and the destruction of Muslim cultural heritage. Consequently, with the Muslim experience of suffering during the Second World War still fresh, the new Communist order established a framework for new forms of trauma and a continuation of the destruction of the Muslim people in Bosnia. Immediately following the end of the war, violence against key symbols of Muslim cultural identity continued (mektebs, mosques, tekkes, harems, etc.). Such actions had a terrible psychological impact, particularly as these people had not yet come to terms with the extent of their suffering during the just finished war (more than one hundred thousand or around 8 percent of this group had been killed, according to the research presented in Vladimir Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu [Zagreb: Jugoslavensko viktimološko društvo, 1989]; and Bogoljub Kočović, Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji [Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990]). The new Communist government took no account of the traumatised condition of the Muslim people and allowed it no psychological breathing space under the new circumstances. The authorities passed a series of laws allowing and, in fact, promoting the destruction of Muslim cultural heritage, while implementing a number of measures designed to increase fear and the sense of insecurity. The brutal punishment meted out to the members of the "Young Muslims" movement was intended, as the state prosecutor of the time, Enver Kržić, himself said, "to freeze the blood in anyone who might ever think of such a thing again" (cited by Alija Izetbegović in Sead Trhulj, Mladi muslimani [Sarajevo: OKO, 1995], 62). This same prosecutor had, in 1948, told Ismet Serdarević (accused and convicted of being a member of the organisation): "between your conviction and your paradise, you will live through 1000 hells" (ibid, 46). The social and political circumstances in which all this took place were permeated by the maintenance of ancient and the imposition of new fears of everything Muslim as unacceptable and dangerous. Political and legal measures taken by the new government were strictly opposed to the reality that the Muslim personality is determined by the effort to realise the self through the confessions that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His Messenger. These confessions are essentially a-historical. They were manifest in history, but cannot be understood outside the metaphysically grounded image of the world. Their a-historicity is denied by the modern ideologies, which endeavour to reify islam, excluding it to the periphery of history, while presenting this reification and exclusion as a historical phenomenon. Both these confessions are available to every individual through transferred or received knowledge. They are, however, also present in each of us as our authentic and original nature and as the Spirit breathed into us by our Creator. Received knowledge only serves the discovery and the realisation of knowledge that already exists in us as our most profound nature, the knowledge of the names which God taught to Adam, and so to all of his children, at the end of Creation, when it was focused within us. This is why every individual and social act includes the desire for self-discovery and self-realisation of that inner knowledge received from God. When a child is born, it is given a name by the most prominent member of the family or the community. That individual takes on the role of the praised by calling us to confess the truth and claim of everything in existence and so to realise our own self in relationship with God, in particular through the highest moment of humanity, represented by the praised as the Messenger of God. For the praised was at the beginning of all creation, as all the prophets and through them all those who have followed them have borne witness. That individual carries the child in his arms, which is to say symbolically at the Prophet’s breast, and recites the Call (ezan) into his or her right ear and the Resurrection (ikamet) into the left. Then, he speaks out his or her name, which should, in principle, express the desire that human being develop in beauty and goodness (see Enver Mulahalilović, Vjerski običaji muslimana u Bosni i Hercegovini, 2nd rev. ed. [Sarajevo: El-kalem, 1989], 16). This Muslim tradition of introducing the name becomes unacceptable in the new ideological environment. Individuals from a Muslim background, included in the ideological apparatus, avoid such names, so that authentic Muslim names become scandalous. The circumcision of male children, as a symbol of our original covenant with God as the only source of the reality of all that is in existence, also became unacceptable, so that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, most Muslims carried it out in secrecy and fear. Teaching children sections of the Recitation, which is the principal expression that the human soul cannot be based upon individual wilfulness, also became unacceptable and an act of opposition to the promises of "progress" and the scientistic ideology. The institution of the mekteb, as the place in which one first learns the use of the pen and the Book, is of decisive importance in the formation of the Muslim sense of self. Young children are gathered around the Book that God revealed as a mercy unto the worlds. Their teacher approaches the Book with the same rights and responsibility as they do. The Book is an authority that binds us all to the praised as the perfect example and God as the source and destination of everything. It signifies our relationship to the Word and Its manifestation through phenomena, speech, and writing. Through this general relationship with the divine revelation, we find ourselves constantly affirming ourselves as "a people of the book." Gathering around the Book has a greater symbolic than essential significance. In this way, the child is immunised against any authority that is not supra-individual and that mediates the child’s relationship with God the Creator, so that ethical behaviour with regard to other individuals and the admission of claims derive from our relationship with God the Creator and Governor of all existence and not from subordination to any secular authority that lays claim to some absolute right. The Book turns and orients the child towards the Creator Who reveals Himself through the world, us, and the Book. In this way, the manifold of the world-the heavens and the earth and everything between-is connected with Unity as the Principle, while our ability to realise and discover this Unity within ourselves is confirmed. Because the Communist authorities outlawed the mekteb, the Recitation was displaced from its central position within Muslim society, as the decisive factor in the creation of the individual self. In its place, the new authorities introduced the new ideologically determined authority, whose defining characteristic was force and which was focused on the person of the leader, represented in terms of the new Communist ideology, and embodied in the party apparatus, with the State as its means. In 1952, the operation of the tekkes or dervish lodges was forbidden by order of the Ulema of the Islamic Community. (This decision was published in the Gazette of the Supreme Islamic Council of Elders of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Sarajevo, 1:2[1952]: 199). In this way, religious life as a whole was reduced to the role of the "imams at the mosque." The role of the "imam at the mosque" is doctrinally just leading common prayer and may be carried out by any adult individual. Given that the nomination and installation of an imam did not require any particular conditions of spiritual initiation, therefore, it became part of a structure entirely under the oversight of the political authorities. According to Osman Čimić (1927-2002), a senior official within the Communist police, most of the imams so appointed were linked with the security apparatus of the Communist authorities and followed their orders. They were, as such, frequently deeply involved in the destruction of Muslim society. This was not, however, the worst consequence of this reduction of the doctrinal unity of Islam, which ensures a balance between received and intellectual knowledge, without which no traditional image of the world can survive, and on which and through which human salvation through self-realisation is based. Once the imams had been securely established in this subordinate position, under the authorities’ surveillance, they were then drawn into the hierarchical network of an exoteric apparatus, entirely managed by the authorities. This was, however, only one of the degrees whereby traditional unities were transformed into ideologies that locate human salvation in political and lucrative action. With the full involvement of the ideological elite, the religious organisations were then transformed into a supreme value used to justify violence against individuals and their inclusion or exclusion, depending on the degree to which they accepted the authority of the ideological elite, which lorded over the apparatus as the authority elected by the elite as supreme. Human salvation through the realisation of the Unity of God and the imitation of the praised as the most beautiful example was suppressed, in favour of respect for an apparatus which had taken the place of the Unity of God and the apostolate of the praised. Confession of the Unity of God was replaced by the inviolate unity of the people. Following the Messenger was now located within history and replaced by the inviolate nature of the leader and the leadership as the conditions of "progress." According to Arquon, Islam was reoriented as "a means of disguised behaviour, institutions, and cultural and scientific activity, inspired by purely western forms, which had been ideologically rejected" (Muhammad Arqoun, Rethinking Islam, trans. Robert D. Lee [Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994], 13). Given that the participants in the apparatus are acting in accordance with the forms of ideological modernity, dressed up in traditional garb, and that God, as the transcendent and always present authority, is excluded or reduced to a framework for the instrumental rationality of the elite, it can hardly be confirmed except by the constant offering of new forms and the destruction of the old. According to such a point of view, the old is regressive, the new progressive. The standard bearers of the new know, or so they claim, the goal towards which history is leading and the ways it will do so. The "imams" and their apparatus had a significant position amongst the destroyers of Islamic cultural heritage during the modern period. They felt ill at ease with the old, inherited cultural unities, as they tried to present themselves as separate from the old and loyal to the new. (For more on this, see the above-mentioned work by Arquon; see also Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, "Fundamentalizam nasuprot tradicijske intelektualnosti," Dijalog 3:4[2005]: 218-40). Such circumstances provided the perfect conditions for the destruction of endowed or waqf property, a crucial factor in providing Islamic culture with staying power. On the basis of archival research by Amer Medar, a local historian, there appear to have been more than 200 waqfs or endowed trusts in and around Stolac [personal communication]. He has confirmed the existence of 421 land registry entries for waqf properties. Waqfs are assets whose owners have excluded any possibility of alienation to ensure that any income accruing from them is used for the purpose of confirming the Unity of God and the apostolate of the praised. In wills made to dedicate a property for such purposes, one frequently finds reference to the obligation to do good, in the expectation of relief on the Day of Judgement. Such endowments also frequently cite the Prophet’s message: "When a man dies, his acts come to an end, but three-lasting charity, beneficial knowledge, and a pious son, who prays for him" (Muslim, imam, Sahih Muslim, trans. ‘Abdul Hamid Siddiqi [Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House , n.d.], 3:867). Only a few of the deeds of endowment (waqfnama) from Stolac have come down to us. A list of the ones preserved in the Gazi Husref Bey library in Sarajevo was published by Zejnil Fajić, "Popis vakufnama iz Bosne i Hercegovine koje se nalaze u Gazi Husrevbegovoj biblioteci," Anali Gazi-Husrevbegove biblioteke, Sarajevo, 5:6(1978): 245-302, at 291-93. For more on the waqfnama from Stolac, see Salih Trako, "Vakufnama hadži Mehmeda sina hadži Mahmudova Mehmedbašića Stočanina iz 1734. godine," Glasnik Rijaseta Islamske zajednice u SFRJ, Sarajevo, 3 (1990): 38-45; and Izet Rizvanbegović, "Vakufname i vasijetname Ali-paše Rizvanbegovića Stočevića," Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 52-53(2004): 295-338. A review of the majority of the waqfnama from Stolac allows one to conclude that the endowment or property being left by an owner to his heirs or the community might include a shop, a house, a water cistern, land (gardens, meadows, an orchard, or pastureland), a mill or mill wheel, a washing area, books, livestock, furniture, or money.
15.
A large number of educated people has been born in the city of Stolac, in comparison to other Bosnian towns of a similar size. A number of them have had a significant influence on events in the country, and even outside. Here we will mention only some: Sulejman Šarac (1850-1927), a theologian and the Reis-ul-ulema; Mehmed Šarić (1852-1920), a painter and politician; Adem Bise (1887-1957), a teacher and essayist; Dimitrije Mitrinović (1887-1953), poet, essayist, and philosopher; Mustafa Golubić (1889-1941), writer and general of the NKVD; Šefkija Behmen (1892-1974), lawyer and politician; Mahmud Behmen (1894-1937), journalist and politician; Asim Behmen (1899-1924), essayist and official on the executive committee of the Communist Youth International in Moscow; Safet Burina (1907-1977), poet; Hamid Dizdar (1907-1967), poet and journalist; Džemal Mahmutćehajić (1907-2000), a delegate at the ZAVNOBIH and AVNOJ; Huso Salkić (1911-1942), writer; Mak Dizdar (1917-1971), writer and journalist; Asim Strnjak (1930-1984), economist; Alija Isaković (1932-1997), writer; and Emir Buzaljko (1952-1992), architect and essayist. In spite of the fact that these citizens of Stolac were involved in various social, cultural, and political activities at home and abroad, as may be seen from their biographies and their works, the dimensions and the savagery of the treatment meted out to their own town and their country failed to find a place in their discourses or their writings.
16.
Mak Dizdar ( 1917-1971), commonly regarded as the greatest poet of Bosnia in the twentieth century, was both an adherent and a functionary of the Communist regime and, through his poetic work, a major de-constructer of its ideology . His main work is the collection of poems Kameni Spavač, translated as Stone Sleeper.
17.
On this phenomena in Persia during the twentieth century, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Philosophy from its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 251 ff.
18.
William C. Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2007), 10-11.
19.
Hasan Đikić , "Povodom obustavljanja rada u mektebima,"Glasnik Vrhovnog islamskog starješinstva u FNRJ, Sarajevo, 1:4( 1952): 25-31, at 27.
20.
For more on this subject, see Daryoush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, trans. John Howe (London: Saqi Books, 1992).
21.
Tu Wei-Ming , Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 102.
22.
If an individual or some group ascribes its own misfortunes or the misfortunes of its country to the presence of a Muslim element in that country or community, and if it suggests that the situation be resolved or dealt with by depriving those Muslims of some of their rights, humiliating them, forcing them to accept apartheid, expelling them from the country, or simply doing away with them, then we say that that individual or group has anti-Islamic or anti-Muslim opinions. When these opinions are transformed into a systematic ideology, then the conditions are ripe for the creation of an elite-ideology-organisation-agency complex, as the framework for potential genocide.
23.
Few were the houses in Stolac that did not contain collections of manuscript or printed books. On the basis of conversations with a number of witnesses, the existence of such collections has been confirmed in the following families: Alihodžic, Basarić, Baščaušević, Behmen, Bukić, Buro, Buzaljko, Ćelić, Čerkez, Čohodarević, Đervoz, Dizdar, Duman, Đulepa, Elezović, Gačo, Grebiđela, Grljević, Hajdarević, Halilagić, Heko, Hrle, Hromić, Jasarbegović, Kadribegović, Kohnić, Korkut, Ljubović, Mahmutćehajić, Mehmedbašić, Mesak, Muftić, Opijač, Pašalić, Pirija, Prndelj, Repak, Rizvanbegović, Sarajljić, Stranjak, Sumbulović, Šarac, Šarić, Šehić, Šemić, Šljivo, Škoro, Trklja, Zekić, Zujo. These collections were, for the most part, destroyed during the twentieth century. A few hundred manuscripts, connected in one way or another with Stolac, have been preserved in the Gazi Husref Bey library in Sarajevo. For the content of one of these collections, which gives some idea of the forms of knowledge which were formative of traditional Stolac, see Fehim Nametak, "Rukopisna zbirka Habibe Mehmedbašić," Anali Gazi Husrevbegove biblioteke 11-12(1985): 181-200. This collection was in the owner’s house and disappeared during the war against Bosnia (1991-1996).
24.
For the destruction of the holy territory of Mecca, see Hassan M. Fattah, "The Profane Crowding Out Sacred in Mecca," International Herald Tribune, 7 Mar. 2007; and Ahmad Irfan, "The Destruction of Holy Sites in Mecca and Medina," Islamica Magazine 15 (11 Nov. 2007), http://www.islamicamagazine .com.
25.
Qur’an 5:30-31.
26.
Qur’an 25:63-76.
27.
Qur’an 37:96.
28.
Qur’an 47:38.
29.
Qur’an 35:15.
30.
Nahjul Balagha, Sermons, Letters and Sayings of Imam ’Ali, collected by Syed Razi ( Qum: Ansaryan, 1989), 254.
31.
Ibid., 375.
32.
Ibn al-‘Arabi’, al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (Cairo, 1911; reprint, Cairo: Al-Hay’at al-Misriyyat al-Amma li l’Kitab, 1972; reprint, Beirut: Dār Sadir, n.d.), 2:447.8.
33.
Qur’an 20:50.
34.
Qur’an 67:3.
35.
Peace is one of the beautiful names of God. See Qur’an 59:23. This name is the most common form of salutation between people.
36.
Qur’an 8:13.
37.
Qur’an 3:9 and 4:140.
38.
Qur’an 3:83.
39.
Bible, Luke, 17:20-21.
40.
Bible, Matthew, 7:7.
41.
Qur’an 2:256.
42.
Qur’an 63:3-4.
43.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been a systematic ruination of the Muslims in Bosnia and her eastern neighbours. This destructive process was completed in the areas to the north and west of Bosnia during the eighteenth century. On the killing and persecution of Muslims and the destruction of their culture during the nineteenth century, see Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821-1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995); Feliks Kanić, Srbija zemlja i stanovništvo: Od rimskog doba do kraja XIX veka, 2 vols. (Belgrade: Rad, 1985); and Vladimir Dedier and Antun Miletić, Genocid nad Muslimanima 1941-1945: Zbornik okumenata i svjedočenja (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990).
44.
See Franz Pfeiffer, Meister Eckhart, trans. C. de B. Evans, 1 vol. (London: John M. Watkins, 1924), 114.
45.
Qur’an 15:29 and 32:9.
46.
Qur’an 36:78-80.
47.
Qur’an 23:35-38.
48.
Nahjul Balagha , Sermons, Letters, and Sayings, 247-48.
49.
Titus Burckhardt , Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, trans. William Stoddart (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2006), 58 ff.
50.
The Philosophia perennis is primarily concerned with the unity of the Principle and the principle of Unity. This is the question of God’s reality as the essence of the manifold of being. This reality is such that it is manifest both mediately and immediately. The question of immediate knowledge of the real is the heart of the perennial philosophy. That some individuals have such knowledge and that they pass it on to others as doctrine, ritual, and virtue may be accepted or rejected. Both responses have been made throughout the history of humankind. As is evident from the now generally accepted name for this phenomenon, the philosophia perennis relates to wisdom or Sophia. Such wisdom has always existed at the core of the various religions and traditional philosophies. Wisdom is one, but it has found expression in different languages. The love of wisdom is the love of God as Wise, a love that leads away from separation, as He has no other. The purpose of perennial philosophy is to establish, maintain, and strengthen human connection with the Divine. Given that human existence derives from God as Perfect, our goal can be nothing less than perfection. This is our potential. It does not depend, in principle, on the circumstances of our lives: it is a matter of human being as such. Circumstances may facilitate or hinder our discovery or distortion of our original perfection. They cannot, however, destroy or render entirely impossible the realisation of the purpose of humanity. Accordingly, the perennial philosophy is not a matter of history or the future, which lie beyond the reality of any given self: it is, above all and beyond all, a matter of our individual self-realisation. The ontology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, and psychology of the perennial philosophy affect our self-realisation in our highest moment-the discovery of ourselves as fully in God’s image. On the history of the concept of the philosophia perennis in the West, see Charles B. Schmitt, "Perennial Philosophy: From Steuco to Leibnitz," Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 505-32.
51.
Qur’an 10:22-23.
52.
Qur’an 37:96.
53.
For this decisive period in the history of Bosnia and the surrounding countries, see Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). The ideological framework for Muslim inclusion in anti-Muslim activities cannot be understood unless one sees how it relates to the nationalist question and nationalism. On this, see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).
