‘And When the Heart is Sick, the Whole Body is Sick.’ Repairing the Person and the Urban Fabric through Everyday Sufi Ethics in Postwar Sarajevo

Introduction

The revival of contemporary Sufism in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, is emerging as an urban practice that provides practitioners with disciplinary methods in what Michel Foucault called ‘care for the self’. ^[1] This is facilitated primarily through a spiritual companionship between the sheikh of the Sufi lodge, or tekke, and his disciples, or murids. While this is a spiritual and religious connection, it is also characterised by an enfolding psychodynamic relationship that contains fruitful ground for mapping new Muslim subjectivities and some emergent postsocialist and postwar cultural changes. In this study, I analyse how formations of ethical selves through Islamic Sufi ritual practices make and remake everyday life in Sarajevo. I give an ethnographic account of how traditional Sufi practice, with the charismatic leadership of the sheikh, plays a role in ethical self-making and postwar community-building. The practice aims, in the words of practitioners, to build a close relationship with God, ‘so that whatever we do is for God’s pleasure’. This is primarily reflected through the embodied Sufi adab, or ‘beautiful conduct’, as something practitioners strive to achieve in the everyday.

Becoming a good Muslim with adab is not only a mechanical act of praying and fasting; it also involves a deeper level of self-care as a form of social responsibility. Practitioners spoke of a living faith, one which, in the words of their sheikh, entails the ‘miracle of awakening the sleeping human heart’. I argue that within the configuration of ‘waking up the heart’ resides the dervishes’ response to a postwar ethical demand, ^[2] as a way of countering a persistent postwar ‘vacuum of meaning and social solidarity’. ^[3] According to anthropologist Jarret Zigon, the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup conceptualised the ethical demand as a responsibility towards the other as a ‘situationally sensitive’ process. In other words, in certain situations moral breakdowns in a society would place a demand upon its people to renegotiate an ethical response as a way out of this crisis. The ethical response is therefore ‘related to the sociality of the demand, [and] […] this responsibility to the other always takes place within certain socio-historic-cultural conditions’. ^[4] I invite the reader to see the Sufi ethical self-making in the particular Sarajevan context in the function of contributing to a restoration of the postwar urban social relationships. While responding to this ethical demand with their practices, dervishes believe they are fulfilling a greater divine calling, one which they often quoted from the Quran: ‘Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves’ (Surah 13:11).

The study draws on a year-long field research in a Naqshbandi tekke in Sarajevo, in 2015/2016. The tekke is presided over by charismatic Naqshbandi sheikh Halil Hulusi. During my stay there, I partook in most of their practices and community life, including the devotional prayer, or zikr (remembrance of Allah), and hizmet (service to the community). These practices are very much centred on regimentation of the body as a starting point to achieving an ethical self-transformation. Attending ethnographically to the processes of embodiment is necessary in my understanding of what self-making through ritual religion means in the Sarajevan postwar context. The tekke is treated as an arena for the restoration of the embodied ethical subject, or, in the words of Cheryl Mattingly, as a ‘moral laboratory’. ^[5] Through an intimate engagement with religious experience, practitioners seek to find creative solutions to their everyday problems as a response to what they identify as the postwar moral crisis, instead of remaining stagnant. The whole process of becoming an embodied subject is reminiscent of the metaphor of movement, whereby bodies and minds are engaged in a reflective process of ethical self-transformation. My research treats the city of Sarajevo as a liminal space, one where moral and ethical considerations are often subjugated by self-interest and lack of trust between people, compromising everyday relationships. Within such a context the charismatic religious authority of the Sufi sheikh plays a positive social role in the process of becoming a good Muslim, a process that is conditioned by self-reparation. I argue that the relationship between sheikh and murid mirrors the deeper social postwar transformation—that of a father loss—in a symbolic way. It is an example of how traditional Islamic practice in the country adapts to contemporary realities to provide an opportunity for symbolically renegotiating a relationship to a paternal authority. I show how important this is in the spiritual progress of the murids.

The role of the sheikh through this progression evokes Michael Gilsenan’s argument that social and political transformations often bring up transformations of the nature of Islamic authority. ^[6] Next to being a role model of living faith, the sheikh’s engagement in defending the country in the aggression against Bosnia plays a great role in the legitimisation of his charisma. The murid is connected to the religious authority of the sheikh, who draws his charisma from the traditional Sufi silsilah, or chain of succession, who has direct experience of the Bosnian War (1992-95), and who is immersed in the local moral world. These characteristics of the sheikh provide the key experiential elements that play a role in negotiating the process of self-reparation, and initiating a renewed Sufi morality in Sarajevo. The process is about a ‘moral reform of the individual’; such an endeavour through religious practice influences ‘religiously informed social agents’ whereby ‘[t]he expression of Sufi identities in the public sphere is done through various forms of moral performance, i. e. the enactment of embodied religious principles as the framework for social practices’. ^[7] The specific kinship-like relationships formed in the tekke challenge existing ideas on kinship as fixed and consanguine. Instead, I propose that kinship relations have, in the words of Maurice Godelier, metamorphosed because of the war and the fall of socialism. ^[8] The tekke and the close community that is formed there are good examples of the nature of postwar and postsocialist forms of kinship metamorphoses.

The study contributes to the emergent anthropology of self-formations and Muslim subjectivities. It is framed by the notion that a Sufi self goes beyond the mere transformation into an ethical subject. Instead, the Sufi seeks to acquire a transcendent self, embodied and performed through the concept of adab, which signifies at once urban civility and a relationship with the Divine. I invite the reader to see this self-formation and self-reparation in the function of contributing to a restoration of the postwar urban social fabric. With this, my paper addresses two preoccupations in urban anthropology: it is at once an anthropology ‘in the city’ and an anthropology ‘of the city’. ^[9]

Disciplines in the Care for the Self

Every Friday and Sunday, practitioners gather at the Naqshbandi tekke for the ritual performance of zikr. During my field research I was privileged to experience what a community represents in the life of the Muslim believer. More importantly, I was there to witness what a sheikh means in the life of a dervish, as a follower of a Sufi order is called, in the particular postwar Sarajevan context.

One evening, after zikr ended, I was sitting with a young woman whose education and interest in psychology made her consider training in gestalt psychoanalytic therapy. We were talking about the differences in psychoanalytic and Sufi work on the self. When I suggested to her that a Sufi sheikh and a therapist seem to share a common aim in the care for the self, she responded:

‘You know what it is that Sufism does not have? A transference process. It is a religious experience. When you come in front of the sheikh, he is such a profoundly spiritual person, and he is already a fully realised human being, and there is no such context as the therapeutic process.’

She agreed that, as in psychoanalytic therapy, the relationship to the sheikh is a template, one of rupture and repair whereby murids heal inner conflicts as they move towards a greater psychic integration of the self. But in Sufism, she told me, this self-reparation is called ‘tevhid, or unity’, but ‘we don’t call it transference, we call it a mirror’. The term for a mature human being in Sufism, which is given to the sheikh, is the insan-i kamil. The sheikh is seen as a mirror to the faults of his own disciples. Through direct contact and time spent with the sheikh, the disciple begins to slowly adopt, or emulate, and internalise the sheikh’s adab, or beautiful behaviour.

The sheikh’s role as a mirror is to present to his murids their own weaknesses as they work through their own projective identifications and inner conflicts, while addressing the root cause of their problems. Since the aim is to break with ego-driven life, or that which identifies with the lower self, or the nefs, the tekke as the moral laboratory provides many opportunities for such practices where one can learn humility. First comes the relationship with the sheikh, and regular attendance to zikr, the heart-cleaning ritual practice, together with hizmet and regular companionship with the community. All these are disciplined actions in the care for the self, actions that murids consciously choose over other forms of Islam available in the city to develop self-knowledge and to become good Muslims.

Because the sheikh attracts practitioners from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and age groups, the tekke is a microcosm of Bosnian society. Most practitioners, however, are highly educated and are familiar with foreign languages. Though from different social backgrounds, most practitioners share the experience of war and have encountered deep and personal losses of family members and friends. A number of practitioners settled in Sarajevo, or around, during the war as internally displaced persons. Another category of people who are particularly devoted practitioners are those who come from Muslim families but had not practised Islam before the war. Their experiences of ‘returning to faith’ mirror a need not only for role models, such as the sheikh embodies, but also for disciplined practice to help them persevere on their path, or to have patience (sabur). This is very indicative of the way in which Muslims, especially those who return to religion, look upon alternative authorities, whereby the sheikh’s life experience and charisma represent a pivotal point in the way in which Islamic knowledge is passed, internalised, and practised.

In his seminal work Recognizing Islam, Michael Gilsenan writes how political transformations of power and authority bear an important imprint on the way Islam is reimagined. In Bosnia, the historical trajectories of Sufi practice certainly testify to the way in which political events could influence development of religious life. What Sufism stood for in the pre-Yugoslav, Yugoslav, and post-Yugoslav periods has changed. At the close of the nineteenth century, Sufi orders saw a great decline, while the rise of Sunni ulema was institutionalised in a new hierarchical organisation, the Islamic Community, by the Habsburg Empire. ^[10] During state socialism, the work of tekkes was banned, and Sufi sheikhs, regarded as the best example of lived Sunna (the ways of the Prophet Muhammad), were marginalised and lost their social function. This process, and especially the one where the sheikh plays a social role, has been reversed in postwar Bosnian society, reflecting both the changing nature of Islamic authority and also local demand for charismatic role models. This is especially true amongst the urban young, who comprise by far the largest demographic group at the tekke in Sarajevo. This movement towards Islamic Sufi orthopraxy represents a shift in how Sufi Muslims at the Naqshbandi tekke see themselves as believers in the postwar and post-Yugoslav space. They are primarily concerned with correct Islamic practice as a form of self-care and care for others. Both these concerns are conveyed in what their sheikh preaches on the ‘miracle of awaking the heart’, or developing the compassionate sensibility to live with others.

‘Where Is Movement, There Is Blessing.’ Freedom to Become and the Tekke as a Moral Laboratory

Revival of contemporary Sufism emerges as an urban practice embedded in transnational networks, undermining the earlier perception of Sufism as being archaic and rural. ^[11] Bosnian Sufism, in particular the urban tariqas (Sufi orders), today reflects the growing number of global Sufi practices, showing how the older tariqas have evolved from their traditional structures to become modern and sophisticated places for disciplined ethical practices. ^[12] David Henig frames the revival of Sufism in Bosnia in the ‘historically disruptive contexts’ of ‘Marxist-Leninist atheism’. He treats it as an ‘emergent form of organization of divine knowledge and practice that is embedded in historical and political processes, that of state socialist oppression and postsocialist liberation’. ^[13] Within this approach, he shows how this emergent postsocialist organisation of Sufi divine knowledge harbours an improvisatory nature which he names ‘creative moments’. ^[14] I take Henig’s metaphor as fitting to the Sufi ritual practice, as the ‘creative moment’ of the ethical self-formation too.

Though Sufism had been banned and most tekkes had been shut down or even destroyed, there was still some continuity of the tradition, especially through the Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi brotherhoods, which had influential sheikhs. The famous Hađi Sinanova tekke in Sarajevo, which belongs to the Qadiri Sufi order made memorable through Meša Selimovič’s famous novel Dervish and Death, was closed after World War II but reopened in the 1970s. Ritual practice was performed, albeit in a reduced form. The same was true of the tekke Mesudija of the Naqshbandi order led by Sheikh Mesud Hađimejlič. This is especially important as the Hađimejlič family draws its silsilah from Husein-baba Zukič, who had renewed the Naqshbandi tariqa in 1789.^[15] I believe, from my fieldwork, that socialist policy, by forbidding the work of the tekkes, significantly shrank the space for traditional and culturally available forms of ritual practice, whereby the act of becoming a good Muslim and an ethical subject was cultivated by religious ritual, such as the Sufi zikr, as a process of embodied self-making. Thus I explore how the postsocialist ‘liberation’ has opened the space for reintroducing the embodied subject into the anthropological research on Islam. One such creative moment for an emerging Sufi community can be identified as an urban phenomenon. Sarajevo in fact has a long tradition of Sufism. The seventeenth-century Ottoman writer Evelya Chelebi mentions in his travelogues that Sarajevo had forty-seven tekkes. According to the census of the Islamic Community from 1930, there were eleven tekkes.^[16] This gives the overall conversation on Sufi revival a metaphor of movement—it is movement that captures much of the ethos at the tekke, where bodies move in hizmet and in zikr, as well as in prayer, or salat. The metaphor of movement also captures the recent overall revival of Sufism, in its restoration and building of new tekkes, and in its publication of literature. Sarajevo today has several publishing houses which deal exclusively with the translation and printing of Sufi literature, most notable among them the publishing house Dobra Knjiga, which has published the biographies of many renowned Bosnian Sufi sheikhs.

The image of movement left a deep impression on me while I was based at the tekke. The invocation of the Naqshbandi silsilah that initiates practitioners into the ritual zikr was always followed by the sheikh quoting from the epistle of an early Sufi theologician, al-Qushayri: ‘El Bereket Fil Hareket’ (u kretnji je bereket, meaning ‘Where is movement, there is blessing’).^[17] Qushayri spoke of the importance of movement—‘bestirring oneself externally brings blessings internally’.^[18] In Sufi theology, the process of becoming a dervish is described from the movement of one spiritual station to another.^[19] In this context, movement represents a way of disciplining the body, whose desires and needs are mostly pleasure based, to make room for the emergence of a higher self, or the spiritual body, which takes charge of the corporeal. Within the framework of movement, we can speak of ‘performing Islam’, whereby the embodied belief becomes a public performance that sacralises the public space.^[20]

‘Bodies in practice’ can be ethnographically investigated as embodied subjects, which become the ground to study cultural changes in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia and to study, in this particular case, urban Islamic ethics. Thomas Csordas’s paradigm of embodiment proposes that it is the body that should provide the starting point to analysis of culture and the self, whereby research looks at practices that are seen to contribute to the collapse of the Cartesian distinction between subject and object—in this instance, the Sufi ritual of zikr.^[21] Csordas’s analysis of embodiment is the body informed by local contexts as a result of involvement in the real world. It is an analytical combination both of the religious experience of practitioners and of the sociocultural and economic context in which such practice takes place. The latter inform the ‘concrete constellations in which people forge and foreclose their lives around what is most at stake’, or the local moral world.^[22] Crucial also to this is the charismatic leadership of the sheikh, which mediates this performance in the local moral world of the city.

Sarajevo. Liminality and the Local Moral World

The urban scene of Sarajevo forms a very particular local knot when considering ethical self-transformations. The choices people make in their everyday lives, though not exclusively, often can be of a war-related moral hierarchy.^[23] In her important work Sarajevo under Siege. An Anthropology in War Time, Ivana Maček writes that out of the city’s wartime population of 450,000, one third were internally displaced people. She witnessed the effects this had on kinship ties and social relations, and how it brought about new forms of cooperation and hostilities.^[24] These profound demographic changes have not quite settled yet into normalised urban relationships, and urban-rural hostilities play a salient role in discourses of ethics and what is proper urban conduct.^[25] Combined with conflicts over resources, economic inequalities and political stagnation, ‘liminality’ has become ‘much more frequent as structures of all sorts weaken, and liminal, marginal […] spaces grow in scope’.^[26] Peter Locke proposes that Sarajevo contains seemingly normal everydayness, whereby a ‘vacuum of meaning and solidarity’, with difficult economic disadvantages, presents a real challenge for human relationships.^[27] In my fieldwork, this was illustrated through the chronic lack of trust between people. This lack of trust was the most insidiously embedded postwar condition, a result of the permanent breakdown of social ties. Thus broken promises between ‘friends’, never keeping one’s word, making friendships for material or other benefits, but above all attacking the honour of people through gossip, or gibet, as a form of social control, were often mentioned in conversations. One of my dervish interlocutors summarised this well: ‘There is a great polarisation in our society today. The bad people begin to attack the dignity of the good people. Our society has collapsed.’

For my interlocutors, the postwar ethical demand manifests in the way people have stopped behaving with adab towards one another. Thus, among the psychosocial metanarrative of war-related trauma and broken society, there is something more at stake, and in need of being repaired: the ordinary everyday as the locus of human relatedness. When approaching Sufi ethics in the city, the task is to understand how dervishes strive to recover the everyday and the ordinary. For my interlocutors, this meant above all to reformulate the relationship with the self, which ultimately should lead to a deeper self-knowledge, resulting in self-control and self-regulation. These qualities of the self were described as a foundation for filling the ‘vacuum of solidarity’. Adab, the embodied Sufi self, is manifested in improved everyday relationships, and harmony in the everyday with the other, is the foundation on which the harmony with the Divine is built. In the Sarajevan local world, where alienation is as much a postwar consequence as it is a postmodern condition, the relationship with a charismatic religious authority contravenes this logic by fostering intimate relationships in the care for the self. Charisma in this context is not only understood in a Weberian sense as a ‘quality of the individual’; it is a ‘type of relationship’ between the charismatic sheikh and his murids, who come to learn from him voluntarily and who submit themselves to his terbijjet, or methods of upbringing.^[28]

One of the sheikh’s roles in the life of his murids is to help them achieve this transition from the liminality of the city, or what it represents, to the adab, or from the liminal to the beautiful, moral, and ethical. This process of reparation is captured through a cleaning of the heart ‘from the infected nefs (lower self)’. The nefs can be infected by gossip, envy, ignorance, unhealthy attachment to this world, and anything which comes before Allah. When in one’s heart the attention and adoration are directed to other things, they pollute the heart, making it sick: ‘And when the heart is sick, the whole body is sick.’ Thus, within the liminality of the city, developing wisdom as to what is permitted (halal) and what is forbidden (haram) means developing a capability to live a moral Muslim life in a local world in which negotiating morality is often subject to an ambiguous logic. What is ethical in a particular moment is not always fixed; it is often relative.^[29] While they are with the sheikh, murids can learn to develop the quality of the ‘awakened heart’ and adab from someone to whom they have access every day: ‘You cannot learn your faith from the internet; you must come to a mosque. Sufism is such, you have to learn it from a teacher.’^[30] The sheikh is the best example both of how one should strive to treat others and also of how one should behave, which is in line with Islamic ethics defining noble character.^[31] His social role is that of an elder with experience and knowledge of the local world, able to advise wisely and to offer counsel for everyday living. In a place of liminality, charisma becomes a sociocultural demand.^[32]

Recuperating the Sufi Subject

Bearing in mind the liminality of the local moral world, how can we account for the transcendent elements of the Sarajevan Sufi self? Following Talal Asad’s influential line of inquiry that self-formation is a matter of disciplined practice, other seminal works on Muslim selfhood have also informed recent research on Balkan Muslim subjectivities.^[33] Such lines of inquiry, as Paola Abenante and Fabio Vicini argue, rarely take into account ‘God and the relation believers establish with Him. In more general terms, they all overlook the ways in which the transcendent is present […] as people attempt at understanding, and eventually transforming oneself.’^[34] Emerging studies have sought to correct this, allowing us to reimagine Islam as a spiritual and self-reflexive religious practice, one in which practitioners seek not only to become virtuous but also to attain an interiority that embraces a deeper phenomenological encounter with a Divine presence. However, most of these studies focus on the Middle East and Turkey; hardly any treat the successor states of Yugoslavia.^[35] To counter talks of Islamic radicalism—discourses that are often exaggerated—Islam in the region, especially Islam in Bosnia, would benefit from more studies that seek to understand it for its deep traditions of spirituality and transcendence. This surpasses the ethics of disciplined practice, moving as it does towards a deeper phenomenological Muslim interiority, which the sheikh speaks of as knowledge of the heart that is awake, whereby ‘the self becomes the human gaze on the world which folds the transcendent in the specificity of social relations, with their orientations, hierarchies, power dynamics and constraints.’^[36]

For my interlocutors, the transcendent was located in the concept of Sufi adab. Acquiring adab is seen as the ultimate goal of disciplined practice, and adab always emanates from acquiring self-knowledge. Essential to adab is an alignment between ‘outer behaviour and inner feelings’.^[37] It is an internalisation and an embodiment of the Sunna, or ways of the Prophet Muhammad, and therefore it means a correctly living faith. Thus it is vital to the murid’s spirituality to be in the presence of someone like the sheikh, who provides a living example of the Prophet’s Sunna as the fully realised human being. To this end my interlocutors made a distinction between politeness and beautiful behaviour. While the polite individual, I was told, was more connected to having ‘bon ton’, or behaving out of politeness and civility, the edebli individual is the embodied ethical self, the internalised Sunna of the Prophet, and an external manifestation of an inner way of being from which everything else in relation to living a moral life emanates.^[38] Eminent historian of Islam Ira Lapidus writes of adab as follows:

‘Adab in its most general sense: correct knowledge and behaviour in the total process by which a person is educated, guided, and formed into a good Muslim—adab as the foundation of the soul or personality of the human being as a whole. In this larger, and religious, sense, adab is a part of a system of Muslim ideas, part of an interrelated set of concepts that constitutes the basic vocabulary of Islamic belief and makes up a Muslim anthropology of man. As part of this larger system of thought, adab includes and is closely related to ilm (knowledge).’^[39]

This also includes the capability for applying wisdom in the local liminal world (i.e. knowing how to speak with someone, how to approach them, when to act and when to retreat). An edebli murid fuses their high ethical standards in an orthoprax endeavour, and the good Muslim is always inevitably a good citizen too.

Adab becomes the platform of every action. The wider social implications of adab are manifested as ‘acts of servanthood […] enmesh[ed] with social acts […] into a seamless and synthetic whole which sacralise[s] the community’s entire lifeworld’.^[40] This way the trained murid is always in dialogue with the local world and the public sphere. The edebli self becomes the connecting thread between this earthly existence and the other world; it ‘folds the transcendent into the power relations of everyday life […] and it makes the transcendent play a role in the local dynamics’.^[41] These local dynamics, as I argued above, are deeply ingrained in the war-related legacies that inform everyday life in Sarajevo. Intimate relationship with a spiritual, charismatic leader with experiential knowledge of the war can have social benefits, both in attaining self-knowledge and in embodying adab.

The Tekke. An Institution for ‘Educating the Heart’

The deeper appeal in the sheikh/murid relationship is ontologically important, as whatever needs to be healed is treated as a symptom of a disease whose root cause lies in the separation of man from God—which is how my interlocutors interpreted the immorality of the war, manifested through the animalistic and lower self driven nature of the man not yet awakened. A sense of foreclosure with regards to the recent war, though not always openly spoken about, plays a formative part in the healing of the self. The presiding sheikh at the Sarajevo Naqshbandi tekke, in focus here, Sheikh Hulusi, participated in the Bosnian war (1992-1995) and was briefly a general of the 7th Muslim Brigade. His murids see him as an exemplary role model—as a soldier, spiritual leader, and Bosniak. His involvement in the war, as one young imam told me, ‘was his most defining terbijjet on his own personal Sufi path. The temptations were great, and he did not think he would survive.’ The war is an important source of charisma and legitimation.^[42] This contributes to a rather unique subjectivity formation, where what it means to be a good Muslim often fuses with being a good Bosniak citizen.

The good Muslim /good Bosniak double-bind identity is mediated through the theme of hizmet, which my interlocutors highlighted as the most important aspect of Naqshbandi Sufi practice. Hizmet was experienced as an important discipline to gaining self-knowledge, as it was the first step towards breaking in the ego and becoming humble. Dervishes would often tell me that there can be no spiritual support without servanthood. By selfless service to the community, people restore some of the Divine order, which in itself is an acquisition of, or a form of, knowledge. Young murids would often jokingly point out that novices who join the practice seek to be noticed by asking to be put on duty to serve the sheikh’s tea. This is an ego-driven act and ‘this is not the first hizmet they should be seeking. By the time they reach this part, they should have done a good deal of cleaning the ablution room and washing the dishes.’

There is a wider social implication that this message seeks to convey, and it is most certainly something the sheikh himself encourages. One must not look upon a job as if it is below one’s dignity. Instead, one must learn how to be a hizmečar (servant) with integrity. One story of a dervish hizmečar was evoked to illustrate what this means. It was about an educated man who practiced Sufism. Every day on his way to the mosque to pray, he would collect rubbish and cigarette butts, thus cleaning the street. His humility was seen to be representative of a real dervish hizmečar, which benefitted society. But even such an approach to everyday living demands a level of humility which one needs to practice at attaining, or healing from, ego-driven pride. Therefore, dervishes and sheikhs often say that the hardest thing to be today is a human being, or to relate to fellow humans as Divine creations. The properly educated soul would intuitively stand in service to others.

The process of becoming and soul-rearing has a ritualistic aspect to it, one that engages the body through regimentation and rules. This means that the murid’s spiritual upbringing always begins with the external, physical body. Setting in a new body regimen (ritualistic practice) helps in the formation of an embodied knowledge, as an unreflective way of being a Muslim.^[43] For a dervish, adab is as much in the language of the body as of the tongue, and the thoughts. When the murid begins to change, among the first visible signs will be the alignment of his words and actions: ‘The living word is always followed by the action. A real dervish would also have a clean intention to all the deeds he performs.’ A distinction is made between a murid who acts and does good deeds with a clean intention and sincerity, and one who does it to show off but is not entirely honest about it. The sheikh usually knows the inner states of those who come to see him and who seek to be initiated into the practice. As many murids like to say, there is no point pretending about your true intentions: ‘You cannot trick the sheikh. He sees everything, though he may pretend that he does not see it out of his adab and not to offend you, but he is very discerning.’

The sheikh’s discernment also means that he is able to get a full picture of the character of his murids to apply various methods to bring about a spiritual rebirth. The spiritual rebirth is at times encouraged by murids gaining new names, different to their birth names. If upon joining the practice, their birth name is not Islamic, for example, the sheikh would suggest another name, which murids refer to as the tekijsko ime or ‘tekke name’. This tekke name always carries an important attribute, one that either describes the murid’s character or is something the murid should strive to integrate as a part of self. Giving the child a beautiful name is very important in Islam, and it is the duty of the parents.^[44] Similarly, Henig also notes the importance of naming in ‘transmitting substance of life and personhood’.^[45]

As an Islamic institution, the tekke is a kind of ‘inaugural scene’^[46] for moral rebirths; it was described by Sheikh Hulusi as the ‘institution which educates the heart’. The sheikh spoke about the multitude of Islamic education institutions today, of which ‘none deals with the heart. The tekke educates the heart.’ This is resonant in the experience of the murids. One young imam told me:

‘When we arrive here we are mejt (dead body) and the sheikh is our undertaker. Just like the dead body in the funerary rite in Islam is turned left and right, and is being washed, this is what the sheikh does with us, with our hearts. He performs corrective measures on our behaviour, he turns us left and right, and prepares us for the other world.’

The image of the sheikh as an undertaker of the new, clean body is very much reminiscent of complete surrender. It is through this undertaking that the ego’s nature, preventing a closer relationship to God, is addressed, because what is an obstacle to God is also an obstacle to good relationships with others, friends and family alike. The ego’s attachments, emanating from the lower self, represent a discontinuity in the symbiotic relationship between the person and the external world. Repairing relationships in the everyday becomes the very condition on which the relationship to God is built. In this context, Sufism not only provides a theological discipline for the murid but is intrinsically linked to social responsibility and to the relationship with the urban community, or the local moral world of the practitioner.^[47]

Repairing the self for the practicing dervish is as much of an individual responsibility as it is a social one. This makes the Sufi experience in Sarajevo primarily a community-driven religious experience or, as another of my interlocutors said, ‘Sufism is the path of the individual through the community.’ The locals call the tekke a house of faith where, through the community of believers, new kinship networks are formed. Networking and relationships are very important in this process. Community life and the way practitioners relate to one another show that the important social relationships are grounded not necessarily in biology and nature, but rather in the way one learns and relearns to relate at any stage in life in the process of becoming a better person.^[48] Here, kinship, especially the way in which it has shifted to describe more social than biological relationships, frames the tekke community experience. Participating in communal life as an act of making postwar kinship ties is a process of creating the sacred family, and to some extent it becomes a form of re-enchantment.^[49] Maurice Godelier’s analysis of kinship as subject to metamorphoses due to sociopolitical changes in an age of globalisation moves the debate on kinship towards a more flexible category. Kinship ties are often made and remade as a matter of sociability. Godelier goes on to say that ‘social relations that have nothing to do with kinship make their way into kinship relations and subordinate them to their own reproduction. Social content becomes the stuff of kinship.’^[50] This draws a very direct correlation by way of reciprocal exchange between the tekke life and the consanguine kinships of practitioners. There was a general assumption that when one arrives in the tekke, one first shows one’s own kučni odgoj, or the way one has been brought up at home. The tekke, with its own rules and hierarchy, provides an integrating structure in the life of the practitioner, which over time begins to reflect at home. This is why practitioners noticed that the first changes of their practice ‘begin to show at home, in relation to your family’. This process of kinship formations, akin to a Durkheimian moral reproduction, though on a small scale, is facilitated also through the strong tradition of several centuries of Naqshbandi Sufism in Bosnia. As I show below, through ethnographic examples, establishing connection with tradition represents an important transcendent moment for the practitioner. Such connection offers a healing quality by providing local rootedness in the sense positioning the subject in history. The past becomes a source of guidance for the future.^[51]

The Body and the Public Sphere

Naqshbandi Sufism in contemporary Sarajevo generates its own unique Islamic way of being moral, in which the adab of the body plays as important a role as the adab of the spoken word. This has great implications for negotiating identities in the public sphere. Practising subjects acquire certain body mannerisms which over time make them recognisable in town. In this interpretation, religion becomes a ‘social fact possessed of the potential to produce culturally sanctioned embodied orientations to the self and the world, characterised by a transcendent configuration of immanent social realities’, while religious life becomes a ‘form of embodied pedagogics, or body pedagogics’.^[52] The reparation of the self is not only internal; it shows outwardly. One such example of body pedagogics is nijaz, a body gesture which everyone at the tekke performs. The right hand is placed on the heart, to show that Sufi practitioners are people of the heart, and the left hand below the ribs. The gaze is lowered towards the heart, and the feet are tightly held together, with the right toe held over the left toe. This symbolizes the act of submission and obedience to the sheikh. Generally, it is accepted that nijaz is given to the sheikh out of respect for what he embodies as a spiritual teacher. Most murids whom I asked to name the most challenging aspect of the early encounter with their sheikh answered ‘being kept standing in nijaz at times for twenty minutes in a room full of people’. The act of standing in front of the sheikh in a full room of people sounded like the ultimate moment of embracement, but murids contended that getting through the awkwardness, and finally being released by the sheikh’s look or hand gesture, had a psychological effect of ‘breaking some resistance within’. Nijaz, as a technique of the body, initiates the body into obedience.^[53] This habitual action is translated in the public sphere through what the dervishes call the ‘edeb of the body’, so as to point out that the inner self always mirrors the outer self.

These body techniques have a very practical implication for everyday life in the city, and for how public identities and urban spaces are negotiated. In my fieldwork, people frequently complained about the body language of the Salafis, ‘who walk into a mosque to cause conflict’ and who begin to pray with a body language which does not belong to the dominant Hanafi legal school of interpretation to which Islam in Bosnia belongs traditionally. This was relayed by imams from various local mosques in Sarajevo. As one young woman jokingly said, ‘It has come to this in Sarajevo that we think “please start to pray so that we can see to whom you belong”.’ One of my younger Sufi interlocutors, however, summarised it as follows: ‘I can recognise a dervish anywhere even if I have never met them before.’ When I asked how this was possible, he answered: ‘It is simply the way they are, and say hello, and engage with others. It is through the particular edeb we learn.’ Another of his remarks concerned the way dervishes salute each other in town, with the hand on the heart, which is partially adopted from the nijaz body technique that they become habituated to at the tekke. The body becomes the repository for a shared tacit knowledge as a quintessential element of the Sufi community. Such everyday experiences are an invitation to reintroduce the centrality of the body when studying cultural changes. The body becomes ‘a social and cultural entity’^[54] upon which cultural practices and traditions are inscribed.

The Wounded Father. Repairing the Paternal Image Within

This final part of my study elaborates on the war-related topos of the ‘wounded father’, an important topography of a healing self, which is mirrored in the sheikh/murid relationship. While postsocialism has provided the freedom to become an embodied Muslim subject, the postwar trajectory has complicated it further. With regards to the ‘freedom to become’, the Islamic Community, which is the guardian of Bosnian Islamic orthopraxy, has the authority over what constitutes Islamic practice in Bosnia. Recently, problems with the more conservative expressions of Islam, such as the Salafi strand, have caused much public debate. As Salafi jamaats (communities) are not authorised by the Islamic Community, they have been labelled ‘para-jamaats’, or illegal jamaats. Most Bosnian Muslims, as well the Islamic Community, consider Salafism to be no part of the Bosnian tradition.

A study of morality and ethics in Bosnian society must filter its approach through the consequences and effects of the war, as the one most critical event.^[55] Veena Das writes of the critical event as ‘descending into the ordinary’, as a persistent agent which ‘attaches itself with its tentacles into everyday life and folds its self into the recesses of the ordinary’.^[56] The critical event always lurks on the margins of conversations and dialogues, and often it frames discourse and ethical practices silently. For many of my interlocutors, the war as a critical event is often present in the language of the everyday but is not always openly expressed. One such response to the war and to the end of the Yugoslav regime—a response that is not sufficiently investigated in the anthropology of the region in general, especially in Bosnia—is the image of the ‘wounded father’ or ‘father loss’,^[57] symbolically or physically, as a complex social postwar and postsocialist phenomenon.

The war legacy has created a gap in which a need has emerged for negotiating and repairing a wounded subjectivity as a paternally led process. In terms of postsocialism, this ultimately refers to the grand narrative of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity that rallied around the leadership of Tito. In postwar terms, often the real family father was the one who had either been killed or hurt, thus the close network of kinship suffered direct wounds. In Death of the Father. An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority, John Borneman asks a very poignant question, one that can be applied to both postwar and postsocialist realities: ‘How to conceptualize a rupture in authority and the effects of a presumed cesura on subjectivity’?^[58] The logic of the book’s argument is that a paternalistic authority in patriarchal society would often serve as a transcendent point for subjectivity formation.

I am pointing here to the sociocultural, socialist, and war-related losses that inform the everydayness of my interlocutors in both a real and a symbolic way. A benevolent masculine, paternal-like, kinship-bound authority is an incredibly important early element in the practice. The sheikh is infused with the spiritual authority of the silsilah. His charisma, together with the religious experience drawing on Bosnian Islamic tradition, represents this opportunity for regaining a narrative continuity of the self in the local moral world. Many interlocutors spoke of an image of a father who is not always ‘restricted to a biological person’. Instead, through their life experiences in their own families, and especially memories of the socialist and even presocialist past for the older generation of practitioners, and then the more recent war past for the younger, the image of a father was a

‘linguistic representation, a symbolic matrix for a series of other related symbols. The name-of-the-father represents not merely the “father” but also the locus of truth and meaning, the source of authority. Through a symbolic matrix for other symbols, the name-of-the-father is nonetheless always one instead of multiple, whole instead of dissoluble.’^[59]

The path to the wholeness of the self or self-reparation always seeks some line of continuity, evoking a form of truth or a point of stability from the prewar past that I interpret as having a paternal symbolic significance. I keenly evoke a memory from an older practitioner who had spent the war in besieged Sarajevo. She told me how, for example, when the sheikh asks the murids to line up in the halka (circle) to prepare for zikr, it always evokes warm memories of her childhood, when they would sit around the table with her six brothers and sisters and with their father, whose authority was respected and admired in the family. Being with the community and the sheikh gave her a feeling of wholeness and belonging. She had lost her husband in the war, and they had never had children. Hers was among numerous similar experiences evoked in one way or another in the tekke. Interlocutors often spoke about the sheikh’s authority having a very beneficial effect: ‘It calms me, his authority’; ‘It makes me feel safe to know that someone cares for my spirituality’; ‘I was always looking for someone I could trust, who has answers’; ‘The sheikh is my second father.’ More importantly, most of my interlocutors, especially the older generation of practitioners, have had some experience of Sufism in their families, further strengthening the bond to the sheikh and the community. A father or a grandfather had been a dervish, and memories of what it means to have a sheikh informed their understanding of the self-making process.

One older lady who had not practised Islam in Yugoslavia, but who had returned to her faith in older age, relayed that when she was a little girl, just after World War II, her grandfather had a good sheikh to whom he was loyal: ‘You see, dervishluk (being a dervish) was a normal thing. My grandfather, he did so well, and my grandmother never had to work.’ The idea of doing well and having a sheikh was evoked often, and partially this had to do with the sheikh’s ability to offer wise counsel and to advise in time of crisis. Furthermore, she spoke of her grandfather’s sheikh as a repository of local knowledge. Thus the sheikh is a spiritual guide, but he is also someone who has understood the path to wholeness through his own life experiences in the everyday, which would have been informed by the local context. In contemporary Sarajevo, the sheikh’s paternal authority also contains a repository of local knowledge and, more importantly, of knowledge of the war, of which he has direct experience. All of my interlocutors have gone to the tekke to seek deeper spiritual experience, but more importantly they went to have a role model to learn from.

In the experience of engaging in community life, memories from the prewar period play an important role. They warrant a healing experience, a point of continuity, suggesting that regaining continuity with some form of prewar life provides a transcendent healing element. The tekke, as an institution, cultivates paternalistic forms of relatedness, and it has a strict hierarchy whereby everyone knows their role. The orderliness of the place, the close ties that are cultivated, and the sheikh as a paternal figure presiding over it strongly contrast with the city as a liminal and at times alienating space. For many people, the tekke represents a place for respite. This was a theme which often came about after the ritual programme had ended and people would gather to share tea and some food: ‘I find this place so calming’; ‘This was like a therapy to me’; ‘I really felt so-so before I came, I feel better now’; ‘In the city you are with this earthly world, and in the tekke you are with the community and the sheikh’—thus, ascribing a sacredness to the community experience, in contrast to the city.

A young murid once told me: ‘In the tekke, what you say, what you hear, how you say it, all this leaves a mark on you. What you do, and the way you do it, has an effect on how you feel.’ Edmund Husserl proposes that the lifeworld is indeed the ‘mundane experience, the immediacies of intersubjective life, and modes of human action’, whereby ‘intentionality and praxis’ become the foundations of life being made and remade daily.^[60] However, this making and remaking, Husserl suggests, is somehow always conditioned by an already and previously sedimented habituality: ‘The more a position is sedimented, the more difficult it would be to upset or unseat [a] conviction.’^[61] I argued above that such sedimentation is taking place with regards to a paternal authority, and that regaining and re-experiencing a relationship with a paternal authority allows some practitioners to transcend or to self-repair, which then becomes a stepping stone towards a deeper spiritual experience. The traditional Sufi upbringing—which very often today stands for a cultivation of the clean heart and pure soul—in the context of father loss can mean an upbringing that centres around renegotiating a relationship to authority. Thus, on the basis of my fieldwork, I argue that contemporary Sufi upbringing at times reflects postwar consequences that are mediated through Sufi ritual practice, opening a field for charismatic intervention in character formation. The murids’ differing levels of spirituality demand from the sheikh diverse forms of engagement. It rests with him to adapt his methods to the needs of each of his murids, to lead them towards attaining self-knowledge and adab. In expressing their gratitude to their sheikh for his service to them, murids always say that the ‘sheikh is the greatest hizmečar [selfless servant]’.

Forms of Relatedness to the Sheikh. Ethnographic Examples

I proposed at the beginning of this paper that the route to self-knowledge involves, or is determined by, the act of ‘being known’ first. Through repeated and regular hizmet, the novice begins to open up to the process of becoming a subject or to allowing to be engaged in the sheikh’s methods of upbringing. Over time, a deeper, unspoken connection begins to develop between the sheikh and the novice. The sheikh, I was told, would not speak unless it was necessary. Silence in the presence of the sheikh is another form of terbijjet: ‘Sometimes it is enough only to speak a little with the sheikh, and you feel better’; and sometimes ‘not speaking, just sitting there in his presence, makes me feel better’. This part of the unspoken relationship is a build-up of emotions that are often resolved through a look or a small gesture on the sheikh’s part, bringing about a catharsis of pent-up emotions. The tacit, unspoken knowledge that develops between sheikh and murid is that part of the experience which over time becomes internalised knowledge, the key to orthopraxy. Murids often spoke about the ‘surrender’ they go through, converting ‘obligation’ to practice into a desire to do so.

In many ways this transition, or movement, from obligation to desire is essentially about disciplining the body into practice. Many murids identify with this, especially those who have come to practice later in their lives. This reveals another function the sheikh performs: keeping his murids on the path of faith. What keeps them returning to faith is the knowledge that the sheikh takes an intense interest in their path. Soon they begin to feel known by him. In a way, though practice is an obligation, it is done out of love for the sheikh, and this love for the sheikh later transcends into real love for worshipping. The aspect of knowing and being known represents an important element in developing the self and in practising self-corrective measures: ‘I am ashamed to pretend in front of the sheikh that I am something I am not. He knows everything. He is clean; he can see everything in me.’ Partly, Sufi selfhood is also obtained through internalising the gaze of the spiritual teacher. It is a powerful mechanism for practising self-control as it affects actions outside the tekke, when the sheikh is not present physically. Murids often told me that they ought to behave in the city as if they were always watched by the sheikh. Gilsenan reports similar experiences between sheikh and murids from his research in the Middle East: ‘The sheikh becomes, as it were, a conscience’, and the murids’ self-reparation is intrinsically linked to their faith and witnessing of his internal knowledge, or the secret, that which is hidden, or batin. The sheikh, though, cannot reveal his God-given secret that is the kernel of his charisma, manifest in his relations to his murids. Thus, like Gilsenan’s interlocutors, mine often told me: ‘He [the sheikh] knows’,^[62] referring to the sheikh’s ability to see through the murids’ state of mind or deception, even before they disclose anything to him.

On a different level of sheikh/murid engagement, a young woman related that her relationship to practice helped her develop a better feel for people around her. Having developed a greater awareness because of her practice, she noted that character traits which would irritate her in the past had now stopped ‘rubbing’. The care for the self here, gained through ritualistic practice and the woman’s personal relationship to the sheikh, has opened a new way of relating to others, which improved the quality of her everyday relationships. She told me that at times she had felt closer to the sheikh than to her biological father, with whom she also has a close relationship. But unlike the sheikh, who has shared his knowledge of the war with his murids, her own father has never done so. Self-reparation and the ethical becoming are not only about developing an internal knowledge and an awakened heart; they are also about gaining a more concrete knowledge of the war, of which the sheikh has first-hand experience. This helps murids integrate missing memories with the help of someone they trust deeply.

All ethnographic examples point to the importance of being known as a prerequisite to self-knowledge. To bring this to contemporary practice of sheikhled subjectivities formations, Lindholm’s insight that charismatic involvement in some ways compensates for the ‘angst, ennui, and anomie of modern life, and may be therapeutic’ can be located in the Bosnian postsocialist and postwar moral trajectories.^[63] The intimate relationship to a charismatic authority mediates the consequences of previous loss and provides an epistemological framework for the work on the self, akin to a ‘knot of truth’. The sheikh does provide this framework, both as a mediator of local tradition such as Sufism, and as a carrier of multifaceted war-related and lifeworld-related knowledge, and thus can help to initiate healing and self-reparation. To this end, the sheikh’s source of charisma, next to the Sufi silsilah, to a great degree is also moulded by the local moral world, linked to his war past in a way that allows his murids to draw conclusions about his role in preserving Islam. This in itself could be seen as a form of symbolic paternalistic truth, which can be analysed as a metaphor for the image of the ‘wounded father’ in war, or rather for the way the image of the father as protector and defender was desacralised in the recent war.^[64]

Conclusion

The act of terbijjet or upbringing sits well with Foucauldian subject formation, whereby a person chooses the methods by which they will experience and relearn a different mode of being. Foucault describes the modality of power between master and disciple as a practice that ‘permits individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’, in order to become a certain type of subject.^[65] I have also argued, following the tropes of more recent scholarship, that this form of becoming harbours a transcendent element, which for the practitioners is encompassed by the concept of embodied adab. Acquiring adab directs self-reparation towards reparation of a relationship with the community and with God. In this study, however, a great deal of the discussion centred on aspects of self-reparation that are sourced in the postwar everyday. For Foucault, the modes one chooses to become a certain subject are linked to how subjects would recognise their moral obligations in the historical and social contexts in which they live. However, while recognising such moral obligations in their locality, my interlocutors are responding to a very Sarajevan ethical demand: that of being good for one’s self and for the other.

This moral obligation was motivated by a number of factors, chief amongst which was the main Sufi postulate of ritual cleaning of the heart. But other important driving factors included a need to build communities, a desire to make a halal living, and a wish to be good husbands and to maintain stable family and community values. All upbringing on being a good person and a good Muslim starts at home, but there is also a silent agreement that the home, or the household, in postsocialist and postwar Bosnia has been compromised, either through war-related family death and trauma, or by an affect-driven everyday subjected to the logics of the local socioeconomic dynamics. Here the war presents a local knot, an ongoing reality in the everyday. It is through this very local knot that we ought to analyse the quintessentially local adaptation of the revival of charismatic authority. All these processes are embedded within the rich and metaphorically powerful language of Sufism, which the sheikh mediates as he guides his murids from various stages of liminality into a new form of Islamic orthopraxy and spirituality, and that is Naqshbandi Sufism. Sufism allows practitioners the space to negotiate both an ethical and a moral identity, while also giving space to practitioners to renegotiate a Bosnian Muslim tradition. As such, contemporary Sufism in Sarajevo represents an important movement within the ongoing engagement with Islam as a discursive tradition.