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The World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadi from Sarajevo (CROSBI ID 8158)

Autorska knjiga | monografija (znanstvena)

Paić-Vukić, Tatjana The World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadi from Sarajevo. Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2011

Podaci o odgovornosti

Paić-Vukić, Tatjana

Margaret Casman-Vuko, Tatjana Paić-Vukić, Miroslav Vuko

engleski

The World of Mustafa Muhibbi, a Kadi from Sarajevo

A collection of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts which belonged to Mustafa Muhibbi (d. 1854), a kadi from Sarajevo, is stored today at the National and University Library in Zagreb. These manuscripts contain an abundance of the owner’s records, which were used as sources for (re)constructing the world of this heretofore almost unknown Bosnian notable. Herein, the term "world" denotes the totality of the public and private life of an individual, including the set of shared values and cultural patterns of his community. The idea of presenting a man who did not spend his life "in the full light of history", and whom we can get to know only on the basis of his own fragmentary writings, has led to the choice of microhistory as the most suitable methodological approach because of its interest in the lives of "weak subjects" of history and its emphasis on the meticulous interpretation of seamingly small details. The majority of sources for my research were scattered notes that Muhibbi had written in the margins and on the fly-leaves of his manuscripts, as well as marks of ownership which comprise his name, the names of his ancestors, and data related to his service in court. Those marks are almost the only sources that enable us to follow Muhibbi through the sequence of his appointments as a qadi in various towns throughout the Eyalet of Bosnia and beyond its borders, in Bulgaria and Albania. Most abundant in records are Muhibbi's personal notebooks, his majmū‘as, which contain citations from books he read, copies of documents from the sharia court, poems, sayings, prayers, historical records, necrologies, lists of debts, medical advice, and other diverse notes. Most of them are written in the Ottoman Turkish language, others are in Arabic, and in Persian we find only a few verses. There are also some words of the Bosnian language written in Arabic script. Due to the virtual absence of first-person narration in Muhibbi's notebooks, we know little of his private and intimate life. During my research, I have come to the conclusion that majmū‘as did not belong exclusively to the private sphere, but were equally open to the public. Their owners would lend them to aquaintances and bequeath them to heirs. Frequently enough, personal notebooks were sold at auctions after the owner's death, with the rest of his property. In the approach to majmū‘as, one should therefore take into consideration that the owner was aware of future readers, that the mechanisms of censorship and caution that pervaded the public sphere also operated in moments of writing, and that it would therefore be highly unusual to find in them information on the owner's secret, hidden life, or any kind of intimate confession. The fragmentary nature of the available sources has determined the structure of this book. Due to the above-mentioned scarcity of firm biographical data, which has made chronological narration impossible, the text is divided into thematic chapters on Muhibbi’s social position, his career as a kadi, and the place of books, reading and writing in his life. The most extensive part deals with diverse aspects of his everyday life and the image of the world which can be derived from his writings. It comprises his view of contemporary events, his attitude towards local notables to whom he dedicated several poems, his favourite social rites, his comprehension of time, and finally, the diverse beliefs related to diseases, healing, prevention and divination. Muhibbi lived in the times of crisis, territorial loss, and riots that marked the "longest century" of the Ottoman Empire. Although his position of sharia judge provided him with certain social power and influence, he did not play any distinguished role in the events of the troubled nineteenth-century Bosnia. According to his own records and some remarks by his contemporaries, he was devoted to learning, Islamic mysticism and poetry. Thus we can see him as an observer, rather than as an active participant in local political life. In his sporadic notes, necrologies and poems he sometimes mentions contemporary events, such as the military defeat of Husein Gradaščević, the executions of his fellow townsmen, or the establishment of new borders with Serbia. Being mostly concise, conventionally formulated, and lacking in any expression of personal opinion, these records do not give us access to Muhibbi's view of those events. Exceptionally, a poem in which he despairs over the fate od Bosnia and the Empire as a whole clearly speaks of his delusion and feeling that the world which seemed solid and unchangeable is falling apart. His answer is to retreat to the peace of dervish meditations. The research of Muhibbi’s manuscripts, together with other sources for the history of pre-Tanzimat Bosnia, has led me to the conclusion that his life, both public and private, was shaped by the paradigm of Islamic civilization. His Muslim religious affiliation was one of the main bases of his privileged social status and virtually all forms of his intellectual and spiritual life originated from it. In the networks of his social relations – those of the ulema and of the Sufi brotherhood – there were only Muslims. Although he lived in a quarter, mahalle, with a confessionally mixed population, and communicated with people of different religions while working in court, he did not refer to any kind of personal relationship with Christians or Jews. Other sources pertinent to the history of Ottoman Bosnia that have been examined so far, including the famous chronicle (Ljetopis) by Mula Mustafa Bašeskija, do not give us enough evidence to undermine the notion of pre-Tanzimat Bosnian society as a society divided along religious lines. Further research should only examine how solid these barriers were. All the same, there are no indications in Muhibbi's manuscripts of a dialogue with the so-called high cultures of non-Muslims. Indeed, his library as a whole reflects the textual culture of the Muslim educated elite of Ottoman Bosnia, the culture which was predominantly religiously based and created in the three main languages of Islamic civilization: Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. In that domain, direct interconfessional penetration could have hardly occurred due to the fact that the learned cultures of Bosnian Muslims and non-Muslims did not use the same language, nor did they use the same script. We only find traces of indirect contacts, which most probably took place via a complex process in which knowledge was orally transmitted from learned men to the illiterate and semi-literate by means of their common Bosnian vernacular, then absorbed into the shared popular culture, and transmitted again to the literati, after being modified and contaminated by the cultural contents of diverse confessional groups. Most examples of such exchanges can be found in those aspects of everyday life in which the need for protection from diseases and calamities functioned as a strong motive for crossing socially and religiously determined barriers. Muhibbi's records related to healing and protection, together with other texts concerning medical culture in Ottoman Bosnia, confirm such interaction and exchange. These contents of manuscripts also indicate that, in the life of this member of the Muslim religious intelligentsia, Islamic dogmatic teachings and mystical devotion coexisted in harmony with local, syncretic beliefs and practices. Some of the practices he writes of, such as divination, astrology, and the use of magical squares, confirm that he was not among the rigid ulema who condemned and refuted all attempts at "fathoming God's secrets". Furthermore, his manuscripts confirm the futility of any approach which treats the so-called high and popular cultures separately, for they sometimes meet in one text. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to speak of common, shared culture(s) in which the learned and the illiterate contributed in different ways, just as Jacques Le Goff argues in his studies on medieval Europe. Research into the manuscripts of Mustafa Muhibbi has shed light on the diversity of the social, intellectual and spiritual life of a person who belonged to the educated Muslim elite in Ottoman Bosnia. In the process of the historiographical (re)construction of his world, various approaches to the contents of personal notebooks and the seemingly marginal records that are to be found in Arabic-script manuscripts from private collections were examined and exploited.

Mustafa Muhibbi; kadi; Sarajevo; Ottoman Bosnia; Arabic-script manuscripts; private libraries; personal notebooks (mecmuas); cultural history; everyday life

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Podaci o izdanju

Istanbul: The Isis Press

2011.

978-975-428-433-1

238

objavljeno

Povezanost rada

Filologija, Povijest, Etnologija i antropologija