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Reading Bosnian in Arabic: Sarajevo's Pan-Islamist Press and the Ottoman Public Sphere, 1903-1914
Abstract
The early 20th century saw the rapid expansion of Muslim printing and literary production in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the nominally Ottoman Balkan province then over two decades into Austro-Hungarian occupation. The existing literature, however, has broadly considered this process as a narrowly domestic phenomenon, typically within a master narrative of Europeanization and only occasionally motioning toward its participants’ extensive links with the wider Ottoman world. This paper challenges these Eurocentric and national readings by examining how the emerging Bosnian Muslim print scene drew on and interacted with other centers of Muslim publishing, most notably Istanbul. It focuses in particular on Mehmed Džemaludin Cauševic (1870-1938), a Bosnian-born Islamic legal scholar and journalist who returned in 1903 from his 15-year studies in the Ottoman lands to establish a number of influential reformist associations, institutions, and journals in contemporary Sarajevo. Reviewing both the contents of these journals as well as their exchanges with like-minded publications in Istanbul and elsewhere, I argue that Cauševic successfully integrated Bosnia-Herzegovina into the era’s polycentric and transnational Pan-Islamist public sphere. For a growing Bosnian Muslim reading public, his journals’ extensive translation of Arabic and Turkish materials both actualized lingering loyalties to the Ottoman state and made tangible the very notion of a global Islamic community, while the reverse translation of their own original texts contributed to a parallel process in the Istanbul press. Cauševic’s case ultimately suggests that the Ottoman Empire’s intellectual influence among Bosnian Muslims paradoxically intensified as its political authority receded, highlighting the significance of the expansion of communications technologies and their associated professional networks across imperial boundaries.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Balkans
former Yugoslavia
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries