Determinants of the specific ethnic characteristics of Bosnian muslims in the essays of Ahmed Muradbegović

Abstract

Beside his work in poetry, fiction and drama, the essays of Ahmed Muradbegović, discussing the social and cultural developoment of Bosnian Muslims in the contemporary social circumstances dominated by the Western civilization, are especially significant within his journalistic and critical works. He pointed out the necessity of the participation of Muslims in the contemporary social trends, believing that the modernization on Western basis does not question their identity. In the Yugoslav „isolation“ in the period between the two wars, he percieved the factors of the individuality of Bosnian Muslims, which according to Muradbegović, is manifested as „corpus separatum". He studied in detail the religious and racial factors of the national identification of Bosnian Muslims. The factor of belonging to Islam in the non-Western sense, Muradbegovic defined as one of the components of the national being, believing at the same time, that this factor does not dispute the national identity of the people and the multi-confessional character of Bosnia. The essays that discuss the female aspect of the Muslim question are „the most convincing" part of Muradbegović’s work. Among all his essays, these are in the closest connection with his poetic, fictional and dramatic opus, and in them the emotional, spiritual and aesthetic coherence of his work is most evident.