Project Description and Contribution to CAS ROH Project

The proposed research focuses on modernity and identity discourses in the writing of Muslim reformist and modernist thinkers in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the period of 1900-1945, and specifically on the so-called ‘Muslim woman question' in their work. This term refers to a set of questions related to the position Muslim women should occupy in society. Writings of both modernists and traditionalists writing at the time are replete with symptoms of an identity crisis, which they were trying to resolve through ‘their' women, to use their own rhetoric. They were influenced by both Austrian, and later Yugoslav ideas of modernisation, as well as by Islamic modernist thinkers in the Muslim world, especially Egypt and Turkey. The aim of the research is to explore the intersection between these different yet interrelated modernist discourses that formed around the crucible of adapting Islamic practices to changing political, social and cultural circumstances, and to look into the phenomenon of Islamic modernism in Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of double translation or hybridisation.

As they defended education and the unveiling of women, modernists were long believed to be defending women's liberation. However, what they were advocating actually involved the reinscription of domestic and reproductive functions of women. The changes that were brought forth by modernisation not only offered women new liberatory potentials but implied new forms of subjection, too. Connected to this is the reconceptualisation of mothering and the family, a phenomenon that has been commonly linked to nationalist issues. (Educated and unveiled) women were to be the up-bringers of responsible and capable (male) citizens and (male) members of the nation. This turn modernist thinking took in many countries - emerging nation-states, in particular. However, the situation in Bosnia was quite different. The type of nationalism espoused by certain modernist writers was in a atypical position, one which will be explored as part of this research project.

The research proposal complements the general framework of the Regimes of Historicity Project as it focuses on the responses to and adaptation of a somewhat imposed modernity in a specific Southeast European location, and on a variety of modernisation accounts aiming to overcome an imagined time lag and perceived backwardness. In addition, the inclusion of the gender and religion aspects, are believed to contribute favourably to a wider understanding of modernisation processes.