Paper short abstract:

This presentation is an ethnographic analysis of the Sufi practice of edep/adab [beautiful conduct].It shows how young Sufi dervishes in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, practice ethical self-cultivation, through exercising their imaginations about constitutes the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad.

Paper long abstract:

Postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina has witnessed resurgence of Islamic practice resulting with different forms of relatedness to Bosnian Islamic tradition. These are challenging the existing Orthopraxy of the official Islamic Community. In this paper I show how young Naqshbandi dervishes are deploying tradition in order to establish continuity with their Sufi practices in post-Yugoslav Sarajevo. In doing so, they are creating a counter narrative to newer forms of more fundamentalist approaches to Islam, such as Salafism. I pay attention to how they exercise their imagination in constructing a modern discourse on embodying the Prophet's sunna through the old and polyvalent idiom of edep/adab [good / beautiful conduct].With this, my presentation analyses a novel, and neglected aspect of the role adab plays in constructing the Sufi "culture of belief" (Jonatan Meir 2012) in post-Yugoslav Sarajevo.

I show how such grass root practices are vying for re-introduction of Sufism into the mainstream Islam of the Islamic Community, as a part of the "discursive tradition" (Talal Asad 1986).

This presentation is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.