THE BOSNIAN QUESTION AND THE WORLD
THE BOSNIAN QUESTION AND THE WORLD

Summary/Abstract: In " The Bosnian question and the world", Mahmutćehajić contrasts two world-views: modernity, which sees material development as the only good, and tradition, which stresses humankind´s wish to transcend the material world. The dangers come when the two are no longer in dialogue, leading to rampant selfishness on the one hand, and the sentimentalisation and totemisation of religion on the other. Mahmutćehajić then looks more closely at how a symbiosis between the mundane and the transcendental has enabled day-today co-existence within BiH. Co-existence, he argues, has lain at the core of the region´s different sacred traditions, whereas the threats to this co-existence have come from outside rather than inside the region. These threats have been backed up by nationalist, secular projects which ignore religion´s quest for transcendental unity between the mundane and the divine, seeking instead to exploit the earthly trappings of "ethnicized religions" as a means of defining communities in terms of what they do not share rather than what they share.

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