Kręte drogi sufich. Turecko-bałkańskie wątki sufickiej koncepcji „drogi” we współczesnej odsłonie (na wybranych przykładach literackich)
The twisting paths of the sufis – the Turkic-Balkan motifs in the sufi ‘tariqa’ concept in selected examples of contemporary literary works

Summary/Abstract: The first part of this paper summarises how Sufi brotherhoods formed in the Balkans with some references to their Turkic-Ottoman sources. Islamic mystical movements constituted part of the Islamisation initiatives in the territories occupied by the Ottoman Empire: mystical teaching was apparently more successful among the local people than conservative Islam. Crypto-Christianism was a typical phenomenon among converted Slavs. Orders using the language of symbolic tales (like the Bektashi) involved some Christian rites. The orders which proved most popular were the Mevlevi, Naqshbandi, Chalwati and Bektashi, which are still active in some parts of the Balkans. Their role also reconciled the national thought of newly forming national identities in the Balkans. In the novels Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović and Konak by Ćamil Sijarić, the mystical idea of the Arab tariqa (tarika), i.e. „path,” meets the modern literary concepts of fate and the search for truth and sense of life. The paper constitutes an attempt to present how these two aesthetics have been unwoven into modern literary texts.

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