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An interview with Magdalena Ujma and Anna Smolak, the custodians of the “Transculture” project, conducted by Waldemar Kuligowski.
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This paper was written in conjunction with a discussion which took place on 26 April, 2008, under the auspices of International Forum Bosnae. Britain and the Balkans was originally published by Routledge (London and New York, 2006) and thereafter translated as Velika Britanija i Balkan and published by Detecta (Zagreb, 2007). The purpose of this article is to point briefly to some crucial issues referring specifically to British foreign policy involvement in the region to date.
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This rather short paper is based upon some of my recent experiences of the relationship between religion and public life in America. Namely, I spent the last six months as a visiting researcher at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Religious Studies, observing both academic and practical aspects of a number of religious issues at close quarters, within the multi-faceted pluralism of American society. In my academic experience, professors of Religious Studies are not, for the most part, believers. They are usually doctors of philosophy, with backgrounds in the social or human sciences. They are seldom doctors of theology and (or) believers and often express very open scepticism toward religious systems of thought and practice. In a certain way, this is a form of diminishing the importance of the subject they teach. These religious studies scholars’ thoughts are very controversial. Some are against rigid and strict religious belief and practice (especially in Judaism, Christianity and Islam) that serve as defenders of sacrifice. On the other hand, some oppose the ongoing, massive, rapid, social and moral liberalization that is at the root of so many social disorders. [...]
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Laissez-faire multiculturalism—that is the acceptance of multiculturalism without any serious attempt at the social and economic integration of minority communities—has been Western Europe’s default method of dealing with the social effects that immigration has brought to a changing demographic. The shift of economic power, in labour and industry, away from Europe, has squeezed the job market and presented policy makers with a ripe argument in favour of more stringent ways to deal with immigration. New immigration policies go beyond the usual tough stances on borders and crime and focus more acutely on the issues which surround integration. On one side is the rise in policy aimed at the successful integration of these communities, but, on the other a popular resistance to integration emerges. Inter-communal antagonism emerges, and rising unemployment is usually the first topic raised. The trend towards increasing unemployment has come from the process many refer to as globalisation. Economic forces mean that jobs have shifted away from places where they were before. This reality offers what will be the defining challenges of our time in Europe; how to diversify to create jobs, and how to create unity and prosperity from our diverse and often fractured communities, which are losing core labour providers. Questions of concern to us—religion’s place in the public arena, the state of interfaith relations, the problems that minority religious communities face—do not exist separately from the current social climate. Unemployment, immigration, and that enigmatic force called “globalization” should be of primary concern in thinking about religion in public life. Religion has a central role in identity creation and the way that people carry out their lives, influencing their aspirations and conduct, while also helping to bind immigrant communities. [...]
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In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit religion is an important part of a grand conversation that we, human beings, conduct between ourselves in an ever expanding attempt to tell and re-tell ourselves a story of who we are, where we have come from, and where we should be heading – a story of our self-understanding as self-articulation within a current social context. Beyond this philosophical significance, religion has a very important emancipatory dimension in the development of Spirit. Kojève points out that “with his belief in God – the Absolute Master before whom all men are equal in their absolute slavery – the slave has emancipated himself from dependence on a human Master” (Kojève, 1964: 176). The narrative of monotheistic religion thus plays a very important formative role in articulating our emancipatory vocabulary, since it deprives future ideological and political narratives of the power elites – would-be human masters – of any epistemological priority. Thus, one can plausibly speak about the contribution of religious emancipatory narrative to overall democratization of culture. However, Kojève warns us of another different dimension of religious discourse, namely, that the slave remains a slave in himself and for himself. [...]
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The editors of a recent Cambridge publication offer a rationale for their title – the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy – which the given title of this essay allows me to finesse, by coupling “Arabic” with “Islamic” (Adamson and Taylor 2005). For, while Arabic served the Islamic intellectual world much as Latin did the medieval Christian world, the fact remains that Arabs today account for but twenty percent of Muslims and a considerable portion of Islamic intellectual tradition has been forged and transmitted in other languages, notably Persian, Urdu, and Bengali. Indeed, key intellectual figures in Islam have themselves been Persian, sometimes composing in both languages, as this itinerary will make clear. So “Islamic” offers, I believe, a more comprehensive cultural descriptor, and I shall reserve the adjective “Muslim” in this narrative for the faith-component of Islam. One could, in an analogous manner, employ the term “Arabic” ethnically or culturally. It is that tradition which I shall trace in this proposal for a fresh review of the phases Islamic philosophy displays in its ongoing attempt to bring Qur’anic revelation into conversation with rational strategies inherited from Greeks and Persians. That intentional conversation is best called “philosophical theology” and its context, “Islamic.” Indeed, part of the fresh story will show how religion, which in the Muslim world focuses on practice, becomes a path leading to understanding, long taken to be the province of philosophy. The shifting relations among these axial notions will mark our journey’s itinerary. [...]
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Recent developments in the conflict between what we categorize as the West and the so-called Islamic countries reveal a strange parallelism between the two protagonists, who have the aspect of two opposed representations of the same course of action. This parallelism or similarity is based on the residual ideas of reality and appearance. There can be similarity only to the extent that something appears and can be identified by a comparing subject. Contemporary Islam should not be treated in isolation from its counterpart, the West, and due regard for all the necessary reservations and nuances. Use of the term contemporary Islam implies the existence of a special object, qualified by time, to be distinguished from another object nonetheless linked with it in certain ways. Thus, we imagine a kind of continuity through space and time that allows us to use the name Islam. This view is linked with the modern conception of history, which personifies collective phenomena as the “subjects” of their own history, taken to be the manifestation and development of their free will. Islam, to return to the main topic, is understood within this framework of active free will, thought of as the meaning of human nature as self-made modern man, assuming that man is that entity that constantly struggles to achieve its humanity through its own acts. [...]
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Relations between Islamic and Christian societies have for so much of their history been marked by hostility, that hostility seems to have been their unchanging characteristic. That gives the impression that hostility is the fate of the relations between Christians and Muslims. One can dispute such a view by pointing to instances of their peaceful, or even friendly, coexistence and cooperation. Such an approach, however, runs the risk of idealizing those instances. A typical case in point is Medieval Spain or, on a more individualized level, figures praised as advocates of tolerance, dialogue, and diversity. The graver problem with such an approach seems to me to lie in the failure to answer the question of why such positive instances failed and have sunk into oblivion, why they have so far been inconsequential. They may represent an “other” or “hidden history,” but they did not make history. I will focus on the changing nature of Western hostility toward the Muslim world rather than on the moments of its absence. It is important to note that the nature of that hostility has been changing. If there is hope, this gives us hope. The main question I want to address is how Western Christians’ hostility towards the Muslims has differed over time and how it has also differed from their hostility toward other peoples and societies. Instead of ascribing the reason for mutual hostility to the assumed nature of Islam and Christianity or of societies presumably organized in accordance with their precepts, one should look into contingent, political factors that, at a given time, shape Muslim-Western relations in general and the expressions of their hostility in particular. In this paper, I focus on one side of these relations. By this I do not want to imply that the other was innocent of producing hostility. (I believe, though, that historical evidence demonstrates that the Muslims were more often than not the victims of unprovoked Western violence). I point to internal dynamics in the West that generated or reproduced specific forms of hostility toward the Muslim world. I will take a very long view of this issue, because I believe such an approach can best help us understand the historical background of today’s Islamophobia. I hope that the generalizations and simplifications this approach is bound to produce will stimulate debate rather than derail it.-
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In my essay The Singer above Tales (2007), it was my intention to prove that Homer was a post-traditional oral poet. As of now, only Robert L. Fowler, in his Introduction to my critical edition of Međedović’ epics (Almanah, Podgorica, 2007, 2 vols), has expressed approbation of my notion of post-traditionality. Fowler worked with me on the text and I am grateful to him for the exchange of ideas. I have sent my essay to some Homerists, including Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Mary R. Lefkowitz, and Sir Martin L. West. They have commented on its content and expressed their encouragement. Luigi Enrico Rossi has accepted it for publication in Seminari Romani. Georg Danek and Thérèse de Vet provided useful criticism. Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the founder and the leader of International Forum Bosnae, and the late Albert Goldstein, the editor of Antibarbarus editions and the publisher of Latina et Graeca, were the first intellectuals among non-Homerists to recognize the importance of the notion of post-traditionality and publish my texts. The editors of Almanah, the Montenegrin publishing house, stood behind me. Native scholars, well acquainted with Bosnian tradition, mostly agreed with me regarding Međedović’s post-traditionality. In my previous Sarajevo lecture, organized by International Forum Bosnae, I spoke of Milman Parry’s collecting, his fundamental research resulting in the so-called Oral Theory, his work with Avdo Međedović, and the contents of the Parry archive at Harvard University (kept in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature). I described Parry’s achievement and the results of his work. I aim to prove in the present lecture Homer’s and Međedović’s post-traditionality.
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Roma are the largest minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Due to the lack of demographic data, we can only estimate their number. The estimates vary from 40,000 to 80,000, with the latter figure more realistic. Of an estimated total population of 3,800,000, the Roma thus make up a rather significant 2.1%. The Roma population has traditionally been exposed to social exclusion. This is due both to racial discrimination and their consequent self-imposed isolation within their own communities. These specific aspects of ethnic relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina additionally complicate the situation of the Roma. Roma attempts at integration are often accompanied by assimilation into one of the three constitutive ethnic groups. The scale of Roma social exclusion is evident from the findings of the UNDP Household Survey, conducted in October 2004 among the Roma, displaced persons, and members of the majority people living nearby. [...]
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The paper aims to outline the historical perceptions held of Muslims, both Turks and Bosnians, mainly in Dalmatian tradition from the Renaissance through Romanticism. The early-modern Croatian writers perceived the arrival of the Ottomans, the bearers of an essentially different civilization, as a catastrophic event for both the Croatian lands and the neighboring Balkan states. Most modern Croat scholars have claimed that early-modern Croatia lost most of both its territory and population as a result of the Ottoman conquest and experienced economic breakdown, decroatization, and decristianisation. Certain very popular themes have transferred from humanist historiography to the present, including those of cultural recession and the barbarism the Ottomans caused by isolating the Balkans from the effects of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Recent work by Croatia’s ottomanists has begun to offer a different picture: The Croatian medieval lands had not been integrated before the Ottoman conquest. In 1620, there were some 300,000 people living in the Ottoman part of modern-day Croatia, hardly fewer than in pre-Ottoman times.
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There is no place in the world where evil could not occur. Bosnia is not unique. Bosnia, however, is unique in how the problem of evil appeared so clearly. Despite its transparency, though, evil there was neither comprehended nor resisted. This event provoked the writing of Understanding Evil: Lessons from Bosnia. In several ways, the war in Bosnia defied sociological and moral explanation. In theory and in reality, the Hobbesian jungle is so nasty and so brutish, and human life so painful and so short, that in response to this horrid situation human beings with their capacity for reason establish a truce through a social contract that restricts the use of force and fraud. For Thomas Hobbes and most sociologists, the foundation for this social contract is empirical and not metaphysical. The social contract serves individuals’ self interest collectively and thus effectively, and herein lies its stability. In Bosnia, despite the extreme horror of the war, no social contract took hold. Even today, the Dayton Peace Accords could be characterized as a dysfunctional social contract; its content not only fails, but perverts a viable sense of civic and social order in a modern state. Sociology cannot colonize Bosnia with its modern logos. Bosnia instead compels sociology to re-think its discipline, its methodologies and theories, if sociology desires to provide meaningfully adequate accounts of events during the war in Bosnia. Understanding Evil develops the concept of “sociocide” in an effort to account for the subject of evil and in an effort to make sociology stronger. The book is the work of an empirical apostate. Its heresy is essentialism. There is essentialism, however, even in the position of anti-essentialism. Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “It always remains a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – even we devotees of knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicans, still take our fire too from the flame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine” (2008:166). Nietzsche’s point still stands: there is a profound element of essentialism embedded in the conceptualizing of anti-essentialism.
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[...] The first historically established references in Swedish public records relating to “Gypsies” (zigenare) are from the mid-16th century. The records make it quite clear that these people with their wagons were not allowed to settle for more than a few days at a time in any one place and thus were compelled to be on the move. They made their livelihood through trading, taking on various unclean jobs, but also serving as entertainers, musicians, fortune- tellers, etc. Common to these references is that the “Tatars,” as they were then called, were unwanted and undesired in the towns and villages they passed through. In the early 17th century, several decrees were issued by the state to the effect that Roma people were expelled from central Sweden to the eastern parts of the country (present-day Finland). By and large, the Finnish Roma population descends from groups expelled from central Sweden several hundred years ago. Many have Swedish surnames. A theory presented by the ethnologist Allan Etzler (1944) is that descendents of the first Roma in the 16th century also constitute the origins of the travelling community in Sweden. Although challenged by other ethnologists (Heymowski 1969), many present-day Travellers support Etzler’s hypothesis. Travellers used to speak a secret language referred to as Rommani. Only a few native speakers are still alive. The Travellers used to be known as “tattare,” a derogatory word derived from Tatar. They were an out-caste group in rural society. A competing hypothesis about their origin is that they derive from various socially-excluded groups in rural society, such as hangmen, horse-dealers, knackers, prisoners of war, foreign mercenaries, possibly also including dispossessed Saami whose territories in the forest regions of north-central Sweden were gradually colonized by Swedish farmers. [...]
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Between the 1st and the 13th centuries, the Jews suffered much hostility and evil in Europe. From the 14th century on, powerful waves of not just anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, but of anti-Roma and anti-Gypsy sentiment began to buffet Europe. One can discern in this process the imprint and reflection of peoples, states, and epochs, of popular belief, cultural and political conditions and problems, economic conditions, prevailing social relations, legal norms, and the ethical and moral consciousness of individuals and peoples, bundled up with their day-to-day existence and the psychopathology of that daily life. With regard to the Jew or the Gypsy, one could reveal oneself as one really was, in all one’s mortal imperfection, with no need to show any remorse or shame afterwards. In fact, they were protected from any accountability, even rewarded and promoted. [...] They arrived in Europe at the beginning of the 14th century, in groups, as the members of different tribes, castes, and sub128 castes. Clearly different from most European peoples in terms of physical appearance, attire, way of life, and culture, they were treated as “strangers” and, in some countries, as “heathens.” Consequently, the Roma were subjected to much the same treatment as the Jews had been and continued to be subjected to. Compelled to live separately from the majority populations, the Roma lived for centuries in a double isolation, which made them easy and accessible prey to any who, whatever their reason or motive, took a dislike to them. On the other hand, the prevailing historical level of cultural development attained by the countries in which they had arrived and the new historical conditions then emerging in a large number of European countries, some of which had just come under the rule of the Turk, only exacerbated the situation of the Roma. [...]
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Religious pluralism is the greatest challenge for contemporary Catholic theology. Today, pluralism permeates all levels and areas of life. This pluralism is, therefore, an empirical fact. However, this pluralism is also an ontological and religious fact. What I mean by this is that pluralism has philosophical and theological foundations and justifications. There are two main reactions in the world today, and in our country, to pluralism; one is negative, the other positive. Fear of pluralism leads to fundamentalism. This fundamentalism arises out of fear for one’s identity and the desire to preserve it. We cannot, of course, advocate a form of pluralism that would endanger anyone’s identity. The positive reaction to today’s pluralism is reflected in the legitimate and authentic expression and nurturing of one’s own religious identity and every other identity and in practicing one’s right to diversity in the plurality of human existence. Propagating authentic pluralism means contesting anyone’s demand to be in a privileged centre. It is the privileged centre with its exclusiveness, inclusiveness, and uniformity that negates the plurality of life and, thus, life itself. The task of contemporary Catholic theology is to affirm the universality of the Gospel and salvation through Jesus Christ in this contemporary plural world, without at the same time diminishing the proclamation, salvation, and universal values of other religions; to defy the colonisation and reduction of other religions; and to oppose any form of supremacy and violence. In this plural paradigm, there can be no centre that rules over and perpetrates violence against others.[...]
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I would like to present here some basic philosophical reflections which have been part of my thinking about art and the “anti- Islamic” complex since 1992. I will speak here as a philosopher, which I am not, believing that philosophy, as art, has some sympathies with madness and ignorance and because philosophy often simply lacks the courage to be philosophy. For atelier pragmatics there is a clear difference between the philosopher’s and the artist’s ignorance. Ignorance, as part of the creative process in (modern) art, is absolute. It refers to every facet of production, even to the material – while the philosopher’s material can safely be defined as words. Now, the outcome (the work) of art is therefore something which can be seen as a (maybe the) precondition for finally posing the question, because one has to know something about the answer to be able to pose a precise question. The same goes for philosophy, where the (hopefully clear) question is of basic importance.
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Having become an atheist state in 1966 – the only one in the world – the fall of communism in 1991 found Albania without clergy. While the Muslim and Catholic communities resolved the issue by “importing” imams and Catholic priests from Kosova, Macedonia, and Montenegro, finding Orthodox Community clerics was more problematic. The first post-communist President of Albania, Dr. Sali Berisha, grudgingly decided to accept a Greek bishop – Dr. Anastasias Janullatos – as the head of the Autocephalous and Independent Albanian Orthodox Church (1992 – the present). Even though this position would have been much coveted by Albanian Orthodox bishops from the Diaspora, the Albanian President was forced to make this decision for a number of political reasons. If we exclude the former Yugoslavia, which had already (1991) been engulfed by the war between Serbia and the rest of the federal units, Greece is Albania’s only land-border neighbor. Around 15% of the Albanian population took refugee in Greece. Consecutive Greek governments, run by the New Democracy Prime Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis (1990-1993) and PASOK Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou (1993-1996) used this fact to apply strong political pressure on Albania, imposing certain political actions on the newly open Albanian state, such as the appointment of a Greek bishop as the head of the Autocephalous and Independent Albanian Orthodox Church. The attitude of Greek governments has been to attempt the hellenization of southern Albania, which was interrupted by the recognition of the Autocephalous and Independent Albanian Orthodox Church in 1937. President Berisha and the Albanian elite feared that this might lead to the disintegration of the country, but they were not able to do anything about it. Part of the Albanian elite in Tirana still fears that this may have a critical impact in the long term, especially after resolution of the Kosova issue, when a change in the nature of the Albanian nation is to be expected. Whether there are real grounds for these fears is the topic of this paper.
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