Medkulturnost v literaturi: položaj Islama v sodobnem slovenskem romanu po letu 1991

Abstract

The first notable Slovenian bumping into Islamic culture is set in the era of the Turkish invasions, which are commonly known by their violent looting, kidnapping and bloody conflicts. These are the main reasons why the Slovenes begun to create several negative perceptions of the Turkish nation, which later generally valuate the almost entire Islamic world. Therefore, the paper focuses on the discussion of the place of Islam in the contemporary Slovenian novel since 1991, i.e. during the period, when Slovenia finally gained complete independence but at the same time experienced another close encounter with the Islamic religion due to the increase of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which resulted in the huge influx of ex-Yugoslavian Muslim migrants. Furthermore, the article deals with the presence of Islam in the selected novels written by the contemporary Slovenian authors, i.e. Maja Novak, Marjan Tomšič, Gabriela Babnik, Boris Kolar, Andrej E. Skubic, Marko Sosič, Goran Vojnović and Jože Snoj. At the same time, the article draws the boundary line between mentioned writers according to their ways of approaching to the Islamic Otherness in the selected novels; moreover, it is noticed that some of them (Novak, Tomšič, Babnik, Kolar) base their novels exclusively on the African-Arab Islamic society, while the Arabic people are represented in several negative aspects, as they would be the successors or representatives of the ex-invasive Muslim Turks. On the opposite, the other authors (Skubic, Sosič, Vojnović, Snoj) show the main novelistic events as the social consequences that originate in the time of the former multicultural Yugoslavia. Interestingly, in this context the ex-Yugoslavian Muslims are not shown as representatives of the greedy and cruel Turks but as Slovenian “brothers”, thereby their novelistic visions are not extremely negative but surprisingly neutral and/or intentionally undetermined, often surrounded by a humorous context and/or dealt with the narrator’s “fraternal indulgence”. The paper also shows that the common elements between the two lines of the novels are hidden in several significant warnings of the actual socially widespread, unsubstantiated and subjective prejudices about Muslims and the Islamic world in general.