Lehrer oder Dichter? – Safvet Beg Bašagić und Musa Ćazim Ćatić zwischen den Lehren und der Kunst des Islams

Abstract

After the treaty of Berlin (1878), when the Ottoman Empire was replaced by the Habsburg monarchy to rule over Bosnia-Herzegovina, a small group of Muslim intellectuals called napredni Muslimani (progressive Muslims; Kemura 1986) publically discussed in numerous newspaper articles, religious tracts, essays, novels and poems the changes taking place. After graduating from a dual education system (Islamic madrasas and public Gymnasien), the napredni Muslimani required to overcome the existing dichotomies like modern vs. traditional or civilization vs. savageness (see Haj 2009, 2) – in which the West always embodied the „progress“ and the Orient the mystical past. Instead, just like the reformers in other parts of the Islamic world, they wanted to modernise the Islamic community in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Within this discourse the literature experienced a renaissance. Especially the poem freed itself from oriental traditions and was embedded into the discourse of modernisation: poets were now experimenting with Western European poetic forms such as the sonnet, the ode and the anthem, and combined these forms with a modern, simplified literary language and South Slavic folk traditions. Two poets came here to the fore: Safvet beg Bašagić and Musa Ćazim Ćatić created like no other contemporary Bosnian artist poetry that connected the „East“ and the „West“. However, both poets chose completely different approaches: Safvet beg Bašagić, an educator and historian, turned mainly to the didactic poem. In addition to the romantic depiction of the heroic past of the medieval Bosnia-Herzegovina, which should encourage the reader to imitate these glorious times, he wrote numerous poems to teach the Bosnian Muslim youth to follow the spirit of progress with their „modern weapons“: the pen and the book instead of the sword and the battle field. Bašagić therefore included various aspects of the Islamic modernisation movement, such as the reinterpretation of the Koran according to the needs of the new time and the redesign of the Islamic education system for the sake of the cultural advancement of the Islamic nation. Musa Ćazim Ćatić also wrote critical poems dealing with the present situation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Being equipped with a greater linguistic interest than the scientist Bašagić, Ćatić however managed to combine old and new lyrical forms like no other. In his collection of poems (Pjesme. Godine od 1900 do 1908, published 1914), Ćatić – being influenced by more romantic and mystical ideas – further developed the enlightened approach, not via didactic poems, but by playing with oriental motifs and typical South Slavic elements such as the gusla (lute) and the vila (fairy). He recollected the early days of Islam as a religion of knowledge and scripture and approached, in a sonnet form, the concept of the I’ğāz (the incomparable and unattainable beauty of the Koran). His goal was to awaken an aesthetic sense within the Bosnian-Muslim community – including the development of a pure Bosnian-hercegovinan lyrical language.