Kostadinova, Zora;
(2023)
Becoming a Good Person: Islam, the Self, and the Ethical Imagination among Naqshbandi Muslims in Postwar Sarajevo.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
This thesis is an ethnography about the influence of charismatic religious authority on the embodiment of religious agency after critical events. It investigates practices of ethical self-cultivation among Naqshbandi Sufi Muslims in postwar Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. By focusing on Muslim ethical self formation as a process of becoming a good person with adab (noble conduct) rather than the ethnographically dominant trope of “pious Muslim”, the thesis shows how the Bosnian Muslim ethical imagination embraces local forms of sociality and engages with particular past events and historical episodes showing that the self is socially embodied and anchored in a sense of local historical consciousness. The ethnography charts the broader engagement with practices of embodiment recognising their generative potential to the study of local moralities and religious agency. The thesis shows the development of such an agency in two parts. The first part demonstrates how an engagement Islamic and Ottoman history, together with the commemoration of events from the recent Bosnian War of 1992-1995, contribute to the formation of a distinct Bosnian Muslim identity that pertains to a religious self, mediated through the idiom of adab in the public secular sphere. The second part of the thesis dwells on Sufi disciplines of the self (relationship to the charismatic authority of the sheikh), hizmet (service to the community and work ethics), and the Sufi ritual zikr (remembrance of Allah) by which practitioners are induced into Muslim personhood as a process of engaging with emotions and affects, and the Islamic ideas of the unconscious. In dialogue with the anthropologies of Islam, ethics, and embodiment the thesis shows that a Naqshbandi subjectivity is both textually mediated and contextually manifested. It is constructed around Islamic texts, expressed, and embodied through rituals, and grounded in a local Bosnian Islamic worldview. This worldview has traditionally centred on being insan (truly human) and having adab (noble conduct) rather than being infallibly “pious”.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Becoming a Good Person: Islam, the Self, and the Ethical Imagination among Naqshbandi Muslims in Postwar Sarajevo |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10183173 |
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