Karic

This is the first critical and theoretically grounded book-length study of Hajj literature (written texts about the experience of the Hajj) and Hajj practices of Bosnian Muslims. It redefines the ways pilgrimage can be understood and offers new methods for investigating the meaning and importance of Hajj for generations of premodern and modern believers. It also throws light on Balkan communities previously ignored by modern scholarship in Islamic, religious, and area studies. Breaking with the predominant academic trends of focusing on nationalism and ethnic conflict in the region, it instead puts the spotlight on the richness of texts, and visual and archival material, and focuses on genres that challenge the established literary canons.

Dzenita Karic is a senior researcher at the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She has published articles in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Archiv Orientalni, Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History (Brill), and Cultural History (forthcoming). She has also contributed to the edited volumes Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond: Reconfiguring Gender, Religion, and Mobility (ed. Marjo Buitelaar, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Viola Thimm, Routledge 2020) and Muslim Pilgrimage in Europe (ed. Ingvild Flaskerud and Richard J. Natvig, Routledge 2016).