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Akbar’s Chamber offers a non-political, non-sectarian and non-partisan space for exploring the past and present of Islam. It has no political or theological bias other than a commitment to the Socratic method (which is to say that questions lead us to understanding) and the empirical record (which is to say the evidence of the world around us). By these methods, Akbar’s Chamber is devoted to enriching public awareness of Islam and Muslims both past and present. The podcast aims to improve understanding of Islam in all its variety, in all regions of the world, by inviting experts to share their specialist knowledge in terms that we can all understand.
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The Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues help us trace the changing ways in which the hajj was experienced and described by these European Muslims who lived under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, then socialist Yugoslavia, before the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. To explore these different meanings of the hajj for the Bosnian Muslims—or Bosniaks—this episode looks at the fascinating texts they wrote in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish as well as the Bosnian language. We’ll follow not only the impact of changing political conditions, but also the way new forms of transport and changing literary fashions reshaped the experience and interpretation of a pilgrimage which both was and wasn’t the same over the centuries. Nile Green talks to Dženita Karić, author of Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
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