Remaking Muslim Lives

David Henig is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart One: Making and Unmaking Village Lives1 Houses in Flames2 Locked Doors3 Halal ExchangePart Two: Vital Exchange4 Cosmological Time5 Praying and Witnessing6 Blessing Falling from the SkyAfterword: The Sultan is backGlossaryNotesReferences

"Through his graceful rendering of lives constrained by debt and foreshortened economic horizons, Henig reveals the potent entwining of religion and history that shapes village life and orients social worlds in this rural space of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Remaking Muslim Lives in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina is a beautifully written book about futures and pasts and the everyday work in between."--Sarah E. Wagner, coauthor of Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide"Thanks to his curiosity and sensitivity to the lived experiences of religion, David Henig takes us beyond the clichéd images of Islam in Europe in this vivid ethnography of Muslim lives in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. As he explores small-town mosques, village houses, and communal graveyards, Henig pauses to reveal perceptive new insights and pose thoughtful questions that will resonate with historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others interested in the layered meanings of Muslim religious practice today."--Edin Hajdarpasic, author of Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914"The Muslim communities Henig describes are centuries-old, yet their villages, orchards, and fields are vulnerable possessions. Islam and the vital exchanges it creates -- among people and with God--give Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina a tenacious grip on time and space. Henig traces these exchanges in amazing detail. He takes us beyond questions of whether Islam can be European to places where divinity and identity have already been woven into moral systems of incredible staying power. His analysis is driven by the sacred power of those places."--Andrew Shryock, author of Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present