Andrić, a Muslim poet of recent times

Everyone knows that Orhan Pamuk is the poet of Istanbul. But there is another Nobel laureate who referred to this city every now and then, and whose work moves, similar to Pamuk's novel "Snow", along the line of tension between Islam and secularism, relics of the Ottoman tradition and new fractures. In December 2016, Pamuk was in Serbia, with what he calls his predecessor. In Belgrade and Novi Sad, where he was awarded prizes at literary festivals there. He gave a lecture in Belgrade, at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where, not for the first time, he introduced himself as a famous reader of Ivo Andrić, the Bosnian poet of Croatian parents who, as the vice minister of foreign affairs and the country's leader in Hitler's Berlin, was put everything at the service of the Serbs of the dominating Kingdom of Yugoslavia, who saw Belgrade as their chosen homeland, and in 1961 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk received the same award 45 years later.

"His novels are the work of an extremely careful, precise observation, which scans the details of the traditional life of Muslims and the Ottoman world, and gives them his attention," Pamuk stated. "I consider Andrić my forerunner, because he was brave enough to show us that we are all made of the same stuff," Serbian media quoted the guest from Turkey as saying. At a press conference for selected Serbian journalists, who were not allowed to ask questions about current Turkish politics, Pamuk announced that it is the duty of every writer to see the world through the eyes of people who are not like him: "When Tolstoy writes about Anna Karenina, he does not with party politics, but with how a man sees the world through the eyes of a woman in love. That's how Andrić observes the world from the perspective of Muslims." You can never go wrong praising Andrić in Serbia, as opposed to Croatia and even Bosnia, but Pamuk does not even need to invest in his hosts, especially since the Turkish writer is not making a pilgrimage to Belgrade for the first time in the footsteps of his spiritual predecessor. A few months before he was to receive the Nobel Prize in 2006, Pamuk was there to see Andrić's museum-turned-apartment, a proto-bourgeois domicile from socialist Yugoslavia.

It is not surprising that Pamuk hung Andrić in the gallery of his ancestors. The question of how Islam and Christianity agree or just don't agree, how the Orient in the West, i.e. Islam can exist in Europe (or not) was already a life topic for Andrić, long before it became a debate meta-topic. In his novels, as well as in hundreds of essays and stories, often set in Bosnia under Ottoman rule, Andrić tirelessly circles around these questions. In the year of Andrić's birth, 1892, his homeland had not been under the Ottomans for fourteen years, but the previous four centuries had left traces that marked Bosnia and Herzegovina even when the Habsburgs had already deeply stepped into power. The Ottoman Empire did not exist, but it was still omnipresent: in the language (there are almost seven thousand words of Turkish origin in Bosnian), menu, architecture, habits, relations between the sexes.

Andrić's parents come from Sarajevo, but he grew up in the Muslim-dominated town of Višegrad on the Drina. The generation that raised and raised him was socialized at the time of the collapse of the last decades of Ottoman rule over Bosnia, which did not remain without influence on the perspective that the poet then took. What he learned about Ottoman times in his childhood and youth intrigued him for life. "Islam is my destiny," he told his Swedish translator Gun Bergman.

Andrić set one of his most important works, the story "Cursed Courtyard" (first published in German in 1957 by Suhrkamp) in Istanbul. More precisely: in an Istanbul casemate. Only what the slaves see, hear or smell when the wind blows from the Golden Horn is received from the city beyond the walls of the apsana. The story of a Bosnian Franciscan, who arrives in the sultan's city due to the affairs of his order, where he is suspected and arrested in the justice of God, is a timeless story about power and the abuse of power. Whoever reads it today, spontaneously begins to think of reports from Erdogan's Turkey, especially if he looks at the most famous quote from the work, a sentence from the dialogue between two slaves: "If you want to know what a country and its administration are like, and what their future is like, look just to know how many virtuous and innocent people there are in prisons in that country, and how many criminals and criminals are at large. That will tell you best".

Already in Andrić, one can read the accusations of today's human rights organizations about arrests in Turkey, without giving reasons and bringing the arrested before the investigating judge in a reasonable time. Andrić's protagonist, Friar Petar, is arrested instead of another, wanted monk: "As there were no other friars who arrived in Constantinople at that time, the Turkish police arrested Friar Petar according to their own logic. He remained in prison for two months 'under investigation', without anyone giving him an honorable hearing." Baksuzni Petar was in Istanbul on the very days when a warrant arrived from the capital to the governors of the provinces of the empire: and when on those very days, on the occasion of suspicions and unrest in the European part of Turkey, a sharp circular letter was sent from Constantinople to all valiyas warning the authorities throughout the country and urge them to pay more attention to the numerous troublemakers and agitators who search state affairs uninvited and even dare to smear the sultan's name, Valija, like every dirty official, felt personally affected". The author, who died in 1975, could not have considered whether they are alive or happening in Turkey today, but the similarities are present, as in any good literature.

Regarding the atrocities with which Tito, the head of state of Yugoslavia and his clique, persecuted their real and alleged opponents in the first years of their rule, it is not surprising that Andrić is cautious, who as a comrade of the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip languished in Habsburg prisons for the duration of the First World War, and then he was not capable of dissidence, transferred the parable of the wasted state power to the Istanbul casemate of the Ottoman times.

The cursed courtyard, as Andrić's slaves call their casemate, could be located in Stalin's Gulag archipelago or in Putin's Russia, on Tito's Goli Otok, in Guantanamo Bay and everywhere where power violates the law - that is, in Erdogan's Turkey. "The Constantinople police adheres to the sacred principle that it is easier to let an innocent man out of the courtyard, than to search for the culprit in the streets of Constantinople."

It cannot be denied that violence plays an important role in Andrić. Certain passages read like a script for a Tarantino film, on the first pages a long description of the impalement of a Serbian peasant in the novel "On the Drina Bridge" or the scene of the mass rape of a mentally retarded Gypsy woman by Ottoman soldiers in the novel "Omer Pasha Latas". But is it, as Muhsin Rizvić writes, a "devilish world" in which an "atmosphere of Turkish guilt" has been created and Islam is defamed as the root cause of evil? Whoever searches selectively, as Rizvić does, will find countless examples of inhuman Catholic Croats or Orthodox Serbs in Andrić's work. Andrić simply did not have the most positive idea about people who have power over others, and the way they use it, and since most of his stories take place at the time when the Turks ruled the Balkans, this is especially reflected in the representation of Muslims.

In fact, Andrić does not distinguish between Muslims and Christians, but between the powerful and the powerless. This also runs through families, where women and children are most often those who cannot delegate violence to lower levels and therefore have to endure it, regardless of their religion.

Rizvić claims that Bosnian Muslims (who as a nation have only been officially called Bosniaks since 1993) perceive Andrić's qualification of Turks as a kind of historical threat, which refers to the Serbian lament for a lost medieval state after the battle of Kosovo Field in 1389. Andrić's message reads: "You ruled over us for 400 long years, now we will rule over you for 400 years. Your time is up”. That the designation Turks for Bosnian Muslims in Serbian sounds somewhat derogatory. There are terrible examples of the context in which this pejorative was used even in recent times, such as the massacre in Srebrenica, when Serbian soldiers under the command of Mladić shot about 1995 captured Bosnian Muslims in July 7.000. In the intercepted communications from those days, which were heard at the Hague war crimes court, it is always and always about the "Turks", who have to "work".

From the point of view of Mladić's guys, these "Turks" were the descendants of former collaborators of the Ottoman invaders, on whom revenge is now to be carried out. But Andrić's narrator, like the one in the central work "Travnička hronika" recently republished in German, with the subtitle "Consular times", completed in April 1942 in Belgrade under German occupation, could not know anything about Srebrenica, and neither could its creator. . What's more - Andrić's unnamed narrators are never completely elevated above things, but often come from Bosnia and tell stories about a time when it was customary to refer to all Muslims in Bosnia as Turks. If they were talking about "Bosnian Muslims", it would be the same as the American plantation owners at the time of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" talking about their slaves as "African-American fellow citizens".

The essence of Andrić's literature does not lie in political observation anyway, but in an astonishing feeling for sounds, smells, gestures and other details, which also caught Orhan Pamuk's eye. This applies to the description of the night silence in the Bosnian residential town of Travnik or the huge handfuls of Franciscans invited by the Austrian consul, all but one of them peasant sons: "The friars ate abundantly and silently, scurrying around in front of unfamiliar dishes and tiny spoons made of Viennese silver, which disappeared in their big hands like children's toys".

In these scenes, however, explosions of violence always occur unannounced. Thus, the vizier, regarding his (alleged) victory in the battle over the Serbs, invites the reception of the Austrian and French consuls in Travnik, which for several decades was the capital of Bosnia instead of Sarajevo. The reception immediately turns into a festival of horrors. While the diaconia is being relaxed, courtiers appear with baskets, sacks and an asura. "They quickly trimmed and unloaded all those vessels and began to shake them out on the scattered asura. During this time, the servants brought the consuls lemonade and new chibuk. On the asura, they began to pour severed human ears and noses in considerable numbers, an indescribable mass of poor human flesh, salted and blackened with congealed blood.

At the end, the courtiers, as the climax of the humiliation of Christianity by Islam, throw several icons on the pile of human flesh. "Someone invisible, from the corner, said in a deep, prayerful voice: 'God has blessed the Islamic weapon.' All the Turks present responded with unintelligible mumbling." The disgust of both foreign diplomats is even stronger when they learn that the body parts were not cut off by Serbian warriors, but come from the "ordinary bloodshed" committed by Ottoman soldiers against helpless visitors to a Christian service of God.

At the same time: it is true that Muslims in Andrić often appear as perpetrators, but they are, realistically speaking, on the defensive. In vain, they yearn for the times when "the glib, which in recent years hangs on pure faith and true Turkishness, will be removed". Instead, the Ottomans, and with them Islam, are in retreat. The Christian nations of Europe are growing faster and faster because of improved health care, and "Raja", meaning the Sultan's Christian people, is grumbling more and more. The call of Christians for national states is incompatible with the Ottoman division of the people according to confessions. Andrić's Muslims have the feeling that they are living in the end times, that they are helplessly at the mercy of the growing army of Christians and their high birth rate. They feel overwhelmed by Christianity, demographically cramped, threatened in their own way of life.

In Bosnia, Andrić still got to meet the Muslims, who experienced those "Muslim end times": in his opus, they describe their fears and concerns in detail. Andrić quite precisely represents the fears that many Europeans feel today regarding the demographic disparity between them and the Muslim world. Anyone who deals with the issues of the division of state and church, reason and faith, religion and private life or how Christians and Muslims in Europe can live together in the future, will find a lot of answers in Andrić, which are not simple or clear, and yet not pleasant. But those are the answers that concern us all, and our children will probably be affected much more than we can like.

Did Andrić cause more harm to Bosnia than the enemy army

Andrić's description of the Ottoman Empire did not go without objections, especially not in Bosnia, where many are struggling with their only Nobel laureate. Bosnian Muslim intellectuals have written an entire library of literature that portrays Andrić as a hater of Islam. Its motto is concentrated in the sentence of the liberal Bosnian academic Muhamed Filipović: "Andrić caused more harm to Bosnia with his actions than all the enemy armies put together".

The most famous example of Bosnian anti-Andrić literature is the work "Bosanski muslimi u Andrićev djelo" published in Sarajevo in 1995, authored by literary critic Muhsin Rizvić, who died in 1994. On over 680 pages, Rizvić tries to prove with the help of hundreds of quotes that Andrić not only hated Bosnian Muslims and Turks, but was also a pervert, who attributed his own sadistic fantasies to Ottoman leaders or Muslim believers.

The fact that Rizvić wrote his work, the publication of which was supported by the Islamic Community of Bosnia and the Party of Democratic Action of the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović, was written in Sarajevo under the siege and fire of Serbian soldiers of General Ratko Mladić in this context is not an insignificant fact. Andrić, according to Rizvić's judgment, painted a "black picture of the Bosnian-Muslim world" and in a "mosaic of perverted scenes" created a "gallery of pathological figures", into which he infused his inclinations towards sadists and horny people.

Everything he wrote about, read in national and international archives

Whoever sees the Ottoman rule over the Balkans as a "golden age", as Recep Tayyip Erdogan or his former foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu did in their speeches in Sarajevo, can call such images "Islamophobic" or "anti-Turkish". But, let's be clear: Andrić, before writing his novels, spent many years researching archival materials and reading contemporary diary entries, diplomatic reports and newspaper articles. For "Travnička hronika" he researched in the archives of Paris and Vienna. Some of his plastic scenes are excerpts from diaries or dispatches from the legacy of French and Austrian diplomats, which Andrić took over almost without paraphrasing.

Author: Michael MARTENS (Mihael Martens)

Translation: Mirko VULETIĆ