Full page photo print

146
SMAIL an~iclThe Cultural Achievements of Bosnian Muslims
When thc old man saw it Mustar-Aga;
Loud he screamed with voice of troubled anger;
"Look to this, ye bidden for the wedding!
He, the robber! bears away my maiden;
See her, see her borne away for ever",
But one answer met the old man's wailings:
"Let the hawk bear off the quail in safety,-
Bear in safety - she was born to wed him;
Thou, retire thee to thy own dwelling!
Blossoms not for thee so fair a maiden! "I6
Muslim heroic songs are often unusually long because of the Muslim
way of life. In the long nights of RamadBn, the month of fasting, during which
pious Muslims are at their most sociable after having abstained from food and
drink all day, long songs that could fill the evening were needed, and thus
emerged.
With the increasing decline of the older social institutions, the heroic
song was condemned to fade from social life. It seems unlikely that it will again
flourish as it did in the seventeenth century when, throughout the Ottoman
Empire, Muslims were beginning their struggle to maintain a European
existence, and when a national consciousness began to emerge among Bosnian
Muslims.
Lyric Folk Poetry
In the Balkan lands, where poetry and the epic were virtually synonymous, lyric
poetry was hardly understood or appreciated. Yet despite the fact that the
Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims poured their greatest love and gifts into the
cultivation of epic poetry, ballads and romances also developed. Their contrast
with the epic is twofold. Whereas epic songs are sung to the accompaniment of
the tamburitza or the gusle, these ballads and romances are recited simply and
naturally, without melody or instrumental accompaniment. Then, too, they
focus on feminine concerns. l7
Their content accounts for their virtual absence from all but the Muslim
Croatian culture. These songs of the lives of women are found only in the
"western domain of the Serbo-Croatian language" IX because of the comparatively
higher social status enjoyed by the women in these territories. In the Bosnian-
Muslim milieu, the chivalrous treatment of women, who are veritably coddled
as young wives and highly honoured as aged mothers, is in sharp contrast with
the attitudes of the Orthodox hinterlands of the East." The medieval, oriental
non-Islamic conception of woman as something intrinsically evil, as the vessel
of sin, was always entirely foreign to Muslim culture in contrast to Byzantine
culture where the concept of woman's defectiveness reigned for a long time."
The Muslim woman had her hereditary rights from time immemorial according
to the Shari'ah (the canon law), and was not dependent upon the goodwill of the
father or brothers.