Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17234/RadoviZHP.55.6
The Muslim Women’s Question and the Emancipatory Potential of Nafija Sarajlić’s Literary Work in South Slavic and European Context
Merima Omeragić
orcid.org/0000-0002-6887-536X
Sažetak
The birth of modern identity in the field of literature can be found in the topics elaborated by the first Bosnian Muslim woman writer, Nafija Sarajlić (1893-1970). Set at the onset of World War I, in a cultural milieu in which the values of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires intermingled and confronted each other, these topics represented the growth and functioning of the concept of a woman. A comprehensive and emancipatory discourse and the writer’s awareness have been defined in light of the impact of Europeanization and also as essentially deductive content, reflecting the fluidity between self-preservation and destruction as well as rejection by (traditional) society. The author’s work is read through the prism of its correlation to writers from Serbian and Croatian cultural circles, with whom she shared not only a social experience, but also her vocation (teacher), as well as literary descriptions of the resistance to the emancipatory practices that they promoted. Sarajlić established herself as a writer who, in her biography and prose work, bore witness to the processes that accompanied the rise of the Muslim women’s question. This paper’s focus is on the issue of Muslim women’s education at that time, which was not only a crucial question inside the Muslim community, but also a problem that official Austro-Hungarian policies were supposed to address in Bosnia. To that end, an interpretation of the writer’s intimate experiences, as one of the first formally educated teachers, and her exclusion from her profession, her writing and narrative style, as well as her approach to specific motifs, will be examined with regard to how they underscored the modes and avenues for the emancipation of Muslim woman. Despite traditionalisation and patriarchal and clerical processes, which reasserted themselves in the Muslim community, particularly after World War II, it is crucial to emphasize the tremendous importance of Sarajlić’s work. The latter, for all the reasons noted above, with its text and context, functions as a starting point in the real path towards shaping a model of a modern South-Slavic and European Muslim woman.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
316262
URI
Datum izdavanja:
20.12.2023.
Posjeta: 85 *