Introduction: rearticulating the Islamic canon

One of the most prominent characteristics of Sunni Islam is its emphasis on emulating the life of the Prophet Muhammed (sunna) (Algar, 2000). The Prophet represents the epitome of good character, and he was sent as a messenger to teach people how to perfect theirs. While this is the major preoccupation for different Muslim groups worldwide, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there has been a widespread tendency in academic and journalistic accounts of Muslims, to attribute the strict observance of the exemplary conduct of the Prophet Muhammad with Salafism (Li, 2020; Vicini, 2023)Footnote 1. In the duration of the fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in Sarajevo the capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina (henceforth Bosnia) with a Naqshbandi Sufi community between 2015 and 2017 on which this paper is based, the Islamic State suicide bombings that took place in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels in March 2016 visibly disturbed Bosnian Muslims and triggered resurgent debates of the immediate post 9/11 period. Bosnian Muslims are very sensitive to any calls toward Islamic governmentality locally and are quick to condemn and denounce such discourses. In this climate of the global quest for leadership, practicing Muslims with whom I spent most of my time in Sarajevo engaged in a great deal of self-reflection on the social role of their religion, its political ramifications, and in discussions on what constitutes the prophet’s sunna and the prophetic ideal. One of the most telling indicators of these public and private debates was the concern and the uncertainty, especially among newcomers to Islam, on how to become good Muslims and develop a religious agency by which they can negotiate everyday life while avoiding being associated with an essentialised image of fanaticism and piety. In this process of self-examination, many of my interlocutors felt anchored and sought to ground a religious agency in the terminology of adab (al adab; spiritual manners/noble conduct; al-adaab) (see Heck, 2007). This inevitably involved a turn to historical developments of the Islamic canon in Bosnia, whereby seeking positionality for themselves in the broader postwar and postsocialist Bosnian religious landscape, they looked upon narratives of historical persons such as famous Sufi sheikhs, who are considered some of the finest examples of the prophetic sunna. Thus, the question of what constitutes “Islamic” was sourced in an Ottoman Imperial canon, as non-Western, and therefore an internal critique. The deployment of adab as an internal critique arguably represents an ongoing process of reformulating local ideas of a canon, where personal hermeneutics plays an important role and where historical temporalities are deployed in pointing to the fractured nature of a canon and toward the impossibility of cultivating a “global Islamic canon”. Therefore, we can think of ethical self-cultivation and of adab as a way of undoing the canon by locating the “Islamic” in the ethical as a relational category in the everyday (Zigon, 2021).

In Bosnia, histories of colonization and over five decades of Yugoslav-sponsored secularism and atheism followed by war (1992–1995) converge with a dominant early twentieth-century Muslim reformist tradition and an equally formidable and deeply historically rooted Sufi one (Alibašić, 2003, 2014). Since the Dayton Agreement ended the war in December 1995, Bosnia has opened toward the global currents of Islamic debates and discourses (Raudvere, 2011; Raudvere et al., 2012; Karčić, 2010a, b; Oktem, 2010). These hermeneutic fluctuations presented a significant challenge to the authority of the Islamic community (Bos. Islamska Zajednica henceforth IC) an institution tasked to oversee Muslim practices in the country since its inauguration by the Habsburg Empire in 1882 following the departure of the Ottomans. As a former region of the Ottoman Empire until 1908 when it was formally annexed by the Habsburg Empire, Bosnia’s Islam has been significantly shaped by Ottoman institutions and practices, of which a Naqshbandi Sufi orthopraxy played an important role, especially in the nineteenth-century Ottoman reform period (Ćehajić, 1986; Wiseman, 2007). Their concern with sharia rules has historically given them the reputation of being the orthodox tariqa (Ćehajić, 1986, 2000; Le Gal, 2005; Weismann, 2007), and arguably, up until the Habsburg (1878) and later Yugoslav Communist takeover of Bosnia (1945), Naqshbandi orthopraxy was constitutive of the local Islamic canon, which early twentieth-century reformism sidelined. Their postwar revitalization and increased public presence are due to their reintegration into the IC following a communist ban in 1952 and to a generous Turkish campaign for the restoration of heritage in the wider Balkans, particularly in Bosnia (Hesová & Rašidagić, 2020).

Part of the postwar religious landscape was also claimed by conservative Salafi groups. The first Salafis in Bosnia were the foreign mujahadeen who came to fight in solidarity with Bosnian Muslims, during the Bosnian war. After the war, some of them remained and founded religious communities (Li, 2020). There is no clear demographic or economic divide between Sufis and Salafis, and often, the disputes between the two are polemical, with both groups contrasting their own imaginaries of good/bad Muslims, who have misunderstood both Islamic teachings and Bosnian history and tradition. Nevertheless, both terms Salafi and Sufi contain in practice significant variations and are often used as generalizations through polemical phrases (for Sufism see Raudvere, 2018 and for Salafism Hesova, 2021). The tension between these different imaginaries and enactments of the sunna locally, which in the duration of my fieldwork was shown as low simmering confrontations in Sarajevan mosques over how to pray, how to dress, and how to communicate Islamic knowledge, among other, situates the paper’s broader aim of engaging with an agency of self-reflexivity, as integral to embodying the sunna of the Prophet Muhammed among Muslims on the margins of Europe (Henig & Bielenin-Lenczowska, 2013). The paper ethnographically lays out how the polyvalent idiom of adab, locally construed by Naqshbandi murids as “beautiful behavior” (ljiepo ponašanje) can be read as a critique of global aspirations of Islamist leadership and toward local conservative Muslim groups. In cultivating adab, practitioners sought to deploy their imagination in embodying the Prophet’s sunna and in imagining the best possible behavior by which the Prophet would have positioned himself toward his followers, neighbors, family members, and the society in which he lived and preached. Such an imagination, in turn, informs how Sufi practitioners negotiate everyday sociality and how they articulate piety in everyday life in an often polarized social world, ethnically and politically.

Sarajevan Naqshbandis

The Naqshbandi community in this study is part of a postwar and postsocialist revitalization of Sufi brotherhoods, led by charismatic Sufi sheikhs whose wartime experiences engage with the narrative of belonging and tradition (Henig 2014; Raudvere 2011, 2012). It is one among several Naqshbandi communities in Sarajevo and part of the wider Bosnian network of the tariqa or tarikat (Bos.) which gathers in a newly built Sufi lodge or tekija (Bos.). It is relatively recent, dating back to the early 2000s, and was founded by a former general in the Bosnian army, who received permission to be a shaikh in wartime in 1993. This revitalization, of the overall Sufi life in Bosnia, is well framed by David Henig’s “creative moments” methodology (2014). Henig treats Sufi revitalisation as an “emergent form of organization of divine knowledge and practice that is embedded in historical and political processes, that of state socialist oppression and postsocialist liberation” (Henig, 2014: 98). Within this approach, he shows how this emergent postsocialist organization of Sufi divine knowledge harbors an improvisatory nature of the creative moment presented in all aspects of revitalisation of Sufi life. It ranges in scope from the way the silsila (chain of transmission) is renewed to restoring and building new Sufi lodges, to reconnecting with translocal and transnational networks of dervish lodges, and to exploring the nature and dynamics of the divine. Thus, Shaikh Hulusi (b.1953) is a representative of a newer generation of sheikhs, whose wartime legacy plays an important element in the construction and legitimisation of his charisma. It is a case study that offers a unique entry point to the relationship between the changing nature of religious authority and postwar proselytization efforts by newer generations of sheikhs whose aim centers on the restoration and revitalization of a local tradition (Gilsenan, 1982; Raudvere, 2018; Vukomanović, 2011). Thus, certain aspects of orthopraxy are influenced by the personalized interpretation of individual authorities, in this case, a formative element to the inculcation of Sufi adab among his community members. This essay argues that the reformulation of Sufi adab both as an idiom that connotes spiritual manners and an everyday behavior constitutes a critique toward global Islamist politics, and it serves as an important ingredient in local proselytization efforts in Bosnia for Bosnian Muslims who in the last two decades have taken a deeper interest in religion (Abazović, 2012; Mesarič, 2017, 2020; Kostadinova, 2018).

The tekija is a very popular place for religious activity gatherings. Conveniently positioned in the old town of Sarajevo, it is frequented by many especially during religious holidays. It is this centrality that it holds to the Sarajevo religious life that makes it an attractive site for an ethnographic study. The close-knit community however, which is made of those who have given beyat (oath of allegiance to the sheikh), are the people that contributed to this study the most. These practitioners come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and age groups. The most visible demographic group was young people, in their twenties and thirties, and a majority of them were highly educated, students, imams, teachers, young doctors, and entrepreneurs, as well as theater stage actors. As dedicated members of the community they contributed greatly to its life cycles with hizmet (service) which extended to all spheres of life: from cleaning and preparing the tekija and mosque for weekly programs to cooking, visiting sick members of the community, and fundraising for charitable purposes. Their engagement in the social world was an active one, and it was part of their ethics to be involved in the world as religious people. In other words, with their social engagement, they performed lived Islam.

As Sarajevo is a vibrant place for religious activities, they have engaged in, or have come to contact with, different Islamic practices. Starting from what they identified as “Salafism” to regularly attending Rumi’s Masnawi interpretations, Quran studies, and the regular liturgies in ordinary mosques across Sarajevo, the plethora of religious activities in town has given them a good comparative framework and an informed decision on why they chose to pursue Naqshbandi ethics in their ethical self-cultivations. Thus, their definition and understanding of adab/edep had a rather rich repertoire of comparison, and it was construed around several common themes that were highlighted in the duration of my fieldwork about imagining the Prophet’s best behavior. A notable accent on how the murids imagined the Prophet's sunna, and which this paper develops further, is the quality of being with others in a manner that serves and is beneficial to the other. This was the dominant feature they ascribed to the person with adab. By this conceptualization, Islam is not only proselytized in the mosque but also by every believer who attracts others with their spiritual manners. In the pages that follow, I will think with Fahrudin’s vision (a young imam) of the mosque to illustrate how spiritual manners are virtues that communicate care for others and thus the embodied sunna. In highlighting edep, as an outward show (or concealment) of beautiful conduct, I wish to bring attention to practices of self-cultivation that have not received due attention but that hold the promise of widening our understanding of Muslim subjecthood and the value of self-reflexivity and self-critique in the formation of the social, and indeed, in the reformulation of the political.

Mosque with a Sufi orientation

The day I met Fahrudin a young imam in his thirties educated in Sarajevo’s theological institutions, he had recently received the news that he may be appointed an imam in a previously hard-core communist neighborhood in Sarajevo’s north to lead a đemat (jamaat, a community of Muslim believers). There has never been a mosque there before which represents an extra challenge to new imams. This means that the đemat comprises many newcomers to Islam which would make his position more demanding and intricate. Fahrudin reflects upon his forthcoming responsibility and speaks about his plans to be a “different kind” of imam: “This is a big đemat. Many people come to đuma namaz (Friday prayer). God willing, I will soon become an imam there and that mosque will have a Sufi orientation”. Upon asking him what he meant by a mosque with a Sufi orientation, he said that the most important thing was in the way “an imam approaches his đemat. It is all in the approach”. Fahrudin’s vision for a mosque with a Sufi orientation involves passing on to others what he has gained in spiritual education from the sheikh’s approach (šejhov pristup): “It is up to us how people will accept and view us; it very much depends on our personal approach towards people as faith leaders. An essential tesavvuf (Sufi) dimension is respecting and honoring edeb”. Fahrudin felt that a mosque devoid of a rich spiritual atmosphere and sincere human relationships will not hold on to people’s interests for long, and it will not give them what they long for:

people who come to a mosque they are almost always looking for this feeling of peace, and to find some beauty. The way in which the imam approaches them, this is how these people will drink up the faith. If the imam is dry, if he is dead and asleep, he will be incapable to call on anybody. And this is exactly the problem of our people…only the formality [of faith] has remained. People go to a mosque, and they pray but nobody receives/acknowledges their faith, nobody serves it to them beautifully.

Fahrudin equated the function of the imam (who should mirror the Prophet to the believers) to “call upon someone” with a degree of proselytization in Islam or dawah. However, he also made a difference between dawah by which the imam is the bearer of Islamic doctrine to the “different kind of Imam” as the bearer of noble character/beautiful approach and spiritual manners, values which he equates to the “beauty of faith”. He felt that the right way in which returnees and newcomers to faith can be persuaded to persevere is not so much through the legalistic and normative methods of preaching, but rather through the accent on human relationships, intimacy, and care, creating a greater degree of familiarity within the community, that merits close relationships. This interpersonal relatedness and intimacy facilitated through adab or what many dervishes often interchange with a beautiful approach, and behavior is foundational to the transmission of Islamic knowledge. The ethical and the pious reside in the aesthetic quality of being with others and with oneself, as the property of adab and as a Hadith value which states that “Allah is beautiful, and he loves beauty”. Central to the practitioners’ ethical self-cultivation is the realization of becoming a “good person with edep” as opposed to the accent on a visibly pious self (Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2005).

An ethnographic accent on adab can expand our understanding of Muslim piety from its normatively fixed performance, toward its everyday social and quotidian manifestation. This in turn helps us situate critique as a part of ethical self-cultivation, in the form of inculcating self-reflexivity as an integral part of the Islamic tradition. In further expanding the scholarship on everyday lived Islam (Schielke & Debevec, 2012), I invite reflection upon suspending the belief that societal values, such as tolerance and liberty, have no roots in an Islamic imaginary and instead seek to understand how they are differently articulated. Humeira Iqtidar has made this point with her essay on the political thought of the Pakistani political thinker Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, for example. Though Ghamidi never identified himself as a “liberal” in the way in which the Western political thought is accustomed to, he nevertheless emphasized the quality of tolerance upon which the West centers ideas of liberalism, as “predicated on individual responsibility infused with humility and shari’a-inspired state minimalism” (Iqtidar, 2021:1). Appreciating how self-cultivation and adab-mediated intersubjective encounters intersect with the wider social context of a post-conflict, postsocialist state, helps us reformulate the rather misguided question that has tacitly informed scholarship on revival of Islam during the 1980s, namely, why is that modernist expectations of secularization have not quite been fulfilled across the Islamic world (Fadil & Fernando, 2015:62). Focus on adab can show how self-reflexivity guides Muslim and Sufi encounters in local worlds that are incompletely secularized and counter secularized imaginaries with self-reflexivity, considered an extension of divine grace.

Adab and the ethical demand

The fall of Yugoslav Socialism and the subsequent Bosnian war (1992–1995) placed upon Bosnian Muslims a degree of an “epistemological questioning” and an “ethical demand” (Zigon, 2007:142) to re-examine their positionality as Muslim subjects in postwar Bosnia and have created the social, political, and cultural conditions from which an ethical demand for projects of religious self-cultivation has emerged (Kostadinova, 2018). According to the anthropologist Jarret Zigon (2007), the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981) defined the ethical demand as a “situationally sensitive” process. In other words, in certain situations, moral breakdowns in a society, conditioned by critical events (Das, 1995), would place a demand upon its people to renegotiate an ethical response as a way out of the crisis. The ethical response is therefore “related to the sociality of the demand” (Zigon, 2007:138), and it asks for an ethical imagination which responds to the current social and cultural conditions. Thus, adab emerges as a practical response to situations that are both formally qualified as “crisis” (i.e., postwar society, a polarized public sphere) and are quotidian crisis, events of potential conflict, friction, hurt feelings, disappointed ambitions, and misunderstanding. As an ethnographic and native category of ethical aspirations, adab resonates with Løgstrup’s concept of the ethical demand, which he positioned as a universal form of ethics. In other words, he envisioned care for others, in any way that they need, as a trust-building practice, upon which social and political capital can be founded, which does not exclude divine grace from the equation of social relations, but it does and can conceal public religiosity.

Løgstrup’s vision of the ethical demand invites to be understood as foundational to moral life, because it is of a relational character (Zigon, 2021). Its relational character points to an ontological scope which is concerned with the cultivation of human reflexivity as central to living well ethically. Its main concern is in asking what the position of the subject in the ethical demand is and how do we cultivate a subjectivity which is able to respond to such a demand. In resolving some of these dilemmas, Løgstrup was concerned with values such as trust, care, and mutual responsibility toward one another. As such, the ethical demand can be manifested in everyday life situations that can range from cultivating a friendship to neighborly relations and going to work to more challenging and demanding situations. All encounters with one another can ultimately unfold as ethical encounters. Thus, the demand in the ethical is not always vocal and visible, but rather resides in the subject’s recognition of the other as a beneficiary to the other’s expression of care, as some of the ethnographic examples show. “What is demanded” in other words is “that we act toward others in ways that will actually benefit them…” (Darwall, 2017:35). Recent anthropologies of Islam have accentuated this aspect of lived Islam through the concept of care for others. They have argued on renegotiating our understanding of Islamic piety and expressions of selfhood through an accent on everyday encounters with others as manifestations of divine grace (Henig, 2020; Mittermaier, 2014).

Writing on Bosnia’s postsocialist and postwar religious transformation, Henig (2020) examines this through the intertwining between local histories and the local understanding of lived Islam and argues that the experience of being Muslim is negotiated through the “ethics of proximity”. This means that ordinary everyday encounters between people, which respond to the ethical demand, are about God’s expression of care toward those in need. This understanding of God’s grace and mercy weaved through the local moral worlds in an everyday communal life reverberated in the stories and experiences of my Naqshbandi interlocutors as well, whereby showing care toward others was seen as the most supreme expression of lived Islam, and it therefore contemplated the religious experiences and practice as a form of social responsibility. Through the inculcation of reflexivity as an ethical disposition within a religious tradition, young Naqshbandi dervishes orient toward the social in a response to local postwar ethical demands while engaging in a continuous negotiation of enacting the sunna of the Prophet. Thus, we can conceive of adab ethnographically as a category of Muslim personhood (Mauss, 1938; Pina-Cabral, 2021) and therefore as an everyday social practice. The latter invites an engagement with aspects of religious embodiment as an emotionally and imaginatively led process, as the basis for the correct internalization of the Prophet’s sunna.

Adab and Muslim subjectivity

Adab has no Quranic reference but draws its meaning from the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammed (Salvatore, 2019). In the Bosnian local literature and in ethnographies and histories of Islam in Bosnia, adab is not given special treatment (e.g.: Bringa, 1995; Sorabji, 1989; Henig, 2016, 2020). In other parts of the Islamic world however, such as Southeast Asia for example, adab is used as a locus of ethnographic analysis of lived Islam and as a virtue which accentuates beautiful/noble behavior (Rozenhal, 2019), political culture in Malesya (Pepinsky, 2019), and the aesthetics of preforming Islamic musical arts in Indonesia (Rasmussen, 2019) but also on the relationship between humans and the environment as an increasing preoccupation with environmental ethics among Muslims (Gade, 2019). In Turkey, on the other hand, it has been investigated as a spatial negotiation of shared pilgrimages (Sparks, 2015) and as a culture of politeness in postsocialist Uzbekistan (Schmoller, 2017) and recently by Fabio Vicini’s analysis of the Suffa community in Istanbul as an example of the Prophet’s conduct (2023). Historically, Sufis “blended” the two traditions: that of the hadith and adab, which has contributed toward the emergence of various Sufi manuals whereby practices of Sufi adab are codified, producing their own discursivity on embodied religious subjectivities (Papas quoted in Salvatore, 2019:39). Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen writes that “The resilient notion of adab…has been in competition with the Salafi movement and with akhlaq’s ethics” since the early twentieth century and increasingly so today (2019: 1). The origin of the animosity is in the modernization processes at the turn of the twentieth century, when Islamic reformism was slowly replacing adab with akhlaq as the framework for Islamic ethics and morality.

As a critique of postcolonial reformism, which actively sought to marginalize Sufism from the religious landscape, adab has been deployed by several postcolonial thinkers, who have advocated for its reinstalment into the vocabulary of the Islamic canon. This bears a similarity to the Naqshbandi efforts to revitalize the meaning of adab locally, in their own process of restoring religious equilibrium and countering discourses of narrow interpretations of the prophetic sunna locally. In Indonesian Islamic culture, the prolific reformist Islamic thinker Hamka (1908–1981) spoke of the importance of adab in repairing societal moral crisis, in postcolonial Indonesia (Ali, 2019). Hamka divided Islamic ethics into inner and outer adab: “The inner adab takes the form of human relationships for the purpose of protection against unethical behavior. The expressions of the outer adab, by contrast, change according to different places and times, such as customary law…and courtesy…” (ibid 27). Hamka was critical of how postcolonial reformist Islam abnegated the Sufi traditions as an integral part of the Islamic canon and was a keen advocate for the restoration of Sufism in the modern age through a call for a “cosmopolitan reform” (Aljunied, 2017). His cosmopolitanism envisaged an Islamic canon that is integrative of difference and plurality, mediated in times of postcolonial moral crises through adab as a proper etiquette of civility and politeness (ibid). Similarly, Sayyid Muhammad al-Attas (b.1931) wrote about the loss of adab in the postcolonial era of Muslims in Southeast Asia, as generative to a social and political moral decline. This moral crisis he argued was caused by a decline of proper Islamic knowledge. In his book Islam and Secularism (1978), Al-Attas wrote that adab signifies more than just polite and beautiful behavior for its own sake and that over centuries it has helped shape habitus in Muslim societies, of which Sufi esoteric knowledge was a formative part. Al-Attas wrote that in a true sense of its meaning loss of adab represents:

a loss of discipline – of body, mind, and soul; the discipline that assures the recognition and acknowledgement of one’s proper place in relation to oneself, society, and Community; Since adab refers […] to self-discipline in positive and willing participation in enacting one’s role in accordance with that recognition and acknowledgement, its occurrence in one and in society reflects the condition of justice. Loss of adab implies loss of justice, which in turn betrays confusion in knowledge. In respect to the society and community, the confusion in knowledge of Islam and the Islamic world view creates the condition which enables false leaders [my emphasis] to emerge and to thrive causing the condition of injustice (quoted in Rozehnal, 2019:9; 2018:9).

Hamka and Al-Attas direct the attention toward the Muslim ecumene as a body that shares a common tradition through the long practice of adab and its role in observing the proper place of Islam in society. Their reasoning is evocative of Armando Salvatore’s analysis of the depth of the Islamicate tradition as a multifaceted integration of various discursive traditions that have cohered around a delicate and integrated relationship between adab and the hadith or between the centuries of learned wisdom and the normative religious practice (2007, 2019). The emergent split between the discursive normative and the translation of the normative into social practice is a loss of a critique of the inner self as the basis for a broader understanding of virtuous self-making, and it narrows the ethical imagination and a degree of personal hermeneutics, such as is bestowed to Muslims by the prophetic tradition. One such example is the way by which the Muslim virtue of modesty or al-haya has been misconstrued. Adab harbors a set of rules that can be qualified as expressions of modesty. A great amount of literature on Muslim self-making mostly revolved around the formation of al-haya as an Islamic virtue through the practice of hijab (see; Sehlikoglu, 2018), but this paper argues that the cultivation of al-haya is in fact part of a larger theory of self-making in the classical Arab literature. This literature includes various Sufi manuals and risalas for example that have been a part of different canons historically, giving an insight into Muslim personhood which dialogues with the larger literary and philosophical heritage of the religion whereby the ethical or pious self-making would be one of the many manifestations of a broader theory on the deep interconnections between the zahir (outer, manifested, visible) and batin (inner, invisible).

After describing the centrality of the “interlink between the external and internal selves”, Sehlikoglu (2020) explains how “zâhir is like an envelope for batin, surrounding and underlining its contents. That is, words contain meaning, body contains the soul, and clothes contain “edep” which refers to spiritual manners” (Ibid: 113). In other words, adab is not a “content in and of itself” but a rule for inner construction to interiorize to create the discourse and content of the message” (Mayeur-Jaouen & Patrizi, 2016: 5; Chiabotti et al., 2017). This core theory of self-making suggests a nuanced and a multi-layered approach of analysis to self-cultivation, which invites us to keep expanding the venues for ethical self-making in the lives of pious Muslims, to reflect not only the diverse textual sources from which Muslims draw upon, but also the role of piety in the engagement with others socially, and even to challenge our very views and limited conceptions of how Muslims manifest piety and everyday lived Islam.

Saba Mahmood’s work on women’s mosque study groups in Cairo and Charles Hirschkind’s work on the ethics of listening to tape-recorded sermons are two core texts against which some of these issues have been re-examined and most notably articulated agency against its popular liberal equation with resistance and autonomy (Mittermaier, 2012). In Mahmood’s reading, the agency of women she studied was less of a personally sourced platform for action, rather belonging to the authoritative discursive traditions they inhabited (Mahmood, 2005:32). Hirschkind made similar conclusions in his study among men who cultivated piety by listening to taped sermons. Both studies stressed the primacy of normative religious texts in embodying religious subjectivities (Soares & Osella, 2010; Lukens-Bull, 2016; Tapper, 1995) without paying due attention to everyday society. The everyday Islam literature on the other hand was skeptical of how Muslim subjectivity was described only from its religious commitments. This, they argued, leads to a negative portrayal of Muslim societies as being overly secluded in a “pious enclave” (Keane, 2014) detached from other ethical registers and social dynamics (Schielke, 2009, 2010). This ongoing opposition between being pious and living an everyday ordinary life (Fadil & Fernando, 2015; Fadil, 2011, 2017, 2019) has somewhat refused to acknowledge points of commensurability between one another. Lara Deeb however (2015) made an acute observation when she proposed that the argument between the pietist cultivation and everyday Islam becomes problematic only if “nonnormative ways of being are taken up as the only form of the everyday, as defining that category in the first place” and vice versa (Deeb, 2015:94).

Neither of the bodies of literature engages in a discussion of pious subjects as reflexive subjects who share the world with others and act accordingly in their everyday lives, regardless of their religious commitments, stirring away from engaging with other less authoritative practices, also part of the discursive tradition of Muslims, which play a role in pietist cultivation. Such marginal texts contain ethical codes of conduct and may be contemplated and analyzed as complementary to normative authoritative practices and discourses. By placing the focus on how those who are pious treat other less pious or less religious Muslims, we open to the creativity of witnessing how religious interiority is translated socially. Anthropologists who have investigated this relationship through the concept of transcendence have pointed toward the capacity of the inner self (batin) to converge “with modern epistemologies of self” and with its capacity for transcendence which are directed toward the social and thus seek to establish new forms of sociality (Abenante & Vicini, 2017; Werbner, 2017). Fabio Vicini (2017) offers one such example, by analyzing sources of discursivity that inform the inculcation of mediative reflection (tefekkür) among the Nur community and by reading the Risale of the revivalist Said Nursi Risale-i-Nur. Through pointing to different textual sources, and the virtue of mediation that the community cultivates through them, Vicini questions “the excessive focus on subjectification” via legalistic Islamic injunctions and norms and demonstrates how an idea of God is observable among practitioners through the accent on such “meditative practices” (2017).

By extending the scope of what we consider “discursive tradition”, an analytical space emerges for the exploration of interiority as a product of medieval Sufi cosmologies such as those of Ibn Arabi for instance. In a similar way, considerations of Sufi manuals on adab, and their generative power to immerse the imagination into different methods of contemplation of the relationship to divine authority, give way for an ethnographic excavation of Muslim interiorities whose religious anchorage extends beyond the official normative scripts. The nature of subjectification that emanates from such manuals is more sensitive and oriented toward social and interpersonal relationships, affirming an already established scholarship that has shown us how Islam manifests in relation to others in the world (Abenante & Cantini, 2014; Hefner, 2011; Marsden & Retsikas, 2012; Rasanayagam, 2010; Henig, 2020).

By allowing for the integration of religious commitment in everyday life, adab rearticulates religious subjectivity beyond text and discourse into the social and relational dimensions which are equally impactful upon subjectivity. Thinking of subjectivity both as a “state of mind of real actors embedded in the social world, and as cultural formations that … express, shape, and constitute those states of mind” (cf. Ortner, 2005 in Abenante & Cantini, 2014:4) converges modernity with “local moral worlds” (Kleinman et al., 1997). This in turn becomes a foundational starting point for the work on the self, laying the ground for an anthropology of subjectivity. In other words, it opens the terrain for the encounter of the religious with the social as an ongoing process of enfolding ethical encounters. It also helps with understanding the different emerging forms of sociality that arise from Sufi practices and their political ramifications. Thus, it widens the scope of piety as social practice at the nexus of convergence in the dialogue between zahir and batin, transcending religious normativity toward forms of sociality as an ontological relationship between self and world.

Cultivating and preforming adab

My interlocutors drew on notions of adab from Sufi texts that were written in the nineteenth century in Istanbul by a Sufi dervish called Muhamad Abdullah El-Hani in Arabic, who was a murid to Sheikh Mevlana Halid El-Bagdadi (c.1779–1827), the founder of a Naqshbandi Khalidi order. According to the translator of these pamphlets, Adab I and Adab II were texts that were foundational to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire ruling elites, who were influenced by Naqshbandi Sufi ethics, and a great number of them were practicing dervishes. The Bosnian translation, which seems to have appeared for the first time in 2000 in Zenica (city to the north of Sarajevo), is based on the Turkish and Latin transcription of the text which was printed in Istanbul in 1976. These texts are given to initiates as part of their ceremony when they give beyat or the oath of allegiance to their sheikh.

The ethical behaviors which murids use as guidelines from these texts vary from regulating relationships to oneself, to the sheikh, to the family, and to the community. Further, the texts outline the embodied norms during ritual zikr (Turkish, zikr; Arabic, dhikr) and sohbet (companionship in conversation) and the technologies of the body in relation to the sheikh, toward guests, and toward one another. In the instance of the pamphlets Adab I and Adab II, we witness another form of a discursive tradition (Asad, 1986) which emanates from a political and social historical period when the Ottoman Empire was undergoing reforms and transitions. The texts translate as a form of lived Islam expressed through the details in intersubjectivity—relations between self and other, self and country, self and self, and self and the material world.

While such codifications of practice, by the practitioners’ own admissions, serve as a guiding source on embodying certain rules and norms, their embodied transmission is more easily observable in the processes of communal life at the tekija (Sufi lodge). This is mirrored in the existing hierarchy between vekils (deputies to the sheikh), rehbers (deputies to the vekils), zakirbaša (ritual convenors), and then murids (disciples). The members higher in rank are considered to have a greater degree of adab and are therefore qualified to teach it and transmit it to others. These texts, however, are referential rather than definitive. Nevertheless, in the duration of my fieldwork, I was often referred to them to understand how I should practice adab in the sheikh’s presence or how to position myself as a guest in the lodge for example and how should I expect to be treated as a guest.

Reading through these pamphlets gave the impression that a lot of what murids referred to as adab pivoted around the body and body postures and mannerisms. It was a delicate balance between a reverential and submissive positionality of the body in relation both to authority and to one another. Of course, the actual practice of these rules was implemented in the presence of the sheikh and his vekils, but in their absence, murids would assume their casual interaction with one another. However, even in those casual interactions that I became so accustomed to during my fieldwork, there was a certain demeanor among practitioners and rules which were very seldom broken. In other words, there was a flow of conviviality which was greatly aided by the correct use of language and gesture toward one another. Practitioners liked to point out that when they speak of the individual actions and the character of the person, they would say “you have a good edep” or “your edep is beautiful”. In some instances, the sheikh would say “edep is the crown on the character of each person” or “the only competition among you should be in edep” starting with the “beauty” of one’s words and deeds to the way one preforms prayer. In either case, adab is tied into practice, and practice also refers to inner qualities of character, as in the cultivation of noble dispositions which are externalized through action and speech. This externalization of adab was equally employed in understanding and appreciating the traditions of others. Thus, they would say “it is edeb to respect the faith of others” or “it is edep to visit each other” referring to the traditional Bosnian form of sociality and neighborliness (Bringa, 1995).

When I asked dervishes in what ways can one describe adab and how it differs from akhlaq (religious morality/virtues), imam Halil told me: “edep is when you furnish your ahalk (Bos) (Ar. akhlaq) with finesse” or “edep is the beautification of the good deed” or as Halil continued when a good deed is performed with the:

finesse of ahlak, when a Muslim and especially a Sufi fascinates us with the finesse of noble behavior, for that person we say he is edebli. So ahlak equals noble behavior but edeb equals the finesse of noble behavior or when someone had developed this noble behavior to details, for example not one word [he says] is in excess or lacking. Edep is putting each word in its place, governing your gaze so as not to offend someone [by the way you look at them], not to hurt someone with your gaze or your words.

In Halil’s explanation, adab strengthens akhlaq (Islamic morality) and acts as a refined presentation of one’s faith to others. It carries an emotional value for the purpose of stimulating and nurturing relationships in the communication of Islamic knowledge. According to these descriptions, adab can be summarized as the externalization of religious piety, or how dervishes articulate and preform piety, without being overly and visibly religious in everyday encounters. The following ethnographic vignette illustrates how normative piety and adab cohere around one another. It presents an encounter between a pious veiled woman and a man who is not a practicing Muslim.

During my fieldwork, I regularly participated in hizmet (service, preparing the mosque and the tekija for the weekly programs) with the younger women. One Saturday morning, the courtyard was quite busy as several male construction workers had come to assess and plan for a forthcoming work on the mosque. Among them was a middle-aged construction worker trying to start a conversation with some of the busy young women, who were shy and were not used to foreign male attention. He eventually found a willing listener in an older practitioner. While she was walking toward the women in the mosque with some cleaning material to hand to them, he stopped her and said: “today covered women are not all sincere. They are politically used. Some women get three hundred marka (Bosnian currency) to wear the hijab”, he said. The man was referring to the numerous media reports and talks in town about the perception that the niqab and hijab were sponsored by foreign embassies, taking advantage of the economic precarity of some Bosniak women, in exchange for adopting the veil.

He went on to say that “some women who are covered, buy alcohol and the faithful (pravi vjernici) are having the hardest of times”, thus implying a critique of the intention (Ar. Niyah. Bos. Nijet) toward those who have adopted the niqab/hijab. The woman was patiently listening to him, even at what seemed like an insult to her wearing the hijab. Having gotten her full attention, he changed the tone of the conversation and started to talk about his wartime experience: “I was a prisoner of war. I was imprisoned in Foča for two and a half years”. At that point, one male dervish who was on tea-making duty emerged carrying a tray of tea and offered it to them. The woman courteously accepted the tea and invited the man to sit down with her to carry on with the conversation. The man accepted the hospitality, and as if mellowing his voice, he continued recounting his imprisonment in Foča, a municipality in Eastern Bosnia, heavily affected by the war and ethnic cleansing, which came under the control of the Bosnian Serb Army in 1992. Had he not known how to be a plumber, he probably would have been killed, and he was kept alive because he was useful to the Bosnian Serb police, soldiers, and paramilitaries in “fixing things for them”. He then moved on to ask her if she has a family, but without waiting for an answer, he started to speak about his own family and grandchildren and how much joy they bring into his life. The talk went on for a while, and when he finished talking, he stood up and said goodbye.

At that moment, Imam Halil walked out and told me that what I observed was very rare: “Did you see how she stopped and left everything to listen to him. This is very rare, not many people can catch themselves in the moment and do this, leave everything, and devote attention to someone who needs it. This is a greater hizmet (service) than cleaning the mosque. This is edep” he told me. By coincidence, throughout the time that I was observing the event, I was thinking how incredibly courteous of my young friends it was not to take offense at the way in which the man was talking about the hijab. I told Halil later that this too must have been “edep”, to which he smiled and said: “It is edep, not to show off your edep”. In this example, the woman communicates and articulates her piety through what in the anthropology of ethics is known as practical judgment (phronesis) or valuation (Lambek, 2015; Stauth & Schielke, 2008:97), coinciding with Barbara Metcalf’s classical definition of adab as “valuation” (1984). She at once communicates with the man an understanding of his point of view on the hijab/niqab as well as compassion for his wartime suffering. It is through her refusal to show resistance to his treatment of veiled women that she succeeds in attracting him to a conversation. In this, she performed ethics, and she was a good human being. The way in which she perceived this as an immediate duty made her leave all her other work to extend hospitality to accommodate his need to talk stirring the situation from a potentially conflictual to an ethical encounter.

This everyday ordinary interaction is illustrative of what the anthropologist Amira Mittermaier called the ethics of immediacy (2014). In her research among the Cairo poor with the owner of khidma (Sufi kitchen), Mittermaier attends to the ways in which acts of divine generosity are mediated and expressed through the immediacy of serving food to the poor and those in need of a place to stay. Set against the events that took place in Tahrir Square in postrevolutionary Cairo, where lack of social justice is a pressing political and social issue, Mittermaier illustrates how the work of khidma provides a template for what radical social equality looks like, whereby the “ethics of immediacy that is embodied in seemingly non-revolutionary everyday practices … also emerges from stories about Tahrir as a space of togetherness and solidarity” (73). Similarly, in Bosnia, the shared experience of war and the ongoing political crises where compensations and solidarity with victims and survivors have been slow, the tekija emerges as one such place of solidarity, whereby bearing witness to one’s life story amounts to acts of servanthood to those in different needs. In this instance, adab represents an expression of care toward others. Anthropologists writing about care emphasize that “multiple understandings of care” accentuate “relationality and activity” as a social practice, emerging from “social activities” as “morally/ethically framed relationships with others and oneself” (Black, 2018:80). These embodied set of actions are relational and as imam Halil explained earlier in this conversation, adab is communicated through gesture, facial expression, and body orientation (Goodwin, 2015). It fortifies akhlaq and, for the pious Muslim, serves to communicate their faith to others. The ethical imagination as a property of adab is almost identical to the way in which akhlaq regulates human behavior and relationships. However, whereas akhlaq signifies an exclusively religious category, adab is more flexible in its deployment in the social world.

Among my interlocutors, the lack of care as a basic ground for the conduct of everyday human affairs has become an overly pronounced feature of Sarajevan local life. This was identified as a distinctly entrenched postwar societal malaise that was corrosive to local solidarity and the cultivation of local socialites. The man in the earlier vignette already gave an insight into how he perceived the divisions between the “real believers” and those who only act piously but do so for other interests. Locals perceive that such interest coheres around becoming religious for financial benefits (Bećirević, 2016; Hesova, 2021). This lack of trust among Muslims themselves is manifested intra-religiously, among Bosnian Muslim groups, who attack each other in highly inflammatory terms on social media, and at times in mosques. Going back to the opening ethnographic vignette with Imam Fahrudin whose aim was to lead a mosque with a Sufi orientation and to be an imam with a “beautiful approach” and to “call upon people” is yet another expression of Mittermeier’s concept of the ethics of immediacy. For Fahrudin, the mosque should be a place for ethical encounters regardless of who these people may be, emphasizing the need for people to acknowledge each other’s shared suffering and religious choices—not to consider oneself above the suffering of the other, or think of oneself as a better Muslim than the other, an act dervishes associated with oholost or pride. In particular, the sin of pride was contemplated as a social ill because of one’s superiority over others: “It was the first sin” Imam Halil told me that “Iblis committed in heaven, by refusing to bow down to Allah, thinking he is better than the rest of creation”. The sin of pride, while starting off as a discussion surrounding “who is the better Muslim”, also mirrors local discussions of economic and social competitions, whereby it is not only about who is the better Muslim, but also who is better educated, who has more money, who wears better clothes, and even who performs more hizmet (service) at the tekija which often ends in gossip or backbiting, (Bosnian, gibet; Arabic, ghibah).

As an ethical virtue, adab could be also ascribed to non-Muslim or a non-religious person too who shares a similar ethics of care toward others, but for a Sufi Muslim, it had a very strong religious connotation, and therefore, a proper adab weaves Islamic norms and obligatory duties expressed in a manner of lived Islam. Fahrudin once explained that the obligatory or the farz in Islam, on its own, is not always necessarily edebli, but when the obligatory was performed beautifully, when Islamic piety was directed toward others in an expression of ethics and care, then one was indeed cultivating Sufism. This extended into the way in which the Prophet’s own performance of duty and faith were imagined:

But what else is next to edep? the complete sunna, the practice of the Prophet, in every domain of life, all that the Prophet did. The sunna is the keeper of the farz [the obligatory in Islam]. Farz is a Divine command, the sunna is the practice of the Prophet, or the way in which he lived his faith. But for us, to live faith in this way, we must uphold edep. We cannot just grab/hold on to Divine obligations [farz] alone, because next to Divine obligations is sunna, the practice of the Prophet.

In other words, the imagination of adab is projected and expressed as a love for the Prophet’s sunna, and one is not so much cultivating adab in an abstract sense, but rather one learns to imagine how to preform Islamic duties in the best way possible, in emulation of the Prophet’s sunna. Thus, adab is less about the theological differences in the interpretation of Islam and more about the way it is performed, and it represents a distinguished Sufi imprint on Islamic orthopraxy. As Paolo Pinto writes

“the Sufi understanding of adâb does not imply simple compliance with rules of civility or social behavior but is rather the expression of inner qualities of the self. It must be embodied as guiding disposition of all concrete actions and choices of the murîd, expressed in his posture, gestures, glances, and emotional states. The murîd must behave with humility, always casting his eyes down when interacting with his shaykh…He must be restrained in his gestures, never raising his voice, or expressing uncontrolled emotional states. On top of all this, he must always have love (ḥubb) in his heart for God and for his shaykh, as well as being aware of his actions to ensure that they be honest and righteous.” (Pinto, 2006: 44)

Pinto describes adab similarly to Imam Halil earlier in the text, and both descriptions lead toward an identical conclusion that the Islamic virtue of modesty and humility—al-haya is about a wide range of expressions of decency and modesty. Restoring the term to its broader significance in the Muslim self-making process helps us reclaim a degree of balance in the ethnographic approaches to the study of Muslim virtues. Such an approach can also be contemplated as a critique of the existing canonical literature of the anthropology of Islam, which has come to associate al-haya for example, with women veiling practices, and ascribe a gendered meaning to it. One of the methodological ways through which we can extend this dialogue is by observing how obligatory and legalistic rules help shape a person’s adab and how al-haya is central to what murids called “being edebli” as in being of a noble character, which includes virtues like modesty with the opposite being edepsuz which in local colloquial Bosnian stands for an undisciplined and abrasive behavior, which dervishes often ascribed to people who aggressively proselytized Islam and engaged in public polemics in dismissing the practices of other Muslims, such as Sufis, as bida or inventions and engaging in apostasy. These public polemics in postwar Bosnia conveniently though wrongly framed through the binary “Sufis and Salafis” (see Mamdani, 2004, as an example) evoke early twentieth-century postcolonial debates, already discussed early in this paper. In the sheikh’s own considerations, the loss of adab which is foundational to acquiring proper Islamic knowledge in a lived everyday dynamic can be seen as the root cause of intra-religious divisions among Muslims, which results in the frequent attacks of one Muslim group toward another through oholost or pride, whereby one Muslim group considers itself more righteous, better Muslim, than others. In his sermons, he often spoke of the “condition of the umma” in relation to Bosnian Muslims and to the refugee crisis which had engulfed Europe due to the Syrian and other Middle Eastern wars and the Islamic State suicide bombings that took place in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels in March 2016. The sheikh emphasized that it was Muslims who made other Muslims suffer because they had lost adab. Echoing Islamic scholars and historians such as al-Attas above, the sheikh pointed toward the need to look for the cause of crisis among Muslims inwardly and on the role of the individual believer in cultivating community relationships:

Lately, I am using every opportunity to point to the condition of the umma, what goes on between them, and what is worse, that the umma is at war with itself that people persecute one another, and this is unbelievable. What should we be changing, and what should we be building, how can we change the relations between us? Allah instructed us: ‘Allah will not change the conditions of a people, until people change what is in themselves.’ This is exactly why I would like to talk about us, about our jamaats, about the Sufi brotherhood, about this fatherland. We too fall in such states, but we must observe wisdom not to fall into sickness…sick states are the cause of our ugly deeds because of our lower self / nefs.

The sheikh’s sermon reflects al-Attas’s main concern that cultures and civilizations thrive when interpersonal relationships are nurtured and maintained, and the social role of the mosque in postsocialist Bosnia has lost its appeal in aiding the restoration of adab as an expression of a distinct Bosnian Muslim sociality and therefore of the very nature of lived Islam, as Fahrudin spoke at the beginning of this paper. To manifest adab in a wider social context, one needs to first start from rebuilding their own communities, to evoke al-Attas, to establish the “proper place in relation to oneself”, or “to put order in oneself” in the words of the sheikh. As such, the sheikh was calling on his jamaat not to enact public hostilities toward “other Muslims who are our brothers”. The linguistic installation of the idiom of adab as a public virtue comes as a responsibility in the name of the public good as an expression of a religiously infused interiority and subjectivity or what Hamka called guided reason. Guided reason does not emanate from the rational study of Islamic texts alone, but from a deeply felt, embodied spiritual orientation of the self, that is cultivated in ritual as much as in rational thinking. Hamka cautioned against the view that reason is on a par with revelation arguing that the very limits of reason can be an obstacle to truly comprehending the sacred (Aljunied, 2017). Good character, humility, and modesty are the pre-conditions for the enunciation of the sacred and therefore to guided reason.

Through the ethnographic analysis of adab as an embodied virtue, which shows a different engagement with discourses on the Prophet’s sunna applied in everyday interactions in and outside of the tekija and the mosque, we can conceive of “ethical imaginations” that are locally inflected and specific to the context and the moral worlds of our research subjects (Long & Moore, 2012:114). In paying attention to how moral and ethical values are subjected to inculcating reflexivity that pivots around the Islamicate tradition of adab (Salvatore, 2019), we can locate a social responsibility within the individual responsibility as a self-critique and therefore as a wider critique toward the mobilization of an Islamic theological canon for political purposes, whereby the state is tasked for managing and controlling everyday differences. As Naqshbandi dervishes show, the latter is seldom at the service of the local and immediate shared worlds of people’s everyday lives. Becoming a good Muslim is no different than being a good person, and the role of the tekija in the education of the spiritual heart, as sheikh Hulusi often emphasized, is formative in this upbringing (Bos. odgoj). In the duration of my fieldwork, many dervishes made a distinction between the mosque and the tekija by accentuating the spiritual role of the tekija. The sheikh liked to call religious life in a tekija “an education of the heart” as he once told me: “Among the multitude of institutions today in Islamic education none of them deals with the heart. The tekija educates [odgaja] the heart”. The sheikh and his murids referred to the combined approach to Islam from the past which rested upon its shariatic/legalistic and spiritual dimensions but also a degree of parental-like nurturing in the acquisition of faith, as Imam Fahrudin noted earlier “people practice but nobody serves it to them beautifully”. Murids argued that such practice was maintained in Bosnia in places called hanika, specialized for the study of spiritual Sufi disciplines. Until the 1950s, those used to be integral parts of Islamic education (Kulanić, 2015 before the Yugoslav authorities, banned their work. Thus, what Naqshbandis in Sarajevo question today is the nature of the odgoj (religious pedagogies) in postwar Bosnia, which has excluded the emotional and spiritual component in the Islamic pedagogic upbringing, of becoming a Muslim. Sufi ritual plays an important role in this upbringing. They felt that such disruption of Islamic upbringing has given fertile ground for the emergence of conservative Muslim groups whose teachings do not mirror the way Bosnian Muslims have practiced Islam for centuries.

This takes the discussion back to Imam Fahrudin’s desire to be a “different kind of imam” and to lead a “mosque with a Sufi orientation”. Juxtaposed to Saba Mahmood’s Cairo Mosque movement whereby Islamic cultural politics are embedded within the domain of religious agency, the mosque with a Sufi orientation invites for a rearticulation of the political as an expression of local solidarity and care and toward adab as a virtue that mediates both dawah or proselytization efforts and the embodiment of al-haya (modesty). Turning toward the spirituality of piety, Niloofar Haeri’s recent ethnography (2020) on women and prayer in postrevolutionary Iran holds a mirror to the many ways by which Islamist governmentality has uprooted the function of the mosque as a place for ethics and care and narrowed the diverse religious knowledge and therefore the imagination of how believers relate to their religion and experience their everyday social and moral worlds. Like my Sarajevan interlocutors, Haeri places a great value on the knowledge of the divine, locally known as erfan which among other has been shaped and formulated by the century-old Sufi poetry and theosophy. The group of women she followed came of age in 1979, around the same time as the revolution, and have spent their childhoods learning the poetry of Islamic mystics as a particular form of child-rearing pedagogy, before it was banned. The poetic imagination, as Haeri points out, is pivotal in these women's approach to prayer, and it serves as a critique of the overaccentuated legalistic and clerical Islam that dominates postrevolutionary Iran. Critique manifests through how they engage in personal hermeneutics in their relation to the Quran and obligatory prayer, with an individuated voice, whereby reciting Quranic verses in prayer is as pleasurable as reciting a poem.

As an exercise of reformulating the role of the imagination in embodying religious norms, we will do well to revisit anthropologies of Islam that have sought to illustrate the heterogenous ways by which Muslims embody and cultivate their faith. Whether through more recent examples of the experience of God’s transcendence as an embodied emotion (Abenante & Vicini, 2017; Werbner, 2017) or indeed through dreaming (Ewing, 1990, 1997) or dance among the Muslims in Chitral in Pakistan’s North West frontier (Marsden, 2005), or the different discursive traditions which inform pious self-making (Vicini, 2017, 2023), we ought to highlight how the personal experience of divine reality is cohering around a degree of individual hermeneutics and thus presents a critique of a canon cohering around Islamist governmentality. Bosnia’s inter-imperial, postwar, and postsocialist trajectories share much in common with other geographies of the Muslim world where political and social disruptions have decisively altered the religious landscape and have marginalized long traditions of Islamic knowledge. This paper is a call toward a more concentrated effort for an ethnographic analysis of the various local conceptualizations of adab in other Muslim societies as well, where different examples of ethical imaginations can be mapped. Such imaginations, we may discover, emanate from a desire to share the world with others in the manner of being a good person (insan) and preforming Islam through the accent on good deeds, thus mapping the ethical as a relational process (Zigon, 2021). The latter converges religion with the everyday encounter with the other via the practice of valuation of judgment, care, and ethics as pivotal human virtues.