Remaking Muslim Lives by David Henig

Author:David Henig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2020-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

Praying and Witnessing

“I remember the time,” Aiša told me, “when my husband was injured during the war. It was in 1994, and I prayed hajr-dove [for good luck] every day until he was cured. Elhamdulillah [thanks to Allah], God was merciful and made his life easier again.” While talking to me in her house, Aiša was holding a pocket-size book of Zbirka dova (collection of prayers), which also contained the dova for good luck. Aiša’s grandmother gave her the book when she was a teenager back in the 1980s. Aiša keeps the book along with the Qur’an wrapped in a cloth on a top shelf in her living room. She turns to the book and recites the prayers whenever she seeks divine intervention for her family or herself in moments of crisis. The vicissitudes of her life that have led her to search for an intervention have been multiple. They include personal illnesses or those of family members, debts and unemployment, stress and anxiety, school exams, prolonged family separation, or protection from the war. Time and again, I observed in the Zvijezda highlands the way that past experiences of hardship during the war, and economic predicaments and marginalization in the postwar years, are entwined with searching for divine intervention and assistance mediated by dova in a similar way to that described by Aiša on that afternoon in her house.

By a twist of fate, I became acquainted with Sadeta, a dream-healer living in the Sarajevo suburbs, early on in my fieldwork (see Edgar and Henig 2010). I found out about her services around the same time by sheer coincidence from friends in Sarajevo and the Zvijezda highlands who did not know one another. My friends were all flocking to the kitchen table in her apartment in search of help. When I pointed out this serendipity to Sadeta, her calm reaction was that God wanted me to meet her.1 Indeed, people and dreams come to Sadeta rather than her seeking them out. I have had opportunities to meet with Sadeta on numerous occasions since our first coffee in 2009. Without any prompting during our first conversation, Sadeta brought up the theme of the Bosnian war and the divine intervention mediated by the dova:

Once during the war I attended a tevhid where I talked to a hafiz [a person who memorized the Qur’an by heart] about my dreams. Afterward he said, “now I’ll give you a special dova against sihir [sorcery].” We had never seen each other before! He realized that I had a gift from God to help people. Then he wrote down the prayer, which needed to be repeated seventy-seven times, and also wrote down his telephone number and told me to return fifteen days later. During these two weeks I dreamed one night about an old woman and she told me, “pray … and don’t be afraid of shells, bullets, or anything.” You need to understand that it was during the war, my husband was old and ill, and I had to go out every day to fetch water and food.

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