U RALJAMA “DEGENERACIJE I[LI] NUŽDE”. PRILOG ISTRAŽIVANJU MUSLIMANSKOG ŽENSKOG PITANJA U BOSNI I HERCEGOVINI POD AUSTROUGARSKOM UPRAVOM
IN THE JAWS OF “DEGENERATION AND [OR] URGENCY”. A CONTRIBUTION TO RESEARCH OF THE MUSLIM WOMEN’S ISSUE IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA UNDER THE AUSTRO HUNGARIAN RULE

Summary/Abstract: The article tells about the Muslim women’s issue in the years of the First World War and the tribulations of the religious and political elite of the Bosnian Muslims – Bosniaks – in their efforts to protect the traditional moral character of a Muslim woman and stop or slow down the social trends that led to distancing of female generations from a deeply entrenched notion of a virtuous and withdrawn wife, mother and homemaker. Although the crisis of traditional morality was an inevitable consequence of modernization processes which with the arrival of the Austro-Hungarian rule took place in urban areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was only the First World War that seriously confronted the Muslim society to the extent and implications of the “decline of the Muslim womanhood” which faced extreme difficulties trying to overcome the social problems and moral challenges brought by the reality of the war. Although a part of the elite insisted on the negative impact of European culture as a factor of the present “degeneration” of Muslim women, in the last year of the war the majority of the leading figures of Bosniaks was aware of the fact that the relativity of female morality was primarily a result of the misery and poverty of the war time and not the targeted distancing of Muslim women from the Islamic principles, even though some often pointed to weak religious and home upbringing as a factor that facilitated her moral degradation. By the end of the war the Muslim society only managed to get to know the extent of women’s problems, with no visible effects in the field of concrete solutions.

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