ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book refrains from employing dichotomies such as West versus East and Europe versus Islam that saturate our contemporary discourse on pluralism, cosmopolitanism and cultural values. It traces a typology of commemorative rituals within Bosnian Islam to achieve a wider understanding of how relationships with the dead endure and transform under different historical, ritual, and spiritual conditions. The book discusses important religious shifts occurring in the eighteenth century that manifested as Islamisation of the funerary text and its standardisation along Ottoman Islamic norms. Historical emphasis is placed on the first two centuries of the Ottoman rule, arguing that there was Ottomanisation but hardly Islamisation of commemorative culture. The book focuses on the relationship between the living and the dead. Memory of the dead is the key for this relationship to exist and be expressed.
