As you know this is a town of mixed religions, but the sight which is most dominant on the horizon is the minarets of the mosques. It is amazing how many of them there are, but more amazing how near they are to each other. How do you choose which one to attend? Are they zoned like schools, or is it just the family favourite, best preacher, most beautiful?? A plethora of choices.
I head straight across the trickling waters of the Miljacka river and into Careva Mosque, a beautiful oasis of calm in a busy city. I have my shawl in my bag to cover my shoulders and head – you see, I have played this game before. Across the courtyard where a man is washing his feet, remove my shoes and am greeted by a man who wants to escort me into the building and explain life to me.
I make the mistake of initially speaking Croatian and he launches into a lengthy explanation in Bosnian which I cannot keep up with – when I explain this to him, he shrugs his shoulders and swaps to a mixture of English and Bosnian. This mosque was built in 1457 and then had work and additions after a fire in 1566 - by order of Suljeman the Great (smattering of Turkish history required here).
Now, this is where I am getting to the good bit, because he explained something to me which hitherto I had not (clearly) understood. Listen carefully and it will all become clear..
He explained that the men come regularly to the mosque to pray – the first call to pray is at dawn and they need to hightail it to the mosque before the sun comes up: the basic requirement is to come back five times during the day to pray, with bonus points if you manage to get there six times. The reason for coming to the mosque rather than throwing up a heartfelt prayer wherever you happen to be at the required time, is that a prayer at the mosque is worth twenty seven times more than a heartfelt but ungrounded prayer. You didn’t know that there was a ledger, but there is! Imagine the maths – it would have been easier if it had been a round number like 20…
Anyway….then he carefully explained what the slightly elevated spaces at the rear of the mosque were for – the women, of course. The women (he carefully explained) had to sit at the back, not as some thought, because they were lesser citizens, or less important, but because men being men… it was perhaps harder to concentrate on their prayers because they could be distracted. Ahem. Of course.
The space for the women was (I carefully mentioned) smaller than the space for the men. Much smaller.
This (and you need to read this part slowly because I am writing it slowly so that you get the full impact of what I am saying) is because the women don’t come to the mosque to pray as often as the men. Because. And their prayers count no matter where they send them from.
The ‘because’ is (and I quote) ‘because they are busy. Women have many roles (I’m still quoting here) – they are wives, they are mothers, they need to do the housework, and some of them need to work. Some of them need to work because women doctors (for example) are needed so that women don’t have to attend men doctors. If they had to go to men doctors they would have to have a man to accompany them, and the men are busy (I’m still quoting..). So there are four reasons why women are too busy to come to the mosque to prayer with the same regularity as the men. Also (still quoting) women take so long to put their make-up on each time they leave the house that they would not get to the mosque on time (chuckling to himself as he tells me this..). Unquote.
He said that it was difficult for women because they need to be accompanied by a male family member before they are married. And then he explained that even for him talking to me it was a problem, which was why he remained standing in the doorway where his colleagues could see us….
Having said all of this though, I understand that the Muslim faith in Sarajevo is a lot less stringent than elsewhere in the world, although friends of mine who used to live in Sarajevo say that it was not an everyday sight twenty years ago to see women in scarves, and certainly not in the full burqua. Times are a changing – the whisperers would have it that overseas funding is being funneled into the mosques for education and to help rebuild the damage done to mosques in the recent war – and
recimo, there is always a quo for any quid given.
So there you are my dears – now you understand it all.
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