Seeking blessing and earning merit: Muslim travellers in Bosnia-Herzegovina

In this chapter, we discuss the significance of journeys to sacred sites, in search of blessing and fortune, within the rich sacred landscape of Bosnia’s Muslims. First, we argue that the study of pilgrimage should be opened to a discussion of the place of pilgrimages in a larger sacred geography of visitations and ritual activities. Second, we are critical of the exclusive attention to identity politics in recent studies of Islamic practices in Bosnia and propose to focus on the web of relations between Bosnian Muslims’ cosmologies, the notions of selfhood and ongoing histories of sacred spaces.