In December 1944, shortly after liberation, Šefkija Selimović, an officer in the Yugoslav Partisan army, was court martialed and sentenced to death by his comrades. While in charge of handling property recovered from the occupation of his home town, he had appropriated a bed, a closet, a chair and other trifles to replace items from his own plundered residence. He wasn’t spared by his rank in the Partisans, or by having come from a prominent family whose seven children had joined the communist resistance. On the contrary, these facts may well have served to condemn him—killed as an example that revolutionary justice was both harsh and indiscriminately applied. Many citizens of Tuzla felt Šefkija’s brothers could have tried harder to save him.Some twenty years later, younger brother Meša transformed this family tragedy into an ambitious novel of politics, psychology, and moral failure, a modernist masterpiece that stands as one of the best novels to emerge from the Balkans.2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Death and the Dervish (Derviš i Smrt). Set in an unnamed 18th century Bosnian town (presumably Sarajevo) during Ottoman rule, the story is told by Ahmed Nuruddin, the spiritual leader of a small Sufi monastery, and centers on his attempts to save a brother who has been imprisoned for unknown reasons. Translated by Bogdan Rakić and Stephen M. Dickey and published in English by Northwestern University Press in 1996, Death and the Dervish was the best-selling book of the excellent, in some corners legendary, and now sadly defunct, Writings from an Unbound Europe series.It has often been said—including on the back cover of the English translation—that Death and the Dervish provides a window to the soul of Bosnian Muslims. Given the book’s quintessentially Bosnian context, this is an understandable claim. But there is good reason to question how much the novel reveals about Bosnian Muslims and to ask instead what it has to say about its fundamental subject: the conduct of man in a moment of fear and moral predicament. After all, unlike Ivo Andrić’s Nobel-winning Bridge on the Drina, Selimović’s novel is concerned with individual, not national, character. The novel’s fundamental concern is power: its pervasiveness in social relations and the lack of it in Ahmed Nuruddin’s character. I’m less certain that the book provides a recognizable portrait of Bosnian Muslims than I am that a seminar on Foucault could be taught from its pages.Koranic references in the novel are employed “ironically,” Selimović has said, and primarily serve as a symbol for dogma. Theological debates have been repurposed, adapted, and occasionally invented wholesale. Islam grants the story a sense of historical positioning, and it animates the existential struggle within Ahmed Nuruddin. Most interestingly, however, Islam provides the framework for the language games of persuasion and influence. Consider this exchange between Ahmed Nuruddin and the kadi (judge) who has signed the order to imprison his brother:
I tried to draw him into a human conversation, to make him say something, anything at all, about himself, about me, about my brother, but it was all in vain; he only spoke through the Koran. And alas, he was also speaking about himself, about me, and about my brother. […]When I said why I had come, he answered with a passage from the Koran:Those who believe in God and the Last Judgment do not associate with the enemies of Allah and His prophet, even if they are their fathers, or their brothers, or their kindred. […]“I know my brother well—he couldn’t have done anything wrong.”Do not help or aid the infidel.“He’s my brother for God’s sake!”If your fathers, sons, brothers, wives, and families are dearer to you than God, His prophet, and the struggle on the path to His righteousness, do not expect His mercy.O faithful ones, avoid suspicion and slander, because slander and suspicion are sinful.I was the one who said that.
The Koran here is a rhetorical tool for the pursuit of private interests—a hopeful lever of change for the supplicant, a source of justification for the powerful. Insofar as the novel has something to say about Islam or Muslims, particularly today, this is a point worth remembering. What may appear or is presented to us as a matter of theology, couched in religious doctrine and reasoning, is in fact often little more than a thin cover for the attainment and exercise of power. Selimović writes about Islam not to tell us about the workings of the Muslim mind, but to tell us about the operation of ideology. (Closer to home, it’s interesting to reflect on the way that freedom and democracy serve this role in our own society. Whether the objective is to expand civil rights or start a war, to sell boatloads of guns or buy elections with private money, the appeal for legitimacy is often made on these terms.)Meša was born Mehmedalija Selimović in 1910, one of several children of a wealthy Muslim family. His father was “a man of action and adventure, an optimistic man, capable and resilient,” who loved hunting, gambling, women, drink, and horses and dogs above all. He lived “easily, leisurely, quite irresponsibly,” and provided for the family through the sale of inherited properties. By the time of his death in 1936, he had gambled away the family fortune. Towards his children, the father was strict and aloof. In Memories, his idiosyncratic, untranslated autobiography from which much of this information is drawn, Meša recalls his feelings of neglect. On one occasion, while he lay bedridden with pneumonia, his father did not visit him once. Another time, when both son and dog were ill, the father called upon a veterinarian but again showed no interest in the health of his son. Meša’s mother, devout, illiterate, and withdrawn, adored her husband and suffered because of him. The father, like Meša himself, was not religious. Major holidays were observed, but Meša’s sisters were at the vanguard of adopting European clothing styles in Tuzla, writes Radovan Popović, Meša’s biographer.Meša’s father served as inspiration for the character of Hassan in Death and the Dervish. Renouncing his wealth and status to live as a caravan driver, the free and magnanimous Hassan occurs as a contrast to the tormented Ahmed Nuruddin. The novel begins and ends with the sheikh’s betrayal of Hassan: first, to save his brother; later, to save himself. A portrait of a sincere and meaningful friendship emerges between these shameful bookends. Different as they are, the two men share an evident affection for one another, and each tries to understand his friend on his own terms. Through Hassan, Ahmed Nuruddin learns of the reason for his brother’s captivity—working for the kadi, he had “found the transcripts of [a] man’s interrogation, written before he was interrogated, before he was imprisoned” and later executed. The same night of this conversation, Hassan leaves behind a gift, a finely bound book whose name Ahmed had once mentioned and forgotten. The sheikh’s gratitude will be familiar to all who have been so lucky:
It is hard to believe, but it is true: I was deeply moved. Because someone had remembered me. For no reason, not out of any need, from the goodness of his heart or maybe as a joke. So you see, then, how even an old hardened dervish, who thought that he had overcome his small weaknesses, can be bought with attention. But it seems that such weaknesses do not die so easily. And they are not small, either.
All these big and small things gather to make the sheikh’s final betrayal of Hassan all the more devastating and morally damning. We hold out hope for a final act of courage, the sheikh’s moral line in the sand, but Ahmed Nuruddin doesn’t have the character to draw it. To save his own skin he casts into the sea everything that’s dear, all in vain. The swell is rising and he, too, will be washed away.In 1929, the year that King Aleksandar declared dictatorship over the Kingdom of Yugoslavia—renamed from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to signal the ambition of achieving a single, united nation and people—Selimović moved to Belgrade to pursue university studies. Meša’s politics were already an interesting, idiosyncratic case study in the nuances of Bosnian identity. A self-identified Serb throughout his life, Selimović appears to have been fairly supportive of the King’s politics at a time when such positions were rare for someone of his background.As detailed by historian Christian Axboe Nielsen, the reforms introduced by King Aleksandar’s dictatorship only served to further alienate his diverse citizenry. In large ways and small, by way of policy and also by neglect, implicit bias, and local circumstance, “the new Yugoslav idea was founded on Serbian cultural symbols and beliefs”; the regime’s ideology “remained, in the end, Yugoslav-cum-Serbian.” In the most significant example, declaration of the dictatorship was accompanied by an announcement of new administrative districts. These revealed a clear intention to dilute non-Serb influence. Bosnia and Herzegovina was affected especially, its regional autonomy abolished without equivalent representation in the new territorial allocation. Of the nine new provinces that made up the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Serbs constituted the majority in six, Croats in two, and Muslims in none.In this context, the development of Meša Selimović’s political attitude was a rare successful case from Belgrade’s perspective. Having traced his own lineage back to a couple brothers who converted to Islam for pragmatic, i.e. material, reasons, Meša viewed Islam as a harmful foreign influence. He held its adoption responsible for a supposedly uprooted, impoverished sense of self, the root of various ailments that he diagnosed in Bosnian culture. The whole of Death and the Dervish contains exactly three short passages that riff on the Bosnian psyche as such, but these are the most famous passages in the novel—deeply resonant to many readers and quoted on endless Bosnian and Selimović-themed websites and chatrooms:
So what are we then? Lunatics? Wretches? The most complicated people on the face of the earth. (…) Until yesterday we were what we want to forget today. But we haven’t become anything else. We’ve stopped halfway on the path, dumbfounded. We have nowhere to go any more. We’ve been torn away from our roots, but haven’t become part of anything else. Like a tributary whose course has been diverted from its river by a flood, and no longer has a mouth or a current; it’s too small to be a lake, too large to be absorbed by the earth. With a vague sense of shame because of our origins, and guilt because of our apostasy, we don’t want to look back, and have nowhere to look ahead of us. Therefore we try to hold back time, afraid of any outcome at all.(…)A strange people. They’ll talk behind your back and love you; they’ll kiss your cheek and hate you; they’ll ridicule noble deeds and remember them for generations; they live by spite and generosity and you never know which will prevail or when. Bad, good, gentle, cruel, lethargic, tempestuous, open, closed—they’re all of that and everything in between. And on top of everything, they’re mine and I am theirs, like a river and a drop of water, and everything I’ve said about them I might as well say about myself.
Selimović may have been sympathetic towards Bosnian Muslims but he was no political ally. On the contrary, he opposed their political aspirations to be placed on equal footing with respect to Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, stubbornly insisting that Bosniaks—the term has a long history but comes into popular usage in the 1990s, serving to distinguish ethnic origin from belief in the Islamic faith—do not constitute a nation. There is little to be said for this view but that it reflects a popular strand of thought among nationally assertive Serbs and Croats, who have long argued for Bosniaks as Serbs or Croats, in order to legitimate their claims on Bosnia itself.It is telling that Meša was an eager and visible member of the local Sokol chapter upon his return to Tuzla in 1935. Like a number of contemporaneous youth organizations throughout Europe, Sokol served a fundamentally ideological purpose. Nielsen writes that the organization, discussed at the highest reaches of government, “was to play a leading role in efforts to create healthy young Yugoslavs who would be loyal to the fatherland and the king.” Students and teachers were assessed on their involvement in and attitudes towards Sokol. In this and other respects, Meša was a shining example, while teaching Serbo-Croatian and hygiene at a Tuzla high school. The principal of the school noted that he fulfilled “all obligations that are necessary for a civil servant.”Shortly after the Nazi occupation, Meša and his siblings joined the communist resistance, the Partisans. This may seem odd, given his apparently sympathetic view of King Aleksandar’s regime. But Meša also grew up with and felt close to children of miners and other members of Tuzla’s underclass, and his turn to communism may best be understood as a demonstration of his commitment to the idea of a single, unified Yugoslavia. As a multiethnic force of mostly poor Serbs and Muslims, led by Josip Broz Tito, a Croat, the communists offered the only path toward a Yugoslav future. The alternatives were exclusive, even genocidal ethnic divisions.In 1942, Meša and two siblings were arrested and for four months imprisoned for resistance activities. They were undeterred by this experience. Meša joined the Partisan guerillas forces upon release and soon thereafter married his first wife. (The marriage had been delayed several years. Meša’s family disapproved of the woman, also an active member of Sokol, “not because she is a Serb, but because she is a gymnast,” according to Popović.) By the end of the war, Meša was serving as the political commissar of the Tuzla division. Even after the execution of his brother, he remained a lifelong communist, but asked himself: “What am I now? The bereaved and bitter brother, or the unreliable, doubtful member of the Party?” In a clear parallel, Ahmed Nuruddin wonders, “What am I now? Some twisted kind of brother, or an unsteady dervish? Have I lost my faith for mankind, or weakened the faith, thus losing everything?”After the execution of Šefkija, Meša transferred to Belgrade, where he quickly fell in love with a woman twelve years his junior, and on a rainy evening abandoned his newborn daughter and wife, who chased after him in a gown and slippers. A complaint was filed with the authorities, his conduct investigated and, as a result of “dishonesty towards the Party and because of damage to the proletariat morale,” Meša was briefly excommunicated from the Communist Party. The new couple moved to Sarajevo, where two more daughters were born and Meša became a minor figure in the city’s literary scene.As a critic noted at the time, there was at this point little to suggest that Meša Selimović was capable of such a work as Death and the Dervish. He had published stories, taught classes, and edited journals but the 1950s were a period of poverty and professional frustration. Published works had met a tepid response, and Meša had been overlooked for coveted posts. At last a well-received novel, Tišine, appeared in 1961. The following year Selimović began writing his masterpiece.Death and the Dervish is a patient, philosophical novel, composed in poetic, almost hypnotic prose. From the spiritual confines of Ahmed Nuruddin’s psyche, the narrative is chiseled out slowly and deliberately. The excavation is directed inward; the effort is revelatory, but not liberating. In contrast to The Fortress—the only other Selimović novel translated to English, which covers the same thematic ground and makes an unexpected cameo in a This American Life episode—there is no hopeful gesture towards freedom or salvation.After learning that his brother has been imprisoned, Ahmed Nuruddin is summoned to see a wealthy man, the father-in-law of the kadi. The man is ill and Ahmed Nuruddin goes to meet him with an eye to some slim opportunity to save his kin. But instead of the old benefactor, he finds the man’s cold and beautiful daughter, the kadi’s wife, who wishes to disinherit Hassan, her brother. Observing her hands, despite everything at stake, Ahmed’s thoughts drift to sensuality. He grows so distracted that the young woman finally asks him, “Are you listening?” Nothing is achieved by this visit or by others that follow. Ahmed Nuruddin’s brother has crossed powerful people. The local authorities are complicit, or they cannot be bothered to care one way or another. Certainly, no one will risk themselves to save him.Soon after this encounter, Ahmed Nuruddin discovers a stranger, a fugitive in the courtyard of his monastery. As the guards’ footsteps can be heard outside the stone walls, the sheikh weighs his responsibility and conscience, and contemplates whether or not to give the man away. He does nothing until the morning when, after characteristic vacillation, he alerts a young understudy of the fugitive’s presence on the grounds. Leaving the premises, he heads to the mosque and is later surprised to return to find no trace of the fugitive and the courtyard crawling with guards:
“Were you the one who called them?” I asked Yusuf after the guards had left.“I thought it was what you wanted. Otherwise you wouldn’t have told me.”
Selimović builds his novel on anti-climax. Dramatic possibilities are left unexplored, refused in favor of more honest depictions of psychology and social relations. The plot is dulled, effectively traded to boost the credibility of our pathologically unreliable protagonist. This hard won authority is crucial to the success of the story. We trust Ahmed Nuruddin because, for all his faults, he refuses to lie to us (or himself) about his moral corruption and ethical collapse. When he explains his motivations, it is not to justify them. There is no absolution here, no evasion of the most difficult, pressing questions. Ahmed Nuruddin’s manuscript is the record of a conscience, or lack of it, as the case may be. We know from experience that this sort of integrity in moral accounting is rare and difficult to uphold, and so we come to trust the dervish implicitly, leaning on his knowledge of people and his judgment, even as it fails and degrades him.After plotting the downfall of his enemies, the sheikh assumes the position of kadi. He quickly adopts the logic of those he replaced; the job, it turns out, is one of self-preservation.Though Death and the Dervish takes place in the Ottoman era, it belongs alongside other great novels of disappointed socialists who witnessed the human costs of capricious power and byzantine intrigues that governed Eastern Europe and Russia: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Viktor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and the works of Ismail Kadare come to mind.There are also thematic parallels to Kafka—the looming castle as a keep of symbolic power and menace, the inscrutable force of bureaucracy over individuals, the spiritual isolation of a man condemned to tragedy. But the differences are richer and more interesting. Of course, Kafka's works dramatize the alienation of modern experience. His is famously the fiction of otherness: of a hunger artist in a modern circus, of a man waking up as an insect, and other expendable creatures in the merciless wheels of bureaucracy and modernity. It is the work, in other words, of a European Jew on the eve of the Holocaust.The world of Ahmed Nuruddin, by contrast, is fundamentally his own. With the partial exception of Hassan, who occasionally puzzles and inspires the dervish, there is nothing foreign, strange, or surprising to him about the social world that he inhabits. The sheikh is sensitive to the power relations within his community, aware of the meaning of every particular gesture or glance, cognizant of his own status, influence, and its constraints. He knows exactly what few possibilities there are for saving his brother, and he shrinks before their implications.The starkness of this vision, its portrayal of paralysis when action is needed, of self-regard in place of sacrifice, provides a compelling portrait of a man in a moment of crisis. Ahmed Nuruddin is not unlike many of us, prideful and hypocritical, capable of feeling and humanity, but insufficiently committed to anything but himself. While the protagonists of Kafka's fiction are often victims of circumstances beyond their control, the sheikh suffers and he perpetuates suffering.Reading Ahmed Nuruddin as timorous and irresolute is, then, fair but incomplete. Amid his passivity and indecision, there are moments of sorrow and anger, even moments of real courage. He tries to save his brother, not heroically but persistently, not selflessly but out of duty, not even for his brother, but for his own self-approbation. Ahmed Nuruddin may not be an admirable man, but he is a recognizable one. He is weak not because he is incapacitated by fear (as we see in his plot for vengeance and the knowledge of his previous life as a soldier) but because he knows his world and people and understands that his brother cannot be saved, or that the prospects for such a miracle are slim.In adventure novels, the hero makes daring plans to rescue his brother from the fortress and does so, winning a marvelous girl along the way. In real life, as in Selimović's novel, one appeals to the constable, the courts, the local authorities, anyone with potential influence to change the verdict, and then is left to grief and guilt, to ask himself until his final days: What should I have done differently? What else? What more?When Ahmed Nuruddin finally learns that his brother has been killed, he addresses a brief sermon to the faithful at the mosque. In his words it is hard not to hear the echo of Meša Selimović speaking to us: “And now go home, and leave me alone with my misfortune. It is easier to endure, now that I have shared it with you.”____Pedja Jurišić lives in Copenhagen. He writes regularly for hair magazines.
