David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina is a book about “other kinds of relations” (11). More specifically, the book asks “what it means to live a Muslim life amid the political breakdown, economic deprivation, and transformation of religious institutions in postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina” (4)? The study is rooted in the particular social context of villages in the Zvijezda highlands in central Bosnia, as well as in the spaces, narratives, landscapes, memories, religious rituals, and hopes and expectations of mutuality that (dis)connect them. It is a snapshot of a distinctive locale and its turbulent history; yet this project is comparative in nature. The book examines religious subjectivities and the materiality of social forms that emerge in response to larger socio-political, economic, and religious transformations. The project is first and foremost an ethnography, and its foundation and applications are anthropological, comparative, and interdisciplinary. It builds on and contributes to discussions in anthropology, religious studies, peace and conflict studies, sociology and geography, and Balkan and European studies.

This carefully crafted ethnographic study describes how villagers in the Zvijezda highlands negotiate both the fragility and durability of intimate relations between the living, the dead, and the divine in the context of massive historical configurations, socio-economic raptures, and critical events. The six chapters of the book unpack different dimensions of living a Muslim life in Bosnia, including historically situated, yet constantly evolving forms of everyday politics and ethics of care and abandonment as mediated via economic theology of halal and other forms of religious and material exchanges. The author describes a deeply entangled social and religious world where that which is, in scholarly accounts of Bosnia and, more broadly, in western epistemologies, deemed separate—“secular” and “religious” lives—is always deeply interconnected. The book explores the historical consciousness, pious sensibilities, competing religious institutional apparatuses, and vernacular forms of care and intimacy. We learn about the relations between home and neighborhood; prayer and history; debt, wealth, and health; gender and generation; landmines and pilgrimages; and rural and urban migration and circulation. In order to portray “other kinds of relations” in context, the author follows an array of seemingly disparate “ethnographic objects,” stained by past war and socialism, as they travel across bodies and souls, and villages and cities: an ashtray, džezva (coffee pot), baking trays, a string of prayer beads, milk and cheese, trees and manure, dreams, dova (non-obligatory prayer) and dovišta (sites of non-obligatory prayer), women, men, and children, stones and rams, and imams, healers, and prayers.

As we follow these movements and exchanges, for those of us who study Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country looks both familiar and novel, a bit uncanny. The familiar objects and relations are deepened and connected in numerous new ways. We learn about orientations and interpretations of the past, present and future that are often masked by rigid identity politics. We are also discombobulated, in a productive way, by the use of the “IC” acronym: in the majority of studies of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, “IC” stands for “International Community,” in charge of postwar reconstruction in the country. In David Henig's book, however, “IC” stands for Islamic Community. This “slippage” makes the reading both “familiar” and “strange,” thus providing an opportunity for reflection and alternative lenses through which to approach actually existing lives in Bosnia. I am grateful to David Henig for this journey and opportunity to see that “which I know” differently, in a more complicated, richer way.

If there is anything I wish the author could explore further, it would be to reflect on his own positionality in “the field” and in his writing. I wonder, for example, if the author's gender and age were critical to how he was folded into the spiritual and material lives of villagers. Was he praying with the men? What was that like? Was he sometimes asked about his own religious background? And if yes, what materialized from these encounters? Furthermore, in a context so overwhelmed with western foreign presence and academic explorers, I wonder how the author's own unique religious, (post)socialist, and national subjectivities were perceived, commented on, and made sense of by the villagers. Did these differences and juxtapositions allow for moments of solidarity, inclusion, and exclusion, all at once? Understanding how the author, with his own assemblage of religious, secular, gender, generational, material, and other voluntary and/or imposed identifications, was “read” by the villagers could add yet another layer to this powerful and important book.