The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct.

Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.

David Henig is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University.

"The Muslim communities Henig describes are centuries-old, yet their villages, orchards, and fields are vulnerable possessions. Islam and the vital exchanges it creates -- among people and with God--give Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina a tenacious grip on time and space. Henig traces these exchanges in amazing detail. He takes us beyond questions of whether Islam can be European to places where divinity and identity have already been woven into moral systems of incredible staying power. His analysis is driven by the sacred power of those places."--Andrew Shryock, author of Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present