Ottoman Bosniaks had a firm and lasting attachment to places within the traditional Islamic geography. The connection was physical and directed to multiple spaces. Let us take the example of the famous seventeenth-century Sufi scholar ‘Abdullah al-Būsnawī (1593–1644). If a careful observer visits his tomb in Konya – hidden within a residential area, close to a hairdresser salon, a restaurant and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s tomb and mosque – they can see a sign erected in 2007, briefly describing al-Būsnawī’s lifepath. In green letters, the sign presents the major points of al-Būsnawī’s biography: he was a scholar, a Sufi devotee and an interpreter of Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Bezels of Wisdom) and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī’s (1207–73) Mathnawi. He was born in Bosnia, spent time in Egypt, Damascus and the Hijaz, and died in Konya. His Arab students were proud of having learned from him, and he left dozens of works. According to his will, the tomb’s inscription also reads that he carried the nisbas (names indicating belonging) of al-Būsnawī (Bosnian), al-Rūmī (Rūmī, from the lands of Rūm, a term that at this point encompassed Anatolia and the Balkans) and al-Bayrāmī, designating his local, cultural and spiritual leanings. ‘Abdullah al-Būsnawī was, thus, a man of many places, ranging from the Balkans to the Hijaz, just like hundreds of his compatriots whose remains today are scattered across the modern-day nation-states of the Middle East, symbolising a long-forgotten mobility.

Beyond the physical, the connection was also emotional and imaginative, especially to the holy places of Mecca and Medina. Ottoman Bosnian authors such as ‘Abdullah al-Būsnawī penned treatises describing different facets of the holy: how places were made special through God’s love and mercy, how significant the presence of the Prophet Muhammad’s body was in Medina, and how it contained miraculous benefits for believers and visitors. In doing so, the Ottoman Bosnians joined the ranks of their scholarly predecessors and contemporaries, and they wrote for geographically diverse audiences. As the biographical dictionaries testify, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, many Bosnians were truly cosmopolitan through their participation in the scholarly and literary discourses of the age.