Islamic Psychology from Bosnian perspective: Experience and contribution of Muslim psychologists and Thinkers

As indigenous people in southeast Europe, Muslims for centuries have been inhabiting lands of what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their encounter with Western, non-Muslim worldviews and understandings of humankind accordingly has been long lasting and an intensive experience. In a similar fashion, local thinkers and psychologists identifying with Islam as a worldview inevitably were predestined to make attempts at reconciling Islamic religious anthropology with the modern scientific understanding of human psyche and behavior. For much of the 20th century, however, their homeland was an integral part of the antireligious communist political order of socialist Yugoslavia. Therefore, contributions of Bosnian Muslim thinkers, scholars, and psychologists in this regard, later to be named Islamization or integration of Islam and psychology, up to the disintegration of Socialist Yugoslavia in the early 1990s have been negligible. Similarly, more active and engaging attempts to (re)consider theories and practice of so-called Western psychology from an Islamic perspective, as a part of ongoing discourse of integration of knowledge and social sciences in the Muslim mainland, belong to the last three decades. Furthermore, it has been an uncoordinated endeavor undertaken usually by religious scholars, individuals, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) close to Muslim religious circles and institutions in Bosnia. Most notably these activities include (a) explicating basic premises of the general discourse on the integration of Western knowledge to the local academic community; (b) translating texts of their main proponents in main Muslim lands into Bosnian language; (c) promoting Islamic understanding of humanity, anthropology, and various psychological concepts; (d) calling for recognition of the role of religion and religiosity/spirituality in human life, mental health, behavior, development, and education; (e) engaging in empirical research on the mentioned themes as well as investigating the contributions of Muslim classical thinkers to psychotherapy; and (f) making attempts to integrate religiosity and religious motivation in the practice of upbringing, education, and psychotherapy.