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Heritage · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — the Habsburgs opened a sharia-judge school in 1889, and put minarets on it

Eleven years after Christian Austria-Hungary occupied Muslim Bosnia, the imperial government funded a five-year higher-education institution to train Islamic sharia judges. They hired a Catholic Czech architect and told him to make it look Moorish. The building still stands, and it still educates Muslim scholars — just under a different name.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The Habsburg army walked into Sarajevo in August 1878. It took them a couple of months, some fighting on the hills, and a resettling of the administrative furniture, and then the empire ran a Muslim province for the next forty years.

One of the first things they built was a school. Not for Habsburg officials. For Bosnian Muslim judges. In 1887 the Provincial Government, by administrative order number 23972, established a five-year higher-education institution to train šerijatske sudije — sharia judges — for the province’s Muslim courts. Two years later, on 6 April 1889, the building on the corner of Sagrdžije and Čemerlina streets opened its doors, and the first cohort of students walked in.

The building had minarets, horseshoe arches, arabesque tiling, and an ornamental cornice that looked more Cairo than Vienna. The architect was a 31-year-old Czech named Karlo Paržik — the same Paržik who would draw the first plan of the Vijećnica three years later, and who at this point had exactly one Sarajevo commission under his belt.

That is the picture: a Christian empire occupies a Muslim province, and eleven years in, funds a state school for Muslim judges and dresses it in fake Moorish decoration. If you want to understand what “Habsburg Bosnia” was actually like on the ground, this building is where to start.

Why the Habsburgs did it

The occupation started as a Berlin Congress mandate to “restore order” — meaning, take Bosnia off the Ottomans’ hands without formally annexing it. The Habsburg administration ran Bosnia through the finance ministry in Vienna, which is unusual, and through a joint minister named Béni Kállay, who is the person to know here. Kállay’s line was that Bosnia’s Muslims were a European Muslim population — closer, in his framing, to Vienna than to Istanbul — and that the empire should treat them accordingly.

The practical translation: the empire funded the maintenance of the Gazi Husrev-beg endowment, kept sharia law operating for Muslim family and inheritance cases, funded Islamic religious schools, and, in 1887, opened the sharia-judge school. The reasoning was not affection. It was that if the empire ran Muslim legal institutions itself, the Muslim scholarly class would owe loyalty to Vienna rather than to Istanbul, and the Ottoman claim on Bosnia would weaken. It worked well enough. By 1908 the empire formally annexed the province and the Muslim revolt everyone had expected did not really happen.

Why the school looked Moorish

Karlo Paržik had arrived in Sarajevo in 1884, three years before this commission. He was a graduate of the Prague Polytechnic. He had never designed anything Islamic. Neither had anyone else in the Habsburg civil service.

The style the empire settled on was what the architectural literature now calls “pseudo-Moorish” or “Orientalizing” — a decorative vocabulary borrowed from North African and Andalusian Islamic architecture, with muqarnas, horseshoe arches, polychromatic geometric tiling, and small onion domes. Very little of it was actually Ottoman. It was, more or less, what a Central European in the 1880s thought Muslim architecture looked like, mediated through Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament and the Alhambra plates that everyone had seen.

Paržik used the vocabulary because his brief told him to. The empire wanted a building that would read as Islamic enough for the Muslim students who would attend and the Muslim ulema who would teach. Whether it was authentically Ottoman was beside the point.

For Paržik personally, the Šerijatska škola was a warm-up. The Vijećnica, which he would draw seven years later in 1892 and which would open in 1896, is the same vocabulary at a bigger scale. So is the Ashkenazi Synagogue he built in 1902 for the Jewish community. Once the Šerijatska škola was up, Paržik had the recipe. He would use variations of it for the next thirty years.

What the school did

Between 1889 and 1937, the school graduated 370 students. Of those, 223 became sharia judges — the entire šerijat judiciary of Bosnia for two generations. Another 23 became judges in the general court system. The rest went into administration, teaching, and the ulema.

In April 1937 the institution was reorganised into the Viša islamska šerijatsko-teološka škola (VIŠT), a higher Islamic theological college. That form lasted until World War II. After the war, the socialist state secularised religious education, and the building itself passed to the Museum of the City of Sarajevo, which used it until the 1990s. In the aftermath of the last war, ownership returned to the Islamic Community, and the building became home to the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Islamic Studies. It still is.

What survives

If you walk up Sagrdžije from Baščaršija toward the Vijećnica, the building on the right just before the intersection with Čemerlina is what opened in 1889. The minarets are still there. The horseshoe arches over the ground-floor windows are still there. Every generation has changed the interior — a museum for fifty years is different from a school, a Faculty is different again — but the building is doing more or less what it was built for in 1889: educating Muslim scholars.

One hundred and thirty-seven years on the same corner. Different institution names. Same brief.

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