A friar and a Sufi bear witness to the tradition of the common and the beautiful in our religions year after year. In recent years, Dervish Salem Šehović has been hosting Fr. Mirko Majdandžić, guardian of the monastery in Fojnica, during the month of Ramadan in Vukeljići near Fojnica. They shared their story with the readers and viewers of N1.
This year, a special interest in the iftars and meetings you organize?
Fr. Mirko: What seems to me – when Salem organizes, he invites me and I come – – I think this is interesting because people see themselves there. Most of Bosnia and Herzegovina is on the trail of the two of us, they just can’t show it. People are friends at heart, especially if a person says he is a believer – Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox or Jewish, even those who say they are unbelievers. All people have that goodness. Salem calls and I come. It was interesting this year that I fired that cannon for the first time. As they would say, iftar began with that shot. People see kindness and similarity there. Our task is to spread kindness, build bridges between people and travel together. Our paths may be different, but we have a common path to our Creator.
Salem: The Most High Lord, who created us, entrusted us to start every work with Bismilla – “Bismillahir-Rahmanir-Rahim” (In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Merciful). If the Supreme Lord of Heaven and Earth is merciful, why should we not be merciful like ordinary people? God does not need us at all, but He created us for our mission until a certain moment. We need Allah, so why not share mercy when God is merciful? What Friar Mirko says, God created us all and gave us different paths to compete for who will be God-fearing to the Supreme Creator. All people, as Fr. Mirko well said, are like this, they generally think the same way, but maybe they don’t have the opportunity to hear their story. Floods and major disasters have shown us that people are united, and perhaps lately the media has less influence on the story of ordinary people coming to the public.
What do we as individuals lack to make this collective and our country even more beautiful?
Fr. Mirko: As I say in the church, first of all, if you want to do something in a space, you need love. I will not say that there is no love, but there is not enough of it. That love for Bosnia and Herzegovina is not only shown in the story. This can be seen in everyday work, if you take a bag and throw it out the window, you have crossed everything. If only they had a little more courage, and I remember how much energy my chacha or Salem’s grandmother worked with. We don’t even work with 30 percent of the power they did. If only they would work with the same enthusiasm – what kind of Germany. We wouldn’t need anything. What I think is also important, maybe some people won’t like this sentence, we lack fundamentalism. We gave that term a negative meaning. When you say that someone is backward and dangerous, you say that he is a fundamentalist, and a fundamentalist is a man who protects his foundations.
If you don’t have the foundation of the house, you built it for nothing. Values are being lost that must not be lost, such as the value of friendship, the value of love for the Most High and love for each other, respect for family and neighborhood… I know that trends change, that money is something that is important, of course, but not everything can be for sale and not everything can be bought. Those ancestors of ours, the elders, had much more courage and had much more confidence that the world is not without meaning, that meaning is given by the One from above.
Do you think you have that in smaller communities?
Fr. Mirko: “Ordinary”, to call them that with quotation marks, people still live such a life. When you go to some villages that are mixed, even though there was a war and ugly things happened, it comes back and people didn’t let that neighborhood and neighborhood relationship be lost. They are closer to each other than to a Catholic from Zagreb or a Muslim from Turkey.
Salem : My opinion is that ordinary people are actually small people, because God created us to obey him, and then we become great. One of the main reasons for success is that this society, and this country, belongs to every person who was born here and who lives there. My message to every man is that he should never allow an intermediary between him and the Supreme Lord, Allah. When a man is in prayer he is literally in conversation with Allah, people have moved away from practicing religion. And if our citizens have their own attitude, that they don’t reach positions through other people, and think for themselves, then prosperity will come to this country. As long as someone speaks for them, we will always be there (in this situation).
Watch the interesting guest appearance in the video.
Source: n1info.ba
