Serbian Studies Research

Vol. 5, No. 1 (2014): 185-197. 185

UDC 821.163.41-31.09 Selimović M.

Оригинални научни рад

Dr Andrew Baruch Wachtel1

American University of Central Asia (Bishkek)
Kyrgyzstan

DEATH AND THE DERVISH AND

THE LOGIC OF SACRIFICE
Abstract: Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) takes the form of a lengthy suicide
note cum confession by Ahmed Nuruddin, sheikh of a dervish tekke in Sarajevo. The prox-
imate cause of Nuruddin’s suicide is the betrayal of his closest friend to the state organs. Al-
though the scenes describing his existential choice and ultimate moral failure mark the climax
of the novel, this is not the first time Nuruddin has been in a similar position, nor the first
time he has failed. Rather, he has been in situations in which he needs either to save or sac-
rifice a younger male figure with some regularity. In each case Nuruddin’s attempts to find a
compromise position come to naught, and he fails the test. With this in mind, this paper ar-
gues that Death and the Dervish should be read as a theme and variations on the issue of faith
and sacrifice, through which Selimović links his novel both to contemporary political reali-
ties and to one of the foundational texts of the monotheistic tradition – the Sacrifice of Isaac
in Genesis 22.
Keywords: Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish, Sacrifice of Isaac, literature and pol-
itics, Yugoslavia

Meša Selimović’s classic novel Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) is
written as a lengthy suicide note cum confession by Ahmed Nuruddin, sheikh of
a dervish tekke in Sarajevo. He has been led to the brink of self-destruction by his
loss of the religious faith that had, he tells us, sustained him for some twenty years.
On the level of the novel’s plot, his despair is prompted by a number of traumatic
events, which began with the arrest (and subsequent murder) of his younger broth-
er, the failure of his attempts to have his brother freed, his subsequent revenge on
those who took his brother’s life, his own rise to secular power in their stead. The
proximate cause of Nuruddin’s suicide is his betrayal of his lone close friend, Has-
san, a free-spirited cattle drover, the only son of one of the tekke’s benefactors. Has-

1
awachtel59@gmail.com
186 | Andrew Baruch Wachtel

san has helped a merchant from Dubrovnik with whose wife he has an obsession es-
cape from Ottoman territory. Although Hassan is guilty in only the most tangential
of ways, the vali (Nuruddin’s superior) attempts to force Nuruddin, who prides him-
self on his impartiality and incorruptibility, to have Hassan arrested (and face cer-
tain death) in order to test his loyalty. Will Nuruddin agree to sacrifice his friend and
thereby keep his own position and head, or will he refuse to sign the arrest order and
openly defy his superior, who has been protecting him against a number of accusa-
tions that have been leveled against him by townspeople unhappy with the new or-
der he has imposed since becoming kadi of Sarajevo?
Nuruddin tries desperately to wriggle out of his position, first asserting Has-
san’s innocence, and then asking at least to be spared the need to personally sign the
order for his friend’s doom. But the vali’s assistant is implacable, recognizing that
through this ultimate test Nuruddin will either renounce any personal ties and prove
his complete loyalty to the state and its apparatus or he will refuse, in which case the
state will presumably destroy him.2 When asked directly whether he will write the
arrest order Nuruddin replies: “O, Allah, help me. I can neither write it nor refuse
to” (426, 436). In his imagination, Nurrudin resists: “Don’t make me do this. It’s too
cruel. … Would you ask me to kill my father or brother? …Do whatever you want
with me, I won’t betray him” (426, 437). But in reality, he agrees with the simple
phrase, “I have to.” Just to make him realize that this is not compulsion but choice,
albeit one made under difficult circumstances, the vali’s assistant notes: “You don’t
have to. Do what your conscience tells you.”
As it happens, Hassan does not die. He is able to flee through the machinations
of Nuruddin’s clerk Mullah-Yusuf, but the credit/blame for having planned the es-
cape goes to Nuruddin despite his having had nothing to do with it. Indeed, one sus-
pects that his decision to commit suicide has less to do with his having compromised
himself through the betrayal of Hassan than with the unbearable contrast between his
recognition of his own weakness and the external world’s perception of him as a hero
who defied the powers that be for the sake of his principles and his friend.3
Although this set of scenes marks the climax of the novel, the attentive reader
might have recognized that this is not the first time Nuruddin has been in a similar-

2
The situation is undoubtedly more closely related to the realities of Communist-era Yugoslavia, particular-
ly in the period 1948-53, than it is to the realities of the Ottoman Empire. A number of scholarly works have
noted the allegorical nature of this novel so I will not discuss that aspect of it here.
3
To be sure, one could also argue that his decision to kill himself is even more directly related to the fact that
he knows an order for his execution has arrived and that his arrest is immanent. However, he does have the
possibility to try to escape, which he does not exercise, preferring suicide to living with his impossible inter-
nal contradictions.
 “Death and the Dervish” and the Logic of Sacrifice | 187

ly ambiguous position and it is not the first time he has failed in an analogous way.
Rather the pattern of finding himself in a situation in which he needs either to save
or sacrifice a younger male figure repeats itself with some regularity in the novel. In
each case his attempts to find some sort of compromise come to naught, and he fails
the test. I will argue here that the novel should be read as a kind of theme and varia-
tions on the issue of faith and sacrifice, through which Selimović links his novel on
the one hand to his contemporary political realities and on the other to one of the
oldest texts of the monotheistic tradition.
Near the beginning of the novel, Nuruddin, troubled by the arrest of his young-
er brother about which he has done nothing, is disturbed in the garden of his tekke
on St. George’s Eve by the intrusion of a fugitive. The events of this evening, he tells
the reader, were the first step in the chain of events that would lead him to a state
of rebellion against the Bosnian authorities and against his faith. The fact that Seli-
mović chooses to open his novel on a marked Christian holiday should alert us from
the beginning that he will exploit the multi-confessional nature of his native Bosnia,
even if all of the characters in the novel are in fact Muslims.4
The heterodox culture of Bosnia is further emphasized in Nuruddin’s initial de-
scription of the intruder, which employs blatantly Christian imagery: “Two trees
cast shadows on the gate and he stood in a crevice of light, as if condemned, isolat-
ed, exposed. He would surely have liked to hide in the thickest darkness, but he did
not dare to move. The footsteps ran past the gate, clattering on the cobblestones, and
faded away at the bend in the gorge, where there was a post of Albanian guards. The
pursuers were certainly asking about this man who stood as if crucified (što stoji ra-
zapet) on the door” (43, 49-50). As we will soon see, the imagery of the crucifixion
is by no means accidental.
Nuruddin appreciates and fears his power to decide the fugitive’s destiny. “”It
excited me that I could be the judge and decide everything with a single spoken
word. The fate of this man was in my hands. I was his fate and I had never felt so
much power in anything that I could do (44, 50).” Thus, if the stranger is a potential
Christ waiting to be crucified, Nuruddin is God the Father, deciding whether or not
to sacrifice his only son. As opposed to the God of the New Testament, he choos-
es not to, but in a characteristically ambivalent way. He does not directly betray the
stranger to the guards and later the same evening, after a short but ambiguous con-
versation, he even allows the fugitive to hide in a shed on the tekke grounds. But the

4
In his “Introduction” to the English language edition of the novel, Henry Cooper notes the ethnic purity
of Selimović’s Bosnia in this novel (contrasting it to Andrić’s more multi-cultural vision). Certainly it is true
that all the characters are Muslims, but as we will see in the course of this analysis, that does not mean that
the novel lacks crucial subtextual references to the other key Bosnian religious traditions.
188 | Andrew Baruch Wachtel

next morning, aware that Mullah-Yusuf had seen the stranger, he expresses his am-
bivalence about hiding him, after which Yusuf betrays his whereabouts to the police
(though they fail to find him). Thus, as will be the case with Hassan at the end of
the novel, Nuruddin can neither find within himself the faith to resist the desires of
the state for the sacrifice of a potentially innocent man, nor can he fully side with in-
dividual against state power. And as with Hassan at the end, the man ultimately es-
capes but not really thanks to Nuruddin.
For the rest of the novel, the figure (hallucination) of this fugitive will haunt
Nurruddin, and although he never discovers the man’s real name, in his imagination
he calls him Is-haq. The question arises, why does Nuruddin choose to use precisely
this name for the fugitive and what can his choice tell us about the underlying logic
of the novel? Is-haq is not a commonly used name in the Bosnian Muslim commu-
nity and as such it is strongly marked.5 It is of course derived from the Old Testa-
ment, where it is the name of the second-generation patriarch of the Israelite people,
the beloved late born son of Abraham, founder of the monotheistic faith that would
become Judaism. In the Jewish tradition, Isaac’s shining moment comes in Genesis
22, when his father Abraham is commanded by the voice of God to sacrifice the boy.
The passage is short enough to quote in full:
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said
unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, [here] I [am].
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only [son] Isaac, whom thou lovest, and
get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon
one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of
his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt of-
fering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.
Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.
And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and
the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.
And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid [it] upon Isaac his
son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them
together.
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here
[am] I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where [is] the
lamb for a burnt offering?

5
In the text of the novel, Nuruddin justifies his choice by telling the reader that Is-haq was the name of a be-
loved uncle. Henry Cooper noticed a basic connection between this story and that of the Old Testament (see
his “Introduction” to the English addition), but failed to make much of it.
 “Death and the Dervish” and the Logic of Sacrifice | 189

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offer-
ing: so they went both of them together.
And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an
altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on
the altar upon the wood.
And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham,
Abraham: and he said, Here [am] I.
And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto
him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy
son, thine only [son] from me.
And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind [him] a ram
caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and of-
fered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
As has been pointed out frequently, most forcefully in Eric Auerbach’s classic
study Mimesis, the power of this story resides in the paucity of psychological detail.
We are not told what Abraham is thinking as he walks with his son to the expected
sacrificial alter, nor are we told what he thinks after God spares Isaac. According to
Auerbach’s analysis, in comparison with the Homeric epic, which is set in a definite
time and place with well-rounded characters, in the Biblical narrative we see “the ex-
ternalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of
the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are
emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place are undefined and
call for interpretation; thoughts and felling remain unexpressed, are only suggest-
ed by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole permeated with the most
unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of
a unity) , remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’”6 What is apparently
crucial about the text is that Abraham never waivers in his faith in God. He is willing
to sacrifice his son unquestioningly, just as he is equally willing to accept the substi-
tute sacrifice of the ram without asking why he was forced to go through such an in-
human trial (in this, for example, he differs considerably from that later prophet Jo-
nah, who complains to God after his prophecy of the destruction of Ninevah does
not come true because God accepts the Ninevans’ repentance).
The fabric of Selimović’s novel, however, is a long way from the terse biblical
narrative. Rather, insofar as it relates to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, it does so

6
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Doubleday Anchor Books: New
York, 1957, 9.
190 | Andrew Baruch Wachtel

indirectly and through the mediation of a very different sort of text. I have in mind
Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, one of the urtexts of existentialism, the phil-
osophical movement that was at the center of Selimović’s literary and philosophi-
cal world. Here Kierkegaard takes up the invitation to fill in the blanks in the bibli-
cal narrative in the form of extensive meditations on Abraham’s ethics, his duty to
God and his silence toward his family. It is my claim that Nuruddin is in fact a failed
Abraham, whose narrative can be understood as a Kierkegaard-like commentary on
his inability to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps and on the results of that in-
ability. Selimović uses this story, I would suggest, not merely because of its inher-
ent ethical dimension, but also because of another crucial aspect of the Isaac narra-
tive; its relationship to ideas of substitution, sacrifice, and relations between parents
and children. In the Jewish tradition, the story is often read as one that symbolical-
ly separates the Israelites from their Canananite neighbors who practiced child sac-
rifice. Rather than requiring a child, God allows Abraham to sacrifice an animal (the
ram), which becomes a substitute for Isaac. As Shalom Spiegel puts it: “The prima-
ry purpose of the Akedah story may have been only this: to attach a real pillar of the
folk and a revered reputation to the new norm—abolish human sacrifice, substitute
animals instead.”7 As we will see, in the text of Selimović’s novel, Nuruddin is giv-
en multiple opportunities to imitate Abraham with a number of different potential
“victims” and he fails in each case. Thus the whirlwind of events in which he finds
himself does not cause his failure of faith but rather the other way around: because
he fails the trial of faith, the events lead him to destruction rather than salvation. Par-
adoxically, however, precisely in his failure Nuruddin becomes a certain kind of he-
roic figure. For in a world in which individuals are asked to blindly sacrifice others
for the sake of an abstract cause (communism, for example), Nuruddin’s ambivalent
hesitation reveals a streak of humanity absent both in his biblical precursors and in
many true believers in Selimović’s day.
The principle of the substitutability of the sacrificial victim, which will be at the
center of Death and the Dervish and which as we have seen plays a role in the origi-
nal Biblical narrative, is enhanced through the amplification of the Akedah story in
the traditions of Sarajevo’s others faiths: Christianity and Islam. In the Christian tra-
dition, the Sacrifice of Isaac was generally seen as a prefiguration of the crucifixion.
As Jon D. Levenson explicates: “In light of the mounting importance of the aqedah
in the Judaism of the Second Temple period, it is reasonable to suspect that the early
audiences of the synoptic Gospels connected the belovedness of Jesus with his Pas-
sian and crucifixion. Jesus’ gory death was not a negation of God’s love (the Gospel

7
Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial. New York: Behrman House, 1967, 64.
 “Death and the Dervish” and the Logic of Sacrifice | 191

was proclaiming), but a manifestation of it, evidence that Jesus was the beloved son
first prefigured in Isaac.”8 Furthermore, in the Christian tradition another substitu-
tion connects Abraham and God the Father, because both of them are willing to sac-
rifice their sons.
The notion of substitutability at the base of the story is further complicated by
the interpretations of the akedah in the Muslim tradition. While the story does not
play a central role in the Qur’an, it does appear in surah 37:
99. He said: “I will go to my Lord! He will surely guide me 100. “O my Lord!
Grant me a righteous (son)!” 101. So We gave him the good news of a forbear-
ing son. 102. Then, when (the son) reached (the age of) (serious) work with
him, he said: “O my son! I have seen in a vision that I offer thee in sacrifice: now
see what is thy view!” (The son) said: “O my father! Do as thou art command-
ed: thou will find me, if Allah so wills, one of the steadfast!” 103. So when they
had both submitted (to Allah), and he had laid him prostrate on his forehead
(for sacrifice), 104. We called out to him “O Abraham! ... 105. “Thou hast al-
ready fulfilled the vision!” - thus indeed do We reward those who do right.” 106.
For this was a clear trial- 107. And We ransomed him with a momentous sac-
rifice.
What is particularly interesting, however, is that while the Old Testament is
clear that the son in question is Isaac, the Qur’an does not mention the son’s name,
which has led a number of Koranic commentators over the years to conclude that
the son that was to be sacrificed was Ishmael, the legendary progenitor of the Arab
peoples, rather than Isaac, from who the Jewish people would eventually descend.
There is no need to go into the arguments and counterarguments in favor of one or
the other sons here. We are primarily concerned with the principle of substitution
and for those purposes it is the mere existence of this polemic at the root of Muslim
interpretations of the Isaac story that is of interest.9

8
Jon. D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Ju-
daism and Christianity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993, 200.
9
For a sampling of the commentary on this topic, see Muhammad Ghoniem & M S M Saifullah, “The Sacri-
fice of Abraham: Isaac or Ishmael?” http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Contrad/MusTrad/sacrifice.
html. Furthermore, regardless of which son was to be sacrificed on the top of Mount Moriah, Genesis states
clearly that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Ishmael in favor of Isaac, sending him and his mother Hagar in-
to the wilderness with only a skin of water and a small amount of food. To be sure, God prevents this sacri-
fice as well (Genesis 21).
192 | Andrew Baruch Wachtel

Fathers and Sons

Ahmed Nuruddin has only one biological child and he plays a rather small role
in the story.10 This does not mean, however, that he cannot be asked to sacrifice a
child, for Nuruddin has at least four figurative sons each of whom he has the op-
portunity to save or to sacrifice in the course of the novel. We have already spoken
of Hassan and Is-haq and of Nuruddin’s failed attempt to avoid having to sacrifice
them. In addition to them we would note Nuruddin’s much younger brother (Ha-
run, we are told, is fifteen years younger than Ahmed), and his foster son Yusuf.11
If the Bible is to be believed, because of his faith Abraham was paradoxical-
ly spared the need to make the ultimate sacrifice (although as Kierkegaard would
insist, it is hard to imagine that he did not carry the burden of his near murderous
act within him for the rest of his life). Similarly, God the Father of the New Testa-
ment allows the sacrifice of his child, knowing that the result of this sacrifice with be

10
On the last pages of the novel, this youth, whom Nuruddin has never seen and possibly has never known
about, arrives in Sarajevo at the behest of his mother to ask for Nuruddin’s assistance.
11
The “sacrifice of Yusuf is told at the opening of the second part of the novel as a a flashback to the time
in Nuruddin’s life before he became a dervish, when he was fighting in the Ottoman army. Already alienat-
ed from those around him, disgusted by his fellow soldiers, he spends much of his time with the young son
of a woman who serves the soldiers food and drink to the soldiers, and provides occasional sexual favors. At
one point, the Ottoman army pushed back and during its absence the woman does the same for the enemy.
When the Ottoman army returns, her son and mother are exiled and she is executed for fraternizing with
the enemy. Why, we might ask, is this whole scene in the novel? It does not appear to have any exceptional-
ly clear relation to the plot, even though Nuruddin tells us that he later found the woman’s son and brought
him back to the tekke. That boy would grow up to be Mullah-Yusuf, who will later betray Harun. But Mul-
lah-Yusuf’s back story is not necessary as a plot mechanism, just as it was not necessary to tell the reader the
Is-haq was the name of Ahmed’s favorite uncle. Harun could have been betrayed by anyone. What is import-
ant, however, is that Yusuf be brought into the plot of the novel as Ahmed’s foster son, another double of Is-
haq and Harun, another innocent sufferer whom Ahmed is neither able to sacrifice nor save. In this case, that
failure took place multiple times, beginning in Yusuf’s childhood with the execution of his mother, a woman
whom Nuruddin characterizes as “a victim not a sinner.” Yusuf asks Nuruddin directly: “And what did you
do?” (266, 275) Again we discover Nuruddin’s inability either to accept the sacrifice of innocents as God’s
will which cannot be contravened or to rebel forcefully against it. “I begged for her in vain. And I took you
away to another village, so you wouldn’t see. Afterward I wept, hidden, alone, sickened by the men, and yet
pitying them, because they avoided each other’s eyes all day long out of shame.”
In the present time of the novel, Nuruddin proves equally unable either to save Yusuf or to damn him after it
becomes clear that Yusuf was responsible for Harun’s arrest. Rather, unable to decide what to do he spends
his time talking to Yusuf, in effect torturing the young man by stretching out the waiting time between the
recognition of the need to act and the actual act. Yusuf recognizes his impossibly in-between position and
asks Nuruddin either to “Judge me, or forgive me if you can” (279, 288). But Nuruddin is as usual unable to
do either and Yusuf, having left his room after this exchange, attempts suicide in an effort to escape the im-
possible position of son to a father like Nuruddin.
 “Death and the Dervish” and the Logic of Sacrifice | 193

the ultimate salvation of humankind. Nuruddin, however, cannot avoid the need to
choose whether or not to sacrifice his various children but unlike Abraham or God
the Father, he ultimately finds the choice unbearable and so attempts to avoid mak-
ing it. In each case, his decision is so equivocal that it fails to have the expected effect
leaving him in a hopelessly compromised position, neither faithful enough to fulfill
God’s command nor rebellious enough to fully resist it.
In this again, Nuruddin’s experience with Is-haq, the Jewish urtext, turns out to
be paradigmatic. For Nuruddin is neither able to turn Is-haq in nor let him go. No
voice of God comes down from on high to tell him what to do, and so unlike Abra-
ham he fails the test of faith. Hesitating, he hopes that someone else will commit the
sacrifice for him, which Mullah-Yusuf does. And just as the Biblical Isaac could be
seen as the precursor to the sacrifice of Jesus, so the failed but attempted sacrifice of
Is-haq prefigures much of the rest of the novel’s plot.
Even before we are told about the meeting with Is-haq, we see Nuruddin being
asked to intervene in the case of Hassan (well before the two men will become the
closest of friends). We have also been told that on the day when Nuruddin goes to
visit the ailing (apparently dying) Janich, the dervish’s brother Harun had already
been imprisoned in the town’s fortress for ten days. Up until this point, it would ap-
pear, Nuruddin has done nothing to save him.12 However, he goes willingly to talk
with Janich because he is aware that Janich’s son-in-law is the Sarajevo kadi who can
presumably intervene to save Harun. The opportunity to do so comes when the ka-
di’s wife asks Nuruddin to convince the ne’er-do-well Hassan to give up his share of
the family inheritance to her. She claims that this will limit the family’s shame, and
do Hassan no harm, as his father will disinherit him in any case.
Hoping to save his own brother by convincing Hassan to do as his sister wish-
es, Nuruddin makes explicit the substitutability of these two young men: “I was al-
most ready to tell her openly: very well, we no longer have any reason to conceal
ourselves. I’ll give you Hassan, you give me my brother” (24, 30). Initially, Nurud-
din is willing to sacrifice Hassan for the sake of his brother because he hardly knows
the young man. In the course of the novel, however, he becomes closer and closer to
Hassan, a process that begins when Hassan, provides information as to why Harun
was imprisoned and offers to help in getting him out of the fortress.
At first, apparently playing the role of Abraham, Nuruddin refuses to coun-
tenance the idea of arranging for his brother’s escape, proposing instead to allow

12
As has been noted by many scholars and critics, an autobiographical subtext lies at the base of this story. In
1943, Selimović’s older brother, a prominent partisan, was arrested and executed by his compatriots, alleged-
ly for theft. There was unquestionably a level of survivor’s guilt that animated the author and led him to con-
struct a plot around the arrest and execution of the narrator’s brother.
194 | Andrew Baruch Wachtel

God’s justice, or what he takes to be God’s justice to take its course. We see his hes-
itation in the following dialogue with Hassan, who has proposed to try to organize
his brother’s escape: “’Then he’d still be guilty’.’ ‘He’d still be alive. Saving him is all
that matters.’ But I’m saving more: justice.’ ‘All of you will suffer: you, your brother,
and justice’ If it’s fated to be so, then that’s the will of God’” (130, 138).
As it happens, for the moment Nuruddin can continue to play the role of Abra-
ham, acceding to the will of God, because Hassan agrees to play the role of the bib-
lical Isaac, and to sacrifice himself willingly.13 He volunteers to renounce his inher-
itance, as his sister and the kadi wish him to do, thereby putting his brother-in-law
under the obligation to free Harun. The transaction is described precisely in terms
of the logic of sacrifice and substitution. “I thanked him and began to take my leave.
My good mood, my hope had returned: he had won me over with his irresponsible
generosity. Fortunately, he had renounced everything himself: he had not hung his sac-
rifice around my neck” (136, 145 emphasis mine). But it is precisely Nuruddin’s con-
scious acceptance of Hassan’s sacrifice that is problematic. The Bible does not tell us
what Abraham thought of his son’s willingness to go along with what at least at some
point was becoming an obvious act of child sacrifice. But it seems doubtful that he
could have felt guiltless as Nuruddin does here.
As the novel continues, Ahmet makes a number of futile attempts to free his
brother, but eventually recognizes that his faith in his own power to convince the
powers that be to do anything is limited. Simultaneously, however, he begins to lose
his belief that whatever God wills is correct. In so doing, he falls even further from
the position of Abraham. He muses: “We had to break Harun out, to bribe the guards
so that he could escape, to send him to another country, so that he would never be
seen again. This was the only way hat he would ever leave the fortress dungeons: my
shameful performances would not help him at all. With Hassan and Is-haq everything
would be possible” (185, 193). Having lost the ability to accept God’s will, Ahmed
looks for help to his brother’s substitutes, the real Hassan and the hallucinated Is-haq,
each of whom he had, in his own way sacrificed previously. What is more, he is well
aware that even here he is not really trying to free his brother: “I was not dishonestly
warming two opposite desires in my heart. My thoughts were undivided and sincere-
ly tried to find the best way to free my brother. And the more sincerely and energeti-
cally I did that, I say, the stronger the conviction became somewhere within me, like
an indistinct whisper from the dark, like a certainty that is present but neither spoken
nor thought about, that such an endeavor would not succeed. And I had only called

13
Although the Biblical account does not indicate that Isaac was aware of what was to happen to him, there
are many Midrashic commentaries that insist that he must have had knowledge of what his father proposed
to do and that he agreed to it.
 “Death and the Dervish” and the Logic of Sacrifice | 195

Is-haq because he was unreachable … My hidden instincts, which protected me even

without my conscious will, generously granted such beautiful, noble thoughts, with-
out curtailing them: they knew that these thoughts were not dangerous, that they
could not turn into deeds” (186, 194). Nuruddin is the worst kind of Abraham. On
the one hand he cannot accept the idea that it is god’s will that someone, in this case
his brother, should be sacrificed. Yet on the other he cannot bring himself to oppose
god’s will with sufficient vigor to prevent it from being carried out.
The scene in which Nuruddin discovers that his brother has been executed is
key for understanding the terrible logic of his position. Having heard the news he
goes up to the fortress where Harun had been imprisoned, suspecting that his un-
willingness to intervene at an early stage is what had allowed the sacrifice to take
place: “I tried to turn back time, like a lunatic. I tried to revive my dead brother. He
had not yet been killed; I had just learned that he was in prison and come to inquire
about him; it is human, brotherly. There is no reason for fear or shame” (195, 203).
As he descends from the fortress, blaming himself for his brother’s death, he sees a
hallucination of Is-haq in the crowd of townspeople watching him. “I saw Is-haq, the
fugitive … His face was hard, like those of the others. They were one; they did not
differ in any way. I saw them like a multitude of Is-haqs, with many eyes and a single
question.” (198, 206) Nuruddin does not tell us what the question was, but it would
seem that it revolves around what Nuruddin’s actions (or inactions) vis-á-vis Harun
and Is-haq have in common: his unwillingness to take a firm stand on whether to ac-
cede to the will of God or man or to fight it.14 The hallucination appears precisely to
remind Nuruddin of his failure.
It is in the speech he gives in the mosque immediately after this that Ahmed
makes the fateful choice of rebellion. He will appears to abandon his untenable in-
termediate position, but he does not take Abraham’s path of faith. Rather, he decides
to actively fight for what he perceives to be the better way, the path of revolt. What
he does not realize, however, is that this path is the very one that is used by his en-
emies, and that in taking it he is falling to their level rather than rising above it. Al-
though this path eventually leads Nuruddin to secular power, it will eventually prove
to be a dead end. He cannot use it to avoid the need to confront the need to make
the choice between sacrificing individuals for the good of the state or refusing to do
so, as the climactic scene of the novel described earlier proves.
So how are we to understand Nuruddin? Most readers, I think, see him as ulti-
mately a negative figure, characterized, as Henry Cooper says in his introduction to

14
The suspicion that Is-haq should be connected with the Old Testament figure is strengthened in this pas-
sage through Ahmed’s linkage of Harun with the Old Testament figure of Aaron.
196 | Andrew Baruch Wachtel

the English edition of the novel, by the quality of malodušnost (faint-heartedness

or moral cowardice). To be sure, he is a failure as a figure of faith, but I am not con-
vinced that his failure should be understood as an ethical one, even if it does lead to
his suicide. In a recent book, Susan McReynolds has demonstrated that for Dosto-
evsky, one of the most important authors for Selimović, the problem of the econo-
my of sacrifice was of cardinal importance. “[Dostoevsky] suffered from profound
discomfort with the Crucifixion as a vehicle of redemption. The Crucifixion pro-
vokes Dostoevsky through what he perceives to be its combination of Christ’s vol-
untary self-sacrifice and the pathos of a child victim sacrificed by his father. … Over
the years, Dostoevsky comes to the never explicitly stated belief that the God of the
Crucifixion is a bad Jewish utilitarian whose presence within Christianity is intoler-
able … Dostoevsky gradually excludes a perceived willingness to sacrifice children
or innocents from Christianity and projects it onto the Jews.”15
I do not claim that Selimović read Dostoevsky in precisely this way. Rather, I
think Selimović is telling us, following Dostoevsky, that it is inhuman for god (or
the communist or any other party) to place man in a position where he he is forced
to sacrifice a child (or a fellow human being) for the sake of some apparently larg-
er good. Nuruddin’s malodušnost on this reading is not an ethically negative qual-
ity. In a world in which everyone appears sure that Isaacs should be blindly sacri-
ficed if their death seems necessary or expedient, Nuruddin is not so sure. While
it is true that he does not have sufficient faith to stand against the pressure to sacri-
fice the individual to the will of the collective, for the most part he refuses to take
an active part in that process. We can perhaps see this as a sign of weakness, but in a
world such as that described in the novel, it can equally be seen as a sign of strength.
In a state which explicitly embraced the idea that the sacrifice of various children
was necessary for the greater good, Selimović’s hero implicitly hopes for a «normal»
liberal state, which would not demand impossible tests of faith. In his 1970 novel
Tvrđava (The Fortress), Selimović would make this explicit.16 In Death and the Der-
vish, an extended meditation on the economy of sacrifice, he does not go that far.
Nevertheless, his narrator’s dissection of the terrible logic that underlies both the
biblical stories (of the Old and New testaments) as well as the supposedly secular
logic of the communist state is profoundly subversive.

15
Susan McReynolds, Redemption and the Merchant God. Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2008, 10-11.
16
See my article, “Modeli građanstva u romanu Tvrđava Meše Selimovića,” Književno djelo Meše Selimovića.
Sarajevo, 2010, 109-118.
 “Death and the Dervish” and the Logic of Sacrifice | 197

LITERATURE:

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Doubleday

Anchor Books: New York, 1957.
Levenson, Jon. D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. The Transformation of
Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
McReynolds, Susan. Redemption and the Merchant God. Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation
and Antisemitism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2008.
Selimović. Meša. Death and the Dervish. Translated by Bogdan Rakić and Stephen M.
Dickey. Introduction by Henry R. Cooper. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1996.
Spiegel, Shalom. The Last Trial. New York: Behrman House, 1967.

Ендру Барух Вахтел

ДЕРВИШ И СМРТ И ЛОГИКА ЖРТВОВАЊА

Апстракт: Роман Дервиш и смрт обликован је у форми дугачке опроштајне пору-

ке и исповести Ахмеда Нурудина, шејха дервишке текије у Сарајеву. Непосредан узрок
Нурудиновог самоубиства представља његова издаја најбољег пријатеља органима вла-
сти. Премда сцене које описују Нурудинов егзистенцијални избор и коначни морални
пад означавају кулминацију романа, он се и пре тога налазио у идентичним ситуацијама
– када је требало да бира између тога да спаси или жртвује поједине младиће – и себе мо-
рално изневеравао. У свакој од ових прилика, изјаловили су се Нурудинови покушаји да
пронађе компромис. Имајући то у виду, у овом раду се заступа тврдња да би роман Дер-
виш и смрт требало читати као тему и варијацију на тему вере и жртвовања, путем ко-
јих Селимовић повезује свој роман са актуелном политичком реалношћу, као и са једним
од темељних тектова монотеистичке традиције – старозаветним „Жртвовањем Исака”.
Кључне речи: Меша Селимовић, Дервиш и смрт, „Жртвовање Исака”, књижевност
и политика, Југославија

Received 11.01.2014 / Accepted 15.03.2014.