Folk religion in the Balkans and the Qur’anic account of Abraham

In the early 1980s, Boris Uspenskii developed a related idea [1982, 1983].Instead of dvoeverie, he prefers to use the term diglossia, applying it not only to linguistic but also to cultural phenomena.In his view, diglossia (when two or more varieties of a language(s) are used by the same speaker in different cultural contexts) is characteristic, for example, of the period of conversion in Kievan Russia.It was in these turbulent times of change that the new religious canon of Christianity encountered the old belief system of pagan faith, thus creating new cultural and confessional patterns which still survive; correspondingly, Old Church Slavic began to function as the high form of the language, acting as the basic vehicle for the "transplantation of Byzantine culture to Russian soil" [Uspenskii 1983: 9-10] not only in strictly linguistic terms, but in a much broader, cultural sense.Meantime, Russian was used as its low vernacular counterpart.In this way Uspenskii combined both a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic approach to religious phenomena, where the linguistic model served, in a manner typical of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, as a universal paradigm of culture.Hence, culture was studied as a language.This approach has strongly influenced my own.Over the last twenty years, certain East European scholars of Balkan religion, as well as some from Western Europe and the USA, have started using the term "Crypto-Christianity" to denote specific facets of the encounter between Christianity and Islam in Asia Minor and the Balkans (especially Bosnia and Albania).According to Stavro Skendi, "in Crypto-Christianity the two religions, Christian and Moslem, coexisted."He emphasizes that during Ottoman rule Crypto-Christianity meant "the appearance of individuals in a group who, while publicly professing Islam, satisfied their conscience by practising Christianity -Orthodox or Catholic -in private" [1980: 233].Crypto-Christianity is one of very few terms common to both Eastern and Western specialists in the study of religion.Although I do not use this term, the concept has proved valuable to me.This essay does not only take into account established academic ideas and hypotheses, but also provides new data on the popular dimensions of the religions of the book, the Bible and/or the Qur'an, derived from fieldwork conducted in both Christian and Muslim SEEFA Journal 2002, Vol.VII No. 1