This book has spoken about the permanence and persistence of the Hajj in scholarly discourses and the everyday lives of Bosnian Muslims, as much as about their physical journeys to Mecca and Medina. This presence is especially seen in times of absence: as the current Covid-19 pandemic prevents Hajjis from going on a pilgrimage for the second year in a row, Bosnians have undertaken a number of activities to express their profound sadness at the impossibility of travel, sense of longing and attachment to the ritual. Apart from a number of personal reflections and photographs published online in the form of Facebook posts or through the webpages of daily newspapers and journals, the Hajj-deprived Bosniaks also organised events that kept the flame going. One of these events was held in summer 2021. The roundtable organised by the Rijaset of the Islamic Community in Bosnia aimed to ‘maintain the awareness of the Hajj in the circumstances of the pandemics’. The event provided opportunity for attendees to learn more about the Hajj rites, as well as the significance of the ritual sacrifice and Eid. Special attention, however, was paid to the ‘cultural and civilisational aspects of the Hajj’, with the focus on the ways in which the pilgrimage had affected the Bosniaks in history. One of the participants of the roundtable, Ismet Bušatlić, a retired professor of Islamic civilisation, emphasised the long history of the Hajj in the history of Bosnia and stated that Bosniaks gained much with the Hajj, from dreams about the journey to its realisation:

The Hajj discourse in the twenty-first-century Bosnian context, as seen from the example above, has reached a level of critical self-awareness and analysis that is rare for religious literature, particularly for writings about other normative rituals, such as fasting or almsgiving.