The Poem “Get Rid of the Tobacco” by Hasan Kaimija: A Review of a Literary Historical Dispute

Although of little aesthetic significance, the song ˝Ostante se tutuna˝ šejh Hasan Kaimija has been the subject of various controversies in the Bosnian scientific community for a whole century. This paper aims to show how the poem, from its first publication until modern times, has been used as an “ally” to deny or support certain narratives. As the central theme of all the texts in the dispute throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, the “thesis of Bogumilism” was imposed, apropos whether Kaimija could have known about Bogumils in the 17th century. The text is mostly used as an “ally” in historiography, identity theory, economics, religion, and only to some extent in literary history. Also, the aim was to show how the poem figured in these discourses, and especially the “controversial verses”, but also what kind of interpretation and valorization poem had in different historical contexts.