Fehim Bajraktarević
Fehim Bajraktarević was a famous philologist, orientalist and Slavist. He gained international recognition as one of the founders of modern orientalism in the area of the former Yugoslavia. Amidžić is Sulejman Bajraktarević.
He was born in Sarajevo on November 14, 1889, to father Mustafa, a merchant from Gornji Vakuf, and mother Nefisa Šolbat. He finished elementary school and high school in Sarajevo in 1911, after which he went to study oriental languages and Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Vienna. He finished his studies in 1917, and the following year he passed the professor's exam and defended his doctoral dissertation on the Arab pre-Islamic poet Abu Kabir el-Hudali. He completed his specialization in London (University College) in 1919, and from 1922 to 1924 at the Faculty of Letters in Algeria. In 1925, he began teaching the course History of Persian Literature at the Department of World Literature of the Faculty of Philosophy (later Philology) of the University of Belgrade, where in 1926 he founded the Department of Oriental Philology, which he remained at the head of until his retirement in 1960. He became an associate professor in 1929, and a full professor in 1939.
After retirement, he continues to work as a part-time teacher. He died on February 22, 1970 in Belgrade. He knew Persian, Arabic, Turkish, French, English, Italian and Russian languages. He translated from oriental languages into Bosnian and French. He was a member of the International Advisory Committee for the publication of works in Leiden, the Society of French Orientalists in Belgrade, the Committee for Oriental Literature at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Society of German Orientalists. He published a large number of works, such as studies of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature, translations, poems, and linguistic analyzes of domestic and foreign texts.
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