Muharem "Mumo" Serbezovski (Macedonian: Мухарем Сербезовски; born 2 May 1950) is a Muslim Roma singer, popular in former Yugoslavia.
Muharem Serbezovski was born on May 2, 1950, in Topaana, the oldest Romani settlement of Skopje, at that time capital of the People's Republic of Macedonia.
[4] He rose to fame in the late 1960s, thanks to the help of Stevo Teodosievski, a folk composer and director of a Romani ensemble, and his wife Esma Redžepova, herself a Roma singer.
He first followed Stevo and Esma to Belgrade, at that time the capital city of Yugoslavia and its main cultural hub.
[2] The Bosnian capital was then experiencing a rich cultural life and the singer was attracted to its cosmopolitan and Eastern atmosphere.
At that time, Yugoslavia and India were both part of the Non-Aligned Movement and Josip Broz Tito exploited the Indian origin of the Romani people to get the two countries closer.
Serbezovski also has plans to translate the Old and New Testament, Hadiths and some well-known literary works (War and Peace, Crime and Punishment and One Hundred Years of Solitude) into Romani.
It was followed by Cigani A kategorije ("First-class Gypsies") in 1985, Za dežjem pride sonce : dva romana ("With rain comes the sun: two novels") in 1986, and his volume of poetry, Nitko ne zna puteve vjetrova i Cigana ("No one knows the road of winds and Gyspies") in 1999.
For him, his work gives a much more authentic insight on Roma people than novels from non-Romani writers, who usually use Romani characters only to set up an atmosphere.
He never intended to become a professional politician but wanted to represent Roma people on the Bosnian political scene.
In 2009, he said he considered that violence against women was normal and part of the Balkan tradition, and caused outrage among the public and the Bosnian NGO sector.