Balkan Journal | Albania | Nov 2023
Islam and Isolation in North Albania
It isn’t long after leaving the rapidly westernising cities and venturing into the mountainous northeast of Albania, you begin to see that Islam retains a stronghold in more remote part of the country. With beach resorts opening up to the growing number of tourists across Albania’s Mediterranean coast, and the abundance of Alcohol being sold in kiosks on the streets of Tirana, it is easy to forget that Albania is a Muslim majority country.
The Islamisation of the country started towards the end of the fourteenth century with the Ottoman Empire’s conquest in the Balkans. Over the course of Ottoman rule many Albanians converted to Islam due to various factors, including a Jizya (tax) on non-Muslims, as well as heavy enforcement by the Ottomans in some regions to stop Christian revolts. The Ottomans were pushed out of Albania in 1912 during the Balkan wars, but Islam prevailed amongst Albanian populations in what is now Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia. As of today, Sunni Islam makes up 45% of the population, with Bektashism, an order of Sufi Islam, makes up almost 5%. The rest of the population are Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Atheist or undeclared.
This changed after the Second World War, when Enver Hoxha took power and formed the ‘Peoples Socialist Republic of Albania’ in 1947, a communist one-party state. It was in February 1967 that the Albanian Government cracked down on religion with a violent campaign aimed at completely removing it from everyday life, with the justification that it was divisive and promoted a ‘backwards’ way of living. By the end of that year, thousands of churches, mosques, monasteries and other places of worship were forcibly shut down and converted into gyms, workshops or storage facilities, or outright demolished. The government declared Albania to be the world first ‘Atheist State’, Something Enver Hoxha saw as one of his greatest achievements. Although the Albanian constitution guaranteed religious freedom at the time, it was amended in 1976 meaning the state recognised no religion.
A year before the regime collapsed in 1991, the government under Ramiz Alia, allowed for limited religious freedom, and the Catholic church and mosque in Shkoder where the first to open in the country since 1967. Throughout the 90s once the regime had been toppled in 1992, many Muslims across Albania took part in the nationwide effort to restore mosques and religious buildings that the communists had destroyed. Foreign funding from countries such as Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Egypt helped with the revival by training Imams and religious teachers in their countries and assisting in the reconstruction of Mosques and Madrassas. However, fifty years of state atheism combined with little religious education and mass emigration in the immediate post-communist years made the revival of religion slower than that of less restrictive former communist states in Europe.
Semih in Kukës
Semih has lived in Kukës all his life, a city in the mountainous northeast of Albania in one of the poorest regions in the country. He has been a practicing Muslim virtually all his life and tells me what being a Muslim was like in both communist and post-communist times. He was born in 1970 in Kukës hospital to Muslim parents, and grew up just as any ordinary Albanian child did at the time, attending school and pioneer camps, and receiving the standard dose of indoctrination of socialist ideology.
His home life was in stark contrast to his school life however, his mother and father both continued to practice Islam at home secretly, keeping Qur’ans and Hadiths hidden away and only using them for prayers, or when his father would teach him. He recalls there were secret networks of Muslims in each town in Northern Albania, where religious teachings and material could be exchanged, but his parents mostly stayed away from these, as getting caught by the authorities could lead to severe repercussions. As Semih grew older, he became confused between the conflicting sides of state and faith, with the education system promoting atheism, he explains how he began to doubt Islam, and how the school would explain how there is no proof of a god and that science and the party is the only absolute. This feeling of doubt turned into guilt when he was at home, until he told his father he wasn’t sure if he believed in Islam anymore and about what he had learnt in school. His father’s response what the first time he had heard anyone talk bad about the government and about Enver Hoxha, which in turn made him resent his father, as he was told that he needed to inform on anyone who speaks as such. He stopped praying and reading the Qur’an but adds that part of him couldn’t shake the belief.
The year Enver Hoxha died in 1985, he like many other young Albanians at the time, felt immensely sad, he was the ‘big uncle’ of Albania, the defender who kept the capitalists and revisionists out, and made the country a ‘paradise’. By now he was mid-teens and believe the death of Hoxha made him closer with his parents and began to become interested in Islam again. Semih thinks since Enver wasn’t around his subliminal loyalty weakened, and he could explore religion again. Something his father was overjoyed about. Before the end of communism in Albania when the ban on religion was lifted, he found out many of his friends, including his best friend had all practiced Islam or Christianity at home in secret whilst growing up. Finding this out was what made him fully embrace Islam, not only for the religious aspect but also for the community, explaining how it was a ‘brotherhood’ that had survived a regime.
In the years that followed the collapse of communism, which Semih describes as the ‘wild years’ many mosques began to appear across the landscape, and it was when he travelled to Greece in the mid-90s that he realised how the regime had kept Albania in the dark, and how at that minute any last remaining positive thoughts of communism or of Enver Hoxha were gone. ‘The numbers of cars, and lights and money’ he says he couldn’t believe it was only over the border for so many years. As the 90s went on he learnt more about Islam and attended the mosque in Kukës frequently, making sure to attend every Friday prayers, and completely abstaining from alcohol. When his father died in the early 2000s, he tells me he couldn’t have coped without the mosque and the help from the Imam. In 2016 the new mosque was opened in Kukës, built using Egyptian funds, it’s the mosque he attends regularly with his wife and children today. ‘I am raising my children to be good Muslim, but they can choose if they believe’ he adds.
The new mosque in Kukës.
Islam, combined with his experience living through communism and the collapse of the regime has shaped Semih’s world view drastically. He is a firm believer in democracy and political pluralism, a strong belief within the Muslim community in Albania, as it ensures freedom to practice religion and hold one’s own beliefs he explains. Albania is also a secular country with no state religion, something Semih strongly believes in despite being a Muslim, as he thinks one of Albania’s strengths is how different groups all work and ‘survived’ together. He points out how whenever there is a Mosque there is a church.
Semih brings up the future of Albania, and his opinions on Edi Rama, the president of Albania. He, like many others in the north of the country, worry about Rama’s government, being the liberal ‘Socialist Party of Albania’, there is a strong sense of distrust towards left wing politics. He goes onto call the president a ‘communist puppet’ and points out that Edi Rama’s father Kristaq Rama had close ties to the former communist government. In the 2021 parliamentary elections, the northeast overwhelmingly supported the PDSH, the conservative Democratic Party of Albania, the largest opposition to Rama’s left wing government. He says people in the north vote this way to preserve their lifestyle and out of fear of returning to regime style policies.
Semih is an example of how culture and religion can survive years of oppression, especially under totalitarian communist rule. Across the iron curtain after communism fell, religion and customs suppressed by various regimes saw a resurgence, Albania being one of the most prevalent. In September 2024, Edi Rama announced plans to create a microstate, similar to the Vatican, in Tirana for the Bektashi Order, a Shia-Sufi Islamic order from the Ottoman empire. Today about 4% of the Albanian population adhere to the Bektashi Order. As Albania’s dystopian past grows older with those who lived through it, the shared respect and adherence to Albanian religion and culture will likely be preserved for generations.