Inter-religious tolerance is one of the most important pillars of Albania’s fragile national unity – and extremism, based on any religion, is the most efficient way to undermine it.
By DRITAN SULȅBE*
News on the involvement of Albanian volunteers among the ranks of ISIS and other Jihadist fractions has sparked mixed reactions of fear and indignation among Albanian media and public opinion.
The appearance of Albanian Jihadists beheading victims and issuing statements of hatred and terror is generating a heated debate involving delicate issues such as Islam in Albania, sectarian or regional differences and Albania’s European perspectives.
Prejudices and passionate, for the most part futile, discussions have until now hindered a profound genuine analysis on the roots and causes of the nascent Islamism in Albania, which are to be found solely on the domestic and international socio-economic developments of the last 24 years.
With the fall of the communist regime in 1991, Albania’s religious groups faced the difficult task of reconstitution, relying mainly on the aid given by foreign religious communities. In the cases of the Albanian Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the reorganization process was facilitated by the Holy See and the Ecumenical Patriarchate respectively, while for the Muslim Community the reestablishment process was much more complex.
The Muslim Community of Albania could not rely on just one actor to reconstitute itself, because since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, currently there is no legal central authority over Muslims in the world. For this reason Albanian Muslim Community was open to various donors with different backgrounds, which in some cases had obscure intentions and paved the way to the spread of radical Salafist and Wahabist movements.
Weak state structures and the violent turmoil that followed in Albania throughout the nineties, favored the uncontrolled activity of different Islamic relief organizations, which under the disguise of humanitarian activities promoted their own agenda.
On the other hand, many Albanian Muslim Clerics, who were educated abroad, fell under the influence of different radical doctrines, which began to spread once they came back to their homeland. All these factors have led to the emergence of radical Islam in Albania, whose followers constitute a small minority within the Albanian Muslim Community itself, but given the dire social and economic situation of the country, extremism might experience in the years to come a dangerous growth.
Recent comments of some of the most renowned public figures that condemn the phenomenon of Islamism by criminalizing the whole Albanian Muslim Community will be of an enormous value to the extremists’ agenda.
Corruption, economic crises and failure of state institutions to address the citizens’ needs, proved to be decisive factors in the rise of radical Islamic movements throughout the Muslim world and in this context Albania won’t be an exception.
It is true that the solid inter confessional tolerance, combined with the atheist marked communist era have remarkably diminished the role of religion in public life, but the flow of Albanian Jihadists to the ongoing Middle Eastern wars, is a clear alarming sign that religious extremism should not be neglected, since it contains the seeds of future conflicts that might threaten the national integrity of the country.
Inter-religious tolerance is one of the most important pillars of Albania’s fragile national unity – and extremism, based on any religion, is the most efficient way to undermine it.
Religious extremism can only be fought efficiently by identifying its roots. Recent history has proven that societies dominated by poverty and extreme inequality constitute ideal grounds for the growth and diffusion of extremism of any nature.
So far, Albania remains a country of stark contrasts, with an overwhelming majority living in poor conditions and a small wealthy minority owning the most important economic assets of the country.
Over the last two decades Albanian political forces managed to secure their hegemony by playing upon false ideological conflicts and by promising the bright future ahead under the protective EU umbrella.
However, the emergence of Islamism shows that this hegemony has slowly started to crumble and that people tired of the same political slogans and propaganda have started to seek other ways to express their aspirations.
Unfortunately, radical Islam is one of them. As long as the political landscape will remain unchanged without new progressive political factors striving for the eradication of the plagues of poverty, inequality and ignorance, Albania will risk internal divisions along sectarian lines. It is an extremely dangerous scenario that would result in the opening of Pandora’s Box for the whole region.
*Dritan Sul覢e is a researcher at the Albanian Institute for International Studies and a Tirana Times op-ed contributor.
