When communism collapsed, overseas Islamic charities came, largely from the Arab peninsula and north-eastern Africa, to assist the Muslim community. These foreign Islamic groups were the main financial backers for the resurgent MCA, the official organisation that runs Islamic affairs in the country.
Tahir Zenelhasani, now an Islamic educator in Albania, recalls how, during one Ramadan in the late 70s, his father was checked on by three party executives to see if he was fasting. They placed coffee and cigarettes in front of him. The younger generation discovering religion for the first time after communism, did so via schools and mosques established by foreign, often Arabic, charities.
Others were suspicious of so-called Arab groups whose interpretation of Islam was highly controversial in their home states. Differences in prayer styles, whether joined hands should be placed above or below the navel, became the subject of fierce debate. Other disputes included whether to allow marriage between first cousins, banned by Albanian law and among Ottoman Muslims but permitted in many foreign countries.
During that period, at least Albanians studied theology in Saudi Arabia who then returned to Albania, a country with just mosques, say sources within the Muslim community. They regard the MCA as corrupt and inept. The split was a result of an old stand-off between them and MCA officials. Some appeared on US and UN lists of organisations suspected of having links to, or funding, terrorist groups. These were closed down or expelled from Albania. Other groups, some of whom were not on the US or UN lists, chose to leave voluntarily.
The Turkish approach was more institutional. They clearly know how to manage. The largest school, the Hanafi, was predominant in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. The Islamic communities in the Balkans and in Turkey have, by and large, adopted it as their official school.
The Hanbali school, prevalent in Saudi Arabia, has some praying differences with the Hanafi, school, which had caused problems between youths and traditionalists in Albania. The Shafi school, predominant in parts of Egypt, was also brought to Albania by some Egyptian missionaries in the 90s.
Maliki legal interpretation is prevalent in Northern Africa and some parts of the Arab peninsula, but its presence in Albania has been relatively small.
While Arab organizations propped up the cash-starved resurgent Islamic community in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism, Turkish religious doctrines have gained favour since. Private Islamic Turkish charities established religious and non-religious schools in Albania which have become known for good discipline and high academic standards. None but one of the current 30 members of the MCA administration have studied in Arab countries, a reversed ratio compared to ten years ago.
A dozen Albanians study theology in Turkey every year now, and Albanian believers have asked the Diyanet, to arrange their hajj — something that was managed by Arab charities and organisations in the past.
Problems have emerged, however. When SEMA, the religious foundation run by the Turkish Gulen movement, took over the madrasa of Tirana, for example, it imposed intensive Turkish language courses. Named after its founder, the year-old Anatolian preacher Fetullah Gulen, the Gulen Movement is one of the most important religious groups in Turkey. Father Ernest Simoni Troshani, an Albanian Catholic priest, is recalling the post-World War II period in his country, when the regime led by communist dictator Enver Hoxha launched a crackdown on clerics and religious believers.
After Troshani held a mass in memory of US President John Kennedy when he was assassinated in November , he was arrested on Christmas Eve and went on to spend 28 years in prison. He was not the only religious figure to be subjected to severe repression under communist rule. An anti-communist speech led Muslim cleric Hafiz Sabri Koci to be jailed for more than 20 years; Catholic priest Shtjefen Kurti was shot for baptising children after he had already spent 20 years in jail, while another Muslim cleric, Hafiz Ali Kraja, only met his son for the first time at the age of five through the bars of a cell in the prison where he was held two decades.
In , the Party of Labour even declared Albania to be the first atheist country in the world, putting a ban on religious belief in the constitution and imposing punishments for participating in religious ceremonies and possessing religious books. Meanwhile, faith in Hoxha, communism and the party was encouraged.
Through a well-organised system of propaganda including media and movies, the dictatorial state denigrated clerics, targeting them as backward, negative influences on society, agents connected to the West, or even dangerous members of armed groups seeking to seize power by force. The trial of Catholic priest Gjon Shllaku in January He was sentenced to death and executed. The war against the clergy began after the communists came to power in Albania in They saw Catholic clerics, who had strong international ties and rejected communist propaganda, as a threat.
In December , dozens of Catholic clerics and believers were arrested, 39 of whom were convicted at military-led trials, with harsh penalties imposed. In March , seven believers were executed.
We must do our best to make everybody understand this, even those who have been poisoned who are not few in numbers. We must cure them. Political rhetoric and intense media propaganda spurred young people to target religious sites. According to the Memory Museum, an online project by the Albanian Institute of Political Studies, 2, religious institutions were closed, including mosques, Orthodox churches, Catholic churches, and turbe Ottoman mausoleums and teke Sufi religious sites.
Cultural and historical heritage was destroyed along with them. He remembered a particularly disturbing incident in the winter of that he witnessed while he was going to school in Tirana one morning.
The trucks were going to take the people to internment camps. They stayed there for two hours to intimidate people who were going to work or school. Ernest Simoni Troshani centre at the Vatican in November after he was made a cardinal. One of the most absurd cases of persecution was suffered by Father Ernest Simoni Troshani, now aged 90 and one of the most respected Catholic figures in Albania.
Since the practice of religion was not yet forbidden by law at that point, clerics were accused of other violations in various fabricated cases.
In May , a group of prisoners staged an uprising against their guards and started to call for freedom and the end of Communism. Although the rules were strict, he continued to practise his faith in secret, holding mass and taking confessions. But after he was finally released from prison, Troshani was arrested yet again and sentenced to do hard labour working in sewage canals. Hafiz Ali Koci. The speech resulted in Hafiz Ali Kraja being immediately classified as an anti — Communist, and forced him to go into hiding with a family in the town of Shkoder for about two years from Hafiz Ali Kraja was then sentenced to 25 years in prison.
But while he was in hiding, his brothers had been tortured by the authorities in an attempt to get them to reveal his whereabouts. He also recalled how he was mistreated at school because his father was in prison for his religious activities.
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