FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
The spirit of the Caliphate is taking root in today's Albania: from pulpits to dinner panels...
After the fall of communism in the 1990s, nostalgia erupted in Albania; for the king, for the banned elite, for the politically persecuted, for the poets and clerics that the dictatorship had exterminated. It was nostalgia for a past that communism had brutally persecuted and banned. But among these, a new nostalgia began to sprout, nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. At first it seemed like a wave of religious sentiment, but very quickly it transformed into an organized ideological and political platform. In this context, it is no longer surprising or naive, the way in which preaching in many mosques in Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia has been transformed, from a discourse on the holy book, to the glorification of the caliphate and Islamic empires.
This discourse is not local, nor is it born spontaneously. It is the product of an imported ideology, of a pan-Islamic spirit that comes from clear sources; the madrasas of the Middle East, the Saudi foundations, the Erdoganist networks in the Balkans, and, most recently, sophisticated online platforms and media outlets that cover the neo-Ottoman agenda.
In this discourse, the Albanian identity, with its European and enlightened essence of the National Renaissance, is despised, attacked, degraded. Skanderbeg, Mother Teresa, the Renaissance men are scorned as “instruments of the West,” while the empires that subjugated and massacred entire peoples are glorified as shining symbols of the “righteous Islamic world.”
In this context, it is not simply worrying that there are Albanian media outlets that use openly anti-Semitic language, conveying hate speech that goes beyond criticism of Israel, but it is tragic how this mentality is also taking root in self-proclaimed "intellectual" strata that lecture on evening screens about an "anti-colonialism" that is essentially nothing more than anti-imperialism. A number of public figures linked to religious ideologies, today write and speak as if they were the penmen of some propaganda institute of Erdogan or Al Azhar of the '60s, not as sons of a nation whose Renaissance built on light, education, knowledge and equality.
Nothing is accidental. Powerful centers of power that are concerned about the European emancipation of the region are using religion and “anti-colonial” sentiment to transplant dangerous ideas that aim to separate Albanians from their natural historical stream, from the Illyrians to Skanderbeg to Mother Teresa; towards a caliphate that has never been part of the Albanian conscience, but only the shirt of slavery on the body of a nation that has always aimed to be free.
Those who today lecture on the “benevolences” of the Arab caliphates, who glorify the sultans and curse our Renaissance people, who see the West as the “colonizing enemy,” do so not out of any deep spiritual conviction, but as part of an ideological war ordered and financed from abroad. They have no problem with colonization, they simply seek a different colonization: that of the headscarf, of the beard, of rules that prohibit art, music, love, and place submission and fear above everything else.
Albania needs faith, pure religious culture, an enlightened Islam like the one embodied by great Albanian figures, but not dark agendas that seek to revive the Caliphate in the name of a past that has punished us enough. And most importantly: Albania does not need new enemies, but friendships that are built on civilization, respect and values. This is our heritage. And whoever speaks on behalf of Albanians today must choose: with Europe or with the Caliphate. With light or with darkness./ Pamphlet
Lini një Përgjigje