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There has always been a plurality of trends within Islam, to which Sufism also belonged. Within the Ottoman Empire, mystical groups remained among the uncentralized forms of Islam until the end of the 19 th century and the creation of an association of the dervish orders, which, however, provided only a very partial structure for them. In 20 th -century Balkans, the Bektashis, one of the major Sufi orders present in the region, secured an official and institutionalized structure in Albania from the beginning of the 1920s. After the collapse of the Communist regimes in Albania and Yugoslavia, which had put strong obstacles against the free development of religion (especially in Albania where it was banned in 1967), a Bektashi organization was reestablished in Tirana. The paper discusses the main normative features of this organization, called Komuniteti Bektashian. Kryegjyshata Botërore Bektashiane (“Bektashi Community. World Bektashi Grandfather”). Special reference is given to the changing power relations within the community caused by this novel structure (its members being often linked to other Albanian or foreign actors—Albanian politicians, Iranian Shi'i networks, Turkish Alevi networks, etc.). The article also examines the complex and disputed relationship of the Bektashi organization with the official Islamic religious institutions, its international, or rather pan-Albanian, dimension, and also its inner functioning which is not as centralized as it is supposed to be.

Islam in modern Southeastern Europe is mostly studied in terms of institutionalization, nationalization and reforms. This top-down approach allows us to understand only incompletely the transformation of the Islamic religious scene and the relationship between state and religion. Here, I take the case of interwar Albania and decenter the analysis in studying the development of the Tijaniyya-a strongly orthodox North-African brotherhood which spread in this country after 1900-and examine the position of its members in the Islamic religious circles. The spread of this brotherhood was probably stimulated by the interference from the state in the religious sphere, which led to a transfer of the religious vitality to a sector which escaped to the state tutelage. The integration of several members of the Tijaniyya at the heart of the official structures of the Islamic Community in 1930 in order to control them, contributed to an Islamic revival from within the new reformed Islamic institutions, at a time when these institutions seemed more rationalized, controlled and secularized. In the second half of the 1930s, this unexpected Islamic revivalist evolution within the official Islamic institutions came to serve the new politics of King Zog, who abandoned his secularist politics, to fight the "communist danger".

En se concentrant sur le niveau supranational, l’article soutient que tout processus de construction stato-national doit être vu à l’intersection d’une multiplicité d’espaces sociopolitiques supranationaux. À titre d’exemple, le processus de formation de la nation et de l’État albanais est lié au développement de l’idée de l’existence d’une nation albanaise et de son rapport à la souveraineté, tel qu’il se déploie à partir du xix e siècle à la croisée des dynamiques sociales et politiques dans différents espaces supranationaux : l’espace impérial ottoman, l’espace balkanique, l’espace adriatique, l’espace européen et, dans une moindre mesure, l’espace transatlantique.

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