Further Considerations on the Politics of Religious Discourse: Naim Frashëri and his Pantheism in the Course of Nineteenth-Century Albanian Nationalism

The New German-speaking School of Balkankompetenzen: Knowledge production and truth claims in post-colonial post-communist context

“…This might have been the case, as I showed elsewhere, with the older generation of scholars working in the folkloric-ethnographic studies largely inspired from the traditions of old German-speaking Volkskunde and Soviet etnografiya (Abazi and Doja, 2016; Doja, 2013a, 2015). It appears that Schwandner-Sievers sustains an ethnocentric bias in considering that some scholars rather than others can only beat some reserved paths.…”

“…Rather, along with most area experts in the standard tradition of research on Bektashism (e.g., Duijzings, 2000: 157–175), 6 there is a failure to understand that Albanian national activists like Frashëri did not intend so much to make a national myth of Bektashism or to provide Albanians with a unique religion. While Frashëri did indeed have a religious cast of thought, Albanian-born scholars have demonstrated that Frashëri’s religious thinking went far beyond Bektashism in its heterodoxy, being a kind of liberation theology and pantheism that generated an all-inclusive attitude to Albanian identity, not one limited in any special way to Bektashism (Abazi and Doja, 2013; Doja, 2003, 2012). Frashëri’s intention was to forcefully appeal for union while playing down any manifest religious division or social and cultural differentiation among Albanians, thus making nationalist ideas acceptable both to Albanian Bektashi and to Albanians of whatever religious affiliation.…”

Politics of mass rapes in ethnic conflict: a morphodynamics of raw madness and cooked evil

“…Rape may be analyzed by its effects on male group dynamics, military rankings, state and ethnic formations, forms of political recruitment, family reorganization, gender relations, economic and rural/urban differentiation, and forms of political recruitment and religious purity/pollution. Conflict-related rape and gender-based 2 Structural methodology is implicit in previous works on social morphology [32,33], processes of identity construction and cultural socialization [34,35], women's agency [36], the myth of many children within the so-called Albanian patriarchal extended family [1], the religious movements during much of Southeast European history and politics [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], the narrative legacies and international representations of Balkan wars and their implications in regional and international politics [45][46][47], or the transformations of European identity [48].…”

The Beautiful Blue Danube and the Accursed Black Mountain Wreath: German and Austrian Kulturpolitik of Knowledge on Southeast Europe and Albania

“…Not only are these claims based on a deliberate use of selective data and an outright exaggerated point of her own, but they also essentialize and reify the otherization of some given nation, and ultimately work for the ideological purpose of civilizational drifts within the Balkans and within Europe itself. (For more details on the instrumentality of religious shifting in the historical reconstruction of identities in multi-religious Albania, see Doja 2000; on the historical development of Bektashism and the political instrumentality of its religious structure within a general ideological cultural system, see Doja d, 2006Doja e, 2006 f; on the supposed elective affinities of nineteenth-century Albanian nationalism to religion and specifically to Bektashism, see Doja 2013 b;Abazi / Doja 2013 regime. 11 Some others are better known in vernacular Albanian as dumbabist, with reference to the 1914 rural rebellion that shortly after Albanian independence claimed the return to "Father Sultan" of the Ottoman Empire, but which can be freely extended to the former as to all charlatans in need of whichever patronal support in post-socialist post-colonial Albania.…”