Islam in the post-Communist Balkans: alternative pathways to God

Abstract

The Islamic 'revival' in the Balkans has raised many questions among mainstream politicians and academics, who tend to look at religion as a repository of ethno-national identities, and hence a risky 'depot', furthering divisions between and among national entities. How believers themselves discover, articulate and experience their faith, is often lost in the grand narratives of nations' assumed uniformity and the related criteria of inclusion and exclusion. This article shifts the analytical and empirical focus from nation-centric debates on the revival of Islam to believers' self-discovery and pursuit of faith after the fall of Communism. Specifically, it explores the emerging actors and mechanisms that trigger the bifurcation between Islam as a marker of national identity on the one hand, and a source of religious beliefs on the other. It all depends on who speaks for Islam-state authorities, religious hierarchies and/or informal faith communities. All the while, the Islamic phenomenon is no longer merely the bearer of ethnonational alternatives, but also the symptom of new spaces containing a variety of new actors as well as overlapping national, regional and global processes.

State-building or state-capture? Institutional exports, local reception and hybridity of reforms in post-war Kosovo

“…In 2017, the threat from both foreign fighters and isolated Salafi communities topped Kosovo's security agenda as 'a permanent, unpredictable and long-term problem' (UNDP 2017). At the same time, local authorities and believers proved active in screening and localizing the incoming ideologies along a post-communist trend of the personalization of religion and re-culturing of foreign ideals (Elbasani and Roy 2015). The mushrooming of practice communities has reshuffled the religious field and given rise to various, at times overlapping and conflicting trends merging localization and radicalization.…”

Albanian-style laïcité: A Model for a Multi-religious European Home?

“…The agreements provide a legal opportunity to pin down the mutual commitments of the state and respective community, but also single out the religious interlocutors who can collaborate with the state authorities. 58 The AMC, since its creation in 1991, followed the model of representative functions of the This tightly-centralized and hierarchical model of organization, however, did not fit in well with the decentralized flow of external funding and networks that permeated the country in the early 1990s. Many of the foreign built mosques, for example, remained de facto under the control of the associations that financed their construction.…”

A catalogue of vice: a sense of failure and incapacity to act among Roma Muslims in Macedonia

“…Because of the affinities between the discourses of socialism and reformed Islam and zealous transmission of Communist ideas into religious contexts (Elbasani & Roy : 461), the battle over power and claims to authoritative knowledge between reformers and traditionalists that informed political and religious life in the Ottoman provinces in the nineteenth century (Katsikas ) appears to have been won under socialism by the reformist official organizations. The latter sought to assert control over religious affairs and explicitly promoted ‘progressive’ values of rational education and modernization, thus inadvertently contributing to a kind of secularization of the state (Elbasani & Roy : 461, 463).…”

“…However, the conventional regional focus on nationalism poses a risk of isolating the Balkans in the ‘ethnonational ghetto’ (Brown : 817, 819), which diminishes the theoretical relevance of the region to anthropology in general and obscures the fact that many people are motivated by concerns other than ethnic identity politics. For example, Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy () have criticized the narrow focus on Islam as ethno‐national identity in the Balkans and urged for a more nuanced understanding of it as an alternative space of political, religious, and spiritual experiences.…”