Kraa: Why not approach Muslim and Albanian religious identity?

During the entire 20th century, says Kraja, religious identity fought hard with the national identity, while they never came closer.

According to him, Kosovo has been afraid and still has to discuss the issue of religion without prejudice.

Kraja, among other things, has compared Turkey's influence on Albanians and their role in the city of Prizren, saying Turkish identity was in line with Islamic Islam in Kosovo. Unlike Albanian identity that was contrary to it.

To this day, matters opened up about how these two identities, Albanian identity, and Muslim religious identity could be transmitted without harming each other without harming each other. Why wouldn't that happen, why does that seem impossible in Kosovo, when it already doesn't seem impossible even for a European Turkey?

Here's a full note:

BA PLACE NATION-FE WRITER IN COSOVA

Why did religious identity in Kosovo have a hard fight with national identity throughout the 20th century? Why could Albanian national identity with Muslim religious identity never be introduced without violating each other? Why was Kosovo afraid and still afraid to open it and discuss the subject of religion without prejudice? What are the consequences of the years '90s in today's religious developments in Kosovo?

(From the book “)

Marked from a historical standpoint, things about religion in Kosovo are clear, and the only contradiction is about our social environment, which refuses or is reluctant to make open discussions about religion's report on political movements or religion's role in consolidation or distorting identities. In the creation of this not favourable climate for constructive and controversial discussions, many factors have been influenced, but three of them should be divided as the most secular. The first is the authentic factor, so the Kosovo Albanian factor, which until recently did not put religion into the framework of no ID development, but rather considered it a historical legacy, sometimes even as its biggest disaster. Next comes Serbia, Yugoslavia, or the Slavic factor, which the religious issue in Kosovo significantly distorted, instrumentalising it for unresolved political problems and Kosovo status. And, third, the factor of communist Albania, or dictatorial, which has its dogmatism of changing the issue of religion, transforming it into national community, expanded it into Kosovo as well.
So how did the Kosovo Albanians conduct religion themselves, and how did they treat it throughout their latest history? As we have said earlier, the extent of the Islamisation of Kosovo's population, which with the first Ottoman conquests was too high, and in later Kosovo, such as the villas of the Ottoman Empire, is represented as one of the most Islamic, more orientised areas of the Balkans. For this reason, since early Kosovo recognised an almost integral Ottoman emancipation and, as a result, was almost excluded from Albanian cultural movements, separately from those of the National Renaissance. Kosovo's Albanian subject during recent history was greatly hurt by the ongoing wars, assimilation and denationalisation and, as a result, the exiles to Turkey or other parts of the empire. In this respect, a nontypical situation arose for Kosovo Albanians after Turkey's departure from the Balkans and after the establishment of the Albanian state -- namely, a new process of denationalisation and overexcusing religious identity at the expense of national identity. Within a short time, Kosovo Albanians become Turks and as Turks either form favors, or are forced out for Turkey. Paradox: Despite the high degree of Islamisation and Orientalisation, Kosovars appear with more stable national identity at the end of the 20th century than in the first half of the 20th century. Example: Prizren until today is seen as the centre of the Oriental spirit in Kosovo and the Turkish minority. It seems that this was done in a totally late time, in the first half of the 20th century, because at the end of the XIX (1894), Serbian writer Branislav Nussic, who does not show any consideration to Albanians in the book of scripts “From Kosovo to the blue sea” says specifically that Prizren, in addition to the Serb and arum minority, has Albanian populations and that Turkish “has more than ten to fifteen houses”. The situation will change dramatically after 1913. The Yugoslav Kingdom favours the conversion of Albanians to Turks and then their deportation to Turkey. However, because of these exiles, in 1948 Kosovo numbers a total of 1,315 Turks, while five years later registered 259,535 members of this nationality throughout Yugoslavia, where Kosovo is believed to have participated with a considerable number of members of that nationality.
But, really, should the issue of Islamic religion in Kosovo be linked to the Turkish minority, regardless of what number this minority was and how it was politically manipulated by the former Yugoslavia? Yes, because it will constitute the nucleus of the Oriental spirit, the preservation of national-religious identification status, or vice versa. On the other hand, this minority will be the preliminary container for deployments to Turkey, for intensifying Yugoslavia-Turkey relations and for quick compensation of national identity to be missing or endangered with religious identity. Identified with religious iconography, during the second half of the 20th century, Turkey will be present in Kosovo as much as Albania -- the half-hour and star of the Turkish flag, the symbols of the Turkish minority in Kosovo -- will be placed on the minaret of each mosque in Kosovo and Macedonia, at yard gates and in tombstones, at girls' embroidery stands and brides, at wedding ceremonies and goofs, at east and death. As religion, Turkishness in Kosovo gradually became nationality.
Throughout the 20th century, religious identity in Kosovo will develop fierce battles with national identity, trying to replace or compensate it. This battle has taken on various confrontations, transformed, but continues to this day. In the past, this circumstance did not speak of a harmony between these two identities, but of one opposition to each other, until the exception. Turkish identity was in harmony with Islamic Islam religion in Kosovo, while Albanian identity was in conflict with it. Issues remain open to this day about how these two identities, Albanian identity, and Muslim religious identity could be transmitted without harming each other without harming each other. Why not, why does this seem impossible in Kosovo, when it already does not seem impossible even for a European Turkey? It may seem impossible because of Kosovo's stay in the overcome, on the edge of the division of civilizations, between East and West, where a battle is still under way, which is not the case with Turkey. It is Eastern, Oriental, consolidated, and its accession to Europe is not a question of whether Turkey will change its civilianised cover (its only movement can happen between secularism and fundamentalism), but will be a test for the extent of European tolerance, respectively, of Europe's conservative readiness to be included in the contradictory process of globalisation. With Kosovo, the issue remains different. Kosovo still stands on a floating boat, even unlike Albania, which has already taken a decisive step towards the West. Kosovo is unable to be clearly defined, because of history, because of religion, because of dual identity, because of old prejudices and new dilemmas, which, neither of them, managed to become dominated, neither as civilisation nor culture, nor as politics, nor as identity.
I want to do here a retrospect, perhaps a little inappropriate, but for me necessary, and to return to the years, when I first saw Kosovo, exactly in September 1971. What impressed me was the high degree of Islam and Orientalism, which to me, that world, had no great difference. I was born in Kraja, where you seemed to be involved in a permanent ritual of paganism. On the other hand, we had the walls of an old church just across the courtyard, and my father went to the mosque once a week, in which three people pardoned him - my father, my father, and a certain Xhaferi, our cousin, who was born to only daughters and therefore went to the mosque, did not know how to pray, but he prayed for a boy. Then I was going to high school in Ulcinj, where the world had a great mix of religious and national identities: there were Albanian Catholics who had become semi-Montenegrins, there were Albanian Muslims who had become half-Bosnian or exactly Bosniaks, who for us were no different from Montenegrins, because they were speaking Serbian; but, above all, we hated Romanians who spoke Albanian and Serbian mixed, while they wrote only Serbian, in a word, that was on the way of denationalisation and loss of identity.
In Kosovo, apparently, the issue was not so confused. However, what remains in my mind was the intense passion of people for religion, the vast number of fasters, including my fellow students, who on Bajram's day fled from their faculty and dormitories. Religious references to everyday communication were too intense, enormous: in every second sentence the conversationator would mention Allah or the Koran (Musafi). Throughout Kosovo, you heard young children's names Nasser, Arashat, late on even Gadhaf, reflecting an unprecedented event towards Tito's reports with these Arab leaders, although one of them, like Naser, was known to be a rabid anti-Albanian. On the other hand, their attitude toward Catholics, as few as they were in Kosovo, was generally rejected and differed radically from their attitude toward them on our side. We co-existed with Catholics, while in Kosovo it still had to be talked about basic tolerance. Our boxes were known to families with religious divisions, <x0, we divided the X-8x1>, as stated, but still lived under a roof. In Kosovo I had learned very recently about so - called Larmamans, who were actually declassine Catholics, with Muslim outward appearances and Catholic family life completely closed. I've had a very difficult time understanding this phenomenon, because that world didn't think this “Catollicism clantin”, however rare, referred to the fanatic environment of Muslim Kosovo. In fact, as I have later realized, the Larmanians in Kosovo are not at all, but are Catholics, who have long found no suitable social environment to appear with their true religion.
Such was Kosovo from the beginning of the É70s, which had just passed the first stage of emancipation. It was here, at this time and at this stage of emancipation that Albania intervened. Kosovo was extremely conservative, totally immersed in its Anadoluc environment, now received little national education, which quickly advanced and left two steps behind religious fanaticism. As it is known, the resurgent ideas will find wide adaptation in Kosovo and will be absorbed at a high speed. But these national-Roman ideas, as it is known, in Kosovo begin to penetrate alongside Enver Hoxha's Marxist-Leninist ideology and the entire communist Albania. There religion is analyzed, called harmful to the nation, and then stops completely. Kosovo surprisingly created a kind of selective embezzlement capacity of these ideas: it was Enver's national community, but it also wanted private property; it supported Enver's ideas, but for religion and faith it preserved traditional considerations. This was the case with the broader layers of the population. Then, from the Corps of ideas on religion that began to come to Kosovo through propaganda and through literature, emanimated Kosovars began to get what might be best for their circumstances: they did not receive atheism, which propagand Enver, but they received religious indifference, which could sometimes be camouflaged atheism, while other times also hidden theism. This religious indifference created room for Kosovo to be emancipated more quickly, but at the same time, we were saved from the moral strippership, which brings atheism with us into a non-communicational society.

*

The year 1981 and the work of religion marks a turning point in Kosovo -- from this year and back, even in this Kosovo issue again to mix Yugoslavia, Serbia, respectively, transforming it significantly. We have already known that the undoing of the Albanian element in Kosovo, in Yugoslavia, but even wider had taken an important place in the Serbian national programme. One of the forms of undoing the national identity of Albanians was favouring religion, respectively, creating free space and stimulating it to the detriment of national identity. Albanians in general, but Kosovo Albanians in particular, had no harmonisation of national interest with religious identity, so that Serbia through the entire 20th century found ways to damage Albanians' national interest through religion. After making of them migrants, Turks, Islamists and inciting their deportation, the turn was to play the last card: Islamic fundamentalism, which the world had not yet heard of, but Europe had already created a sensitivity, even as distant preventatives.
As soon as the 1981 demonstrations took place, pictures of Kosovo settlements with minarets, mosques, and zoja - a typical Oriental environment - appeared on Yugoslav state television and in media written throughout this large state. From there these images were carried very quickly in the world media, for which being Albanian seeking national rights was quickly confused with being a Muslim who demands religious rights. As soon as something happened in Kosovo, or not to happen at all - by chance and without cause - images that had to illustrate confession, comment or report were ready: minaret, mosque, hoja. With intense propaganda, in the post 1981 period until the 1999 war, Serbia consistently tried to distort the identity of the Kosovo Albanians, overemphasize their Muslim dog, even throwing the thesis for close links of the Albanian nationalist movement to Islamic fundamentalistism. This propaganda made people feel very bad in Kosovo, apart from political classes and intellectuals in general. It was very fabricated propaganda, but it was too difficult to break down. The challenge involved the fact that Kosovars were largely Muslim by heredity, that a number of the goons practiced Muslim religious rites, but in national matters they were deep above religious. This was not easily charged by European opinion, not even by political and diplomatic Chancellors.
Kosovars had no choice but to engage in an untypical identity battle with clean political intentions: to repel Serbia with its aggressive propaganda, sacrificing a normal religious dialogue and a sweeping discussion of religion. Kosovo was afraid to open up the subject of religion. Kosovo was not prepared to open the subject of religion. Kosovo avoided the subject of religion. Kosovo was afraid of misunderstandings about religion. Kosovo began to watch with rejection all Muslim religious manifestations. Kosovo began to consider its majority Muslim disaster. Kosovo, forced by Serbian propaganda and the world's misunderstandings, began to seek unnatural solutions for today -- thus, a process which for the whole world was already closed, a historic process that was hard to get back. It wasn't about remanagement of religion, it was about rejection in the name of a political ideal. A few ten thousand young people, during the years of Christmas, during the '90s, who went to St. Ndo Church's small courtyard in the neighbourhood of “Ulpiana” of Pristina, did not go to confirm their eventual conversion to Catholicism, as may have been wrongly taken by church administrators, but simply for a flat rejection of the politicised Muslim image, respectively, for building an already injured Western image.
Of course, this was a deformity, it was a violence exercised on the consciousness of Kosovo's young. They didn't have to be instrumentalised to this degree, and this was not about their conviction, but rather about Kosovo nationalism, which was confused in its external manifestation: it had not set priorities, but it withdrew “from Serbian propaganda and Europe's arrogant refusal. It was this one - century rejection that Europe had exactly made to Albanians, and part of its intelligence had already established the conviction that, since Europe did not change its attitude, Albanians had to adapt to its prejudices. Since the beginning of the 20th century, concerned with unfavourable developments in Europe about Albanians, Konica proposed to its countrymen to convert to Christianity. This idea was outlined throughout the 20th century among a number of Albanian intellectuals who, due to sensitivity, did not perform it perfectly clearly but thought it over once. Kosovo of the 1990s, faced with Serb violence and Western indifference, almost entered such a climate, prompted by its leader Ibrahim Rugova's confused views. Of course, this was an unhistorical movement, such as would later bring inevitable consequences to Kosovo. In the 1990s, because of nationalism, or rather the saying of countering Serbia, a large part of Kosovo could make it Catholic, if someone specifically set such a condition to be released from Serbia. This was not discussed. Then what would you do with these people, where you would take their forged Catholicism, what choice could you offer?
It was a deformities, it was a temporary and also unnatural situation in Kosovo's religious identity. If there were political vision leaders, in the adventure of religion Kosovo did not have to enter because it is a terrain and a climate where it usually plants rain and floods. In this strait, there was no reason for the misery of the West either because Albanians, separately after 1990, had clearly defined the floors of their political and civilising movement. The suspicion had no other basis than Serbian propaganda and cynical European scepticism, respectively, Christian fundamentalistism, which was not even concerned with the religious dilemmas of Albanians, but developed its prejudiced and recivilistic theories. Indeed, this prejudice, like Serbian propaganda, found a support in Kosovo's external appearance, which at some point unequivocally created Oriental association; as well as in the historical fact, impossible to change, that over 98% of Kosovo Albanians were of Muslim religious affiliation. At this time it seemed that in the few West, there were those who treated the religion in Kosovo on a historic level - just as a historical past, which might have some current reflections but did not determine the identity of Kosovars. Historically, the majority of Kosovars were Muslim believers and they could not deny it, but now most of them with extraordinary success had sidelined religion from identities, to assume, unlike Bosnian Muslims, who had made religion a essence of identity. The Kosovo Albanians, for a very short time, during the period of general awareness (entirely 60-70th and beyond) had disorientized almost the whole individual names, cultivating their Iliro-Albanian source with fanaticism, sometimes, even making inadequate linguistic and omosis. They had also, to some degree, tried, or spontaneously changed their way of life. They had already introduced into their lives almost as a whole of European mania, and only some customary ingredients had preserved elements of the Oriental heritage.
All these Kosovars did so without the help of power, or, said better, having against themselves the powerful state, which was already publicly interested in the process of deorientising the remaining Albanians under his rule or being interrupted, or slowed down as much as possible. From the Serbian national orentalism programme had already been identified as a potential risker of Albanian identity, in addition to the fact that it was suitable for keeping Albanians in deep ignorance, that is, far from the process of emancipation and national awareness. As we have already explained, the process of deorientisation of the Kosovo Albanians and Macedonia (former Kosovo Development) has never even begun. On the contrary, during the entire time of the reign of the royal Yugoslavia and communist Yugoslavia, he had been stimulated in all forms to advance as much or at least remain canned. Indeed, just as we have already explained, compared to the parts of London, because of geographic position and other historical factors, the former Kosovo holiday might say it had experienced a higher degree of Islamisation and Orientalisation. But it was not only this factor that was given different views to these regions from the rest of the Western Balkans and Southeast Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, Oriental views had a large part of Greece and Bulgaria, southern Serbia and all of Macedonia and Albania, then Sandzak and much of Bosnia. In all these countries, after leaving Turkey, parallel to the consolidation of the state, a rapid process of deorientisation, or Europeanisation, began. That is when Konica taught Albanians Albania how to dress and behave so that they could have as well - cultivated European views. With Albanians from the former Kosovo event happening quite differently. Including in the Yugoslav kingdom, processes that were completely opposed to any normal process took place: ties with Albania were cut off, intermediate communication was halted, the process of emancipation, national awareness stopped. Religion was the only thing available to them. Even the political body of Albanians in the Yugoslav kingdom for a time was allowed to take place on religious grounds. After World War II, almost the same avaz went on: Albanians were given their points all other rights, and their rights were in abundance only at the work of religion.

(Vijon)