The ignorant Hoxhans and the Importance of the Dark

It says: Baton Haxhiu

When I left, I tried. I didn't know Fairmont Hotel in Mecca was so great and Ritz-Carlton one of the best in the world. I didn't know that my wife's freedom in Saudi Arabia wasn't what I thought it was. Arabia is changing. We with the ignorant ones preaching are going back where they were.

Desert Rock Resort and Shebara are not just one image. There are only two projects from many others, including eight Olympic stadiums that are becoming reality. Nor did a city project with a few 1.3 trillion projects extended to a space the size of modern Belgium include Saudi Arabia vision 2030.

Desert Rock, where we were stationed, was hiding among the ancient rocky hills of Sharaan. It is not just a tourist destination of luxury but a testimony to a new era in Saudi Arabia. An era that no longer has to do with last century's conservativeism, but with a clear vision: development, economy, tourism and a religion that does not oppose progress.

We climb to one of the hills surrounding the resort, from which the desert landscape stretches like an endless sea of lights and shades. Below, villas hidden among stones created, not to conquer nature, but to melt with it. A project that not only challenges the perception of Saudi Arabia but destroys it. This is not the place most people in the Balkans imagine when they hear, and Saudi Arabia.

It is no longer that Kingdom that once exported harsh religious conservativeism around the world. That period is over.

But the great irony is that while Saudi Arabia is transforming itself, into Kosovo, northern Macedonia and Albania is importing what Arabs themselves are abandoning a rigid, dogmatic religion, filled with fear and ignorance. And instead of happening in large urban centres where intellectual challenges exist, this dogma has found fertile soil in small mosques, often funded by suspicious sources.

In Pristina's park mosque, where preachers threaten with the fire of hell more than they have God's mercy.

In the Kumanovo Quarter, where ordinary people attend lectures that have more to do with a imagined reality of the seventh century than with the modern life of an Albanian in 2025.

At a mosque in Albania where self - proclaimed preachers preach a religion that is hostile to the nation and free of thought.

While Saudi Arabia is building technological metropolis and bringing in The most popular DJs at its festivals, in these Albanian Balkan neighbourhoods, are still being debated whether it is forbidden to listen to music, study sciences, or respect national holidays.

A dark ritual in laity and a crowd who understand nothing

Can you imagine the Lakrish Mosque where people pray in the middle of the street in a winter morning in this neighborhood of Pristina? Is that how it is between Albania and North Macedonia?

The confessions are made in a gray building, without large windows, without room for light, like all dark dogmas that love darkness more than reason.

An imam, brought from a scholarship funded by foreign foundations, with a degree that is neither equal to a poor high school. It stands before a crowd, ordinary people, workers, some older ones, some youths who are tired of a society without perspective. He does not preach love for God or the profound philosophy of Islam. He doesn't explain history, knowledge, or reason. He proclaims laws, announces stops, proclaims fear.

“Grath should not leave the house without the permission of husband”

If anyone listens to music, the heart becomes a stone”.

“Everything that is modern is Abram”.

The life of this world is worthless, you only look at the afterlife”

A crowd that just moves its head. No questions. No challenging reason. An automatic ritual where people don't think, they follow. A religion that does not teach how to live with dignity but only as fear. A pale dogma, no breath.

A ritual of ignorance, in the middle of Europe, while Saudi Arabia itself has begun to shake the chains of an old mentality.

The question standing before institutions is, if Saudi Arabia is changing, why not. Why do we allow the indisposed?

In the Sharaan desert, watching sunset over Desert Rock Resort, I cannot help but think of a profound contrast where Saudi Arabia is changing because it has realized that darkness does not build civilizations. It is being modernised, integrated into the global world, investing in knowledge and development.

But we are taking the Albanian world.

If a country that used to be a symbol of harsh conservativeism is changing, what stops us?

If Saudi Arabia is building an open and integrated future, why Kosovo, Northern Macedonia and Albania are allowing to be imprisoned in a counterfeit religious model imported by preachers without knowledge?

We have a choice. Or remain captive to a darkness that is neither ours nor the true Islam. Or move forward, build a society where religion and modernity can walk together, as Saudi Arabia itself is doing today.

Because if a country that used to be a symbol of fanaticism is changing, what stops us?

After all, God does not seek ignorance. He seeks wisdom.

Saudi Arabia is waking up from a long conservative dream. The question is:

Will the Balkans also wake up?

P.S.

At Desert Rock Resort and in the tranquillity of Sharaan's night, where Alexander as an astronomer, explains to us the city of the future under a sky where stars look closer than anywhere else, and the thought turns differently.

There I realized that loneliness is, not emptiness, but space to write, is the space where man feels himself as part of greater greatness, but also as a small dot in the vastness of the universe.

Understandably, this was why thinkers, poets, great philosophers of the Islamic world were born. Thoughts arise in silent night, between stones and sand speaking with the wind, where religion is no cry, not fear, but is a commandment, but a bridge between soul and reason.

A real pit does not lock people in darkness, but guides them to light. A thinker doesn't threaten, but ask. A man who touches God is not afraid of knowledge, but seeks it.

On this quiet night, where silence is not empty but meaning, it is clear that religion is not an enemy of wisdom, only ignorance is an enemy.

And the real question remains: if in this country, in this desert, thought, wisdom and knowledge were born, why are Albanians in particular in Kosovo and Macedonia and why not in Albania and then even in the Sandzak Presevo region accepting its poorest version?

The dying version of Saudi Arabia is being born in 2030.