The Revival of Islam in the Balkans

Since the early 1990s, several books by historians, anthropologists and political scientists have deepened our knowledge of Islam in the Balkans. Due to the political context of the 1990s, most of these have emphasised the links between Islam, national identity and political mobilisation. Thus, in her introduction, Arolda Elbasani regrets that the specialists of Islam in the Balkans have left ‘the exploration of the Islamic phenomena to the mercy of nationalism and post-conflict paradigms, which have essentialized religion in line with ethnonational divisions of the day’ (1). In this collective work, Elbasani proposes instead to focus on the individual forms of faith, insofar as ‘the experiences of religiosity have increasingly become a personalized individual attitude, detached from organized religion and doctrinal official prescriptions’ (3). In her view, the current situation of Islam in the Balkans is imbued with the legacy of secularisation during the socialist period, the appearance of a pluralist religious market, and the Europeanisation of the religious sphere—all processes that cannot be understood with approaches rooted entirely in terms of ethnonational identity. Elbasani endeavours to fill in this gap with eleven contributions by young researchers, based primarily on participant observation, non-directive interviews or, in some cases, discourse analysis.

The first three contributions describe the orientalism of the Albanian political and cultural elites, who regard Islam as something foreign to Europe (Enis Sulstarova), the islamophobia of the Greek Orthodox Church and the far-right party Golden Dawn (Alexandros Sakellariou), as well as the uncompromising secularism of the Albanian elites of Kosovo (Jeton Mehmeti). While these three contributions are all useful overviews, they do not go any further than research on these issues published in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, Jeton Mehmeti’s contribution includes a number of surprising affirmations, such as when he states that ‘Albanian nationalism is neither an essential part of the foundation of the new Kosovar state, nor a serious participant in its creation’ (66), or when he describes the anti-Serbian pogroms in 2004 as ‘inter-ethnic riots between Serbs and Albanians’ (73); these are clear signs of an ethnic bias that the book’s editors should have noted, even if ethnonational categories are not their primary focus.

The following eight contributions, based on anthropological fieldwork, are of higher scholarly quality and greater interest. Hence Jelena Tošić studies how the Muslims of Shkodër, Albania, draw a distinction between their peaceful, urban Islam and the noisy, exaggerated Islam of new arrivals and recent converts. Andreja Mesarić focuses on the dress practices of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, looking at how ‘everyday life practice serves to construct, maintain and transform different visions of Islam in Bosnia’ (104). Laura Olson describes, in meticulous detail, the conflict in Bulgaria between traditional imams and new religious leaders who advocate practicing Islam in a way that ‘emphasizes personal choice, independence from centralized or traditional hierarchies, and horizontal transmission through self-organized social networks’ (122). In the next chapter, Anna Zadrožna studies the matrimonial practices of slavophone Muslims in Macedonia, eventually concluding that ‘there is no coherent “set of ours” but rather groupings of different extents, emerging from intersections of commonalities and different levels of intimacy’ (157). Ksenia Trofimova begins with the worship of saints by the Roma of Macedonia to show that ‘unlike the processes of formation of national and cultural identity of Balkan nations, the privatizing of religious practice does not lead to the nationalization of the cult’ (178). In Chapter 9, Behar Sadriu takes the issue of the hijab (veil) as the starting-point to show how ‘Albanian imams in Kosovo have successfully appropriated the prevailing liberal democratic norms pertaining to religious freedoms and minority rights found in many European countries’ (199). Julianne Funk also studies the issue of the hijab in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and advocates ‘not reducing “the veil” to a religious, ethnic or political symbol’ and ‘understanding the Islamic revival as more than a utilization of religion for political purposes’ (216). Lastly, Cecilie Endresen presents various religious actors—both official and informal—in Albania, and shows that the local Salafi organisation ‘exemplifies how neofundamentalists are moving into new life spaces like the internet, the wardrobe and the bathroom’ (236).

These eight case studies are valuable contributions to a better understanding of Islam in the Balkans. From this standpoint, the editors of The Revival of Islam in the Balkans have succeeded in their bid to show the ‘emerging mosaic of Islamic religiosity, defined here as the way an individual believer experiences his or her relation to religion and faith’ (2), and this makes the book an important one. However, the selfsatisfaction shown by the two co-editors is excessive, because the innovative character of this book is an only relative one. For example, on a geographic scale, it tells us nothing about the religious life of the Bulgarian Turks, which remains a significant gap in our knowledge of Islam in the Balkans. Thematically, the book is excellent in its analysis of religious pluralism which however other writers have already noted since the early 2000s. Yet, it says nothing about the evolution of religious institutions (except for Cecilie Endresen) or about the relationship between religious change and the general social transformations of the postcommunist period. As for Olivier Roy’s concluding chapter, which, according to Arolda Elbasani, ‘revisits the current state of the art on the post-communist recovery of Islam in the Balkans in light of the evidence gleaned from the empirical chapters’ (17), it cites a grand total of two bibliographic references, including one book … by Olivier Roy.