How Kosovo Created its Own Liberal Islam

On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a “a beachhead into the rest of Europe” for “radical Muslims” and “terrorist elements.” It’s an assertion without evidence. “We’ve been here for so long,” said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, “and not seen any evidence of it, that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat.”

Nine in 10 of Kosovo’s citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn’t quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren’t there in significant numbers now, and they aren’t likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn’t one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn’t coming to Western Europe.

I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for – as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country – was the treatment and status of women.

Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.

In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.

A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.

“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”

It would be wrong to suggest Kosovo has no Islamists at all, but in the last election in late 2007, the country’s single Islamic party gained only 1.7 per cent of the vote. Kosovo is not the Middle East, and Albanians are not Arabs. The majority converted to Islam relatively recently under Turkish Ottoman rule, and Albanian culture was first solidly Christian. “We Albanians,” Dom Lush Gjergji recently wrote, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles… Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions… Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.” Gjergji is a Catholic priest, but I heard similar comments from many who self-identify as Muslims. “Albanian people are not very religious,” said Agron Rezniqi, of the Friendship Association between Kosovo and Israel “We come from Catholicism, and for that, we are not such strong Muslims.”

Perhaps the best evidence available that Albanian Muslims, in both Kosovo and Albania proper, differ radically from their Arab world counterparts is their relationship with Jews and with Israel. Jews in Albania had an almost 100 per cent survival rate during the Nazi occupation. The country was known as a safe haven where Jews could find protection under the noses of the German authorities. According to Dan Michman, chief historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there were three times as many Jews in Albania at the end of the Second World War as there were at the beginning.

Both Albania and Kosovo have excellent relations with Israel, and Israelis are more than welcome to travel and even live among Albanians. An Israeli from Tel Aviv named Shachar Caspi opened a bakery and a bistro bar in Pristina. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he told me. “[Kosovars] had good relations with Jewish people even back in the old days. And nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, the way they react, they react very warmly.”

Much of the angst about Kosovo’s alleged radicalism centres on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organisation that no longer even exists.

It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.

Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.

There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.

The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.

“Bin Laden mosque, Vitina, Kosovo, renamed “Medina Mosque” so as not jeopardize the transfer of stolen property ... “Kosovo”.”

Who renamed it, when and how did the Serbs find this out? No one else picked this up, but the Serb propagandists. Did you get that at the Serb propaganda site you’re promoting or did you hear it at an Serbs4Obama rally?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1979378/posts

Wow, he said Albanians kids were as friendly as Arab and Kurd kids so they must be Jihadis. Did Iraq pay the Serbs yet for fortifying Saddam’s SAM sites to shoot down US planes?

Who cares that Reagan liked the paper 20 years ago?

Babayaga, you are a few steps below a joke: I told you write a paper and publish it. Or better erect a statue of this ‘Serb’ hero. Every sane person seems to think he was an Albanian, prove them wrong. Regarding Sokolovic and Sinan Pasha: We’ve forgiven the Serb treachery in the Second Kosovo War and the Battle of Nicopolis:
“According to most accounts Stefan was very attached to Bayazid [That’s Uncle Bayazid to Serbs] and remained a steadfast ally to the end. Serbian knights fought alongside th Ottomans in the capture of Nicopolis and accompanied Bayazid in his campaigns to Asia minor...Bayazid offered his Serbian allies an equitable share of the booty and further ensured his loyalty by supporting the Orthodox Church”
The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman by André Gerolymatos
http://books.google.com/books?id=vpg8M9E4-94C&pg=PA26&dq=Stefan+Lazarevic+nicopolis&sig=ACfU3U0J8Cd18Jad2QiDntpjM9NogslfwQ

For this, and the extermination attemps from Serbs that followed, not yet: “Isa Boletini and Idriz Seferi tried to halt westward advance of Ottoman troops, but they were outflanked by the army, which had been given the assistance of local Serbs and serbian school teachers to guide them through mountains” (N.Malcolm ‘Kosovo a short history’ 241).

We DIDN”T fight the first Gulf War to because “Saddam Hussein was a murderous **shole”, even though he was. We didn’t fight it because “Saddam Hussein was a perceived threat to the US” or a whole list of other reasons. We fought the first Gulf War to defend the the sovereignty of Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Why did we defend Kuwait’s sovereignty? Because “sovereignty” is the international equivalent of “private property”. Just like you and I hold title to our houses and land, regardless of whether we choose to rent out that property to others or not, countries hold title to the property of their countries. Of course a government of one country can by mutual agreement and legal means, choose to relinquish or sell part of that property to another country or ethnic group, just as individuals can, but no one has the right to seize it by force — anymore than our government has the right to come and take our land from us illegally. Again, sovereignty is “national private property”. The only political groups who challenge those (national or personal) private property rights are socialists and communists who think that a government has a right to question your use of your land and take your land if they don’t like what you are doing with it or if they think that they think that they have “a better use for it”.

Kosovo is and was sovereign Serbia. Kosovo was and is the national property of Serbia. Now we may not have liked what Serbia was doing with the land in Kosovo, but it was hers to do with as she pleased. Serbs didn’t have to be “a majority in Kosovo” for Kosovo to justify her ownership of that property, anymore than I have to live in every piece of property I own in order to justify my ownership of it. I have the title and the deed to my property and Serbia has her sovereignty that should have been defended by international law.

The international court should have protected Serbia’s interests, but the problem is that all the Judges (countries) were also participants in the seizure of Kosovo (under NATO) and the governments of those who now recognize “Kosovo independence”, are all socialists or on their way to it — including our own! These “judges” made their decisions based on their own personal interests and “best use of land” instead of property rights.

NATO also used the old Robin Hood, “taking from the (undeserving) rich to give to the poor” spin to make NATO in this case look like the good guys, which they weren’t.

NATO marched into Kosovo with all the diplomatic aplomb of the Soviet Union marching into Poland. We spit on national sovereignty the same way that Communist Russia once did to its former satellites. We did what we wanted, not because it was morally right, but because we could. We built a permanent military base in Kosovo a year after we got there, and it was pretty clear then that we were not going home, nor were we ever going to give Kosovo back no matter what kind of government was running Serbia. We never tried to negotiate with Serbia, we just told them and our Albanian proteges, “Kosovo is independent” period, because we said so —we don’t give a rat’s behind what you think because we are more powerful than you.

Eastern Europeans see this comparison to previous Soviet behavior, even formerly communist Russia sees this, which is why they are fighting us on it — because they see “a weak spot” — they know that the same weak spot that sunk their communist system — the arrogant need for military expansionism for its own sake — the US has now been infected with. The tables have been turned and they are leveraging our own hegemonic hubris against us, diplomatically, the same way we did it to them and eventually won. And, if indeed they are right, we are totally screwed.

So you can hate Russia all you want, for whatever reasons you want. But when we in the US start defending “best use of land” instead of national sovereignty (private property rights); when we start defending the idea that “might alone makes right” and international law and property rights mean nothing; when those in charge of meeting out “justice” are corrupt socialists who are on the take, themselves — then Serbs aren’t the only people who should be very very afraid. Because what they do to the citizens of other countries, they will one day do to us!

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