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.

"The Croatian checkerboard had been used for hundreds of years prior to the Ustashe. The Serbian accusation of Nazi connotations with the Croatian flag is pure BS."

That's half true and half false, Dio.

It is true that the Croatian checkerboard had a long Croatian history prior to the Ustashi & WWII.

However, it is also true that the last time Serbs in living memory had seen that checkerboard symbol was during the period of the WWII Ustashi, and the Ustashi crimes were so vicious and brutal against Serbs, that they did freak out, as any Jew would seeing someone raise the swastika.

Personally, I think that this along with the revival of a lot of other Ustashi symbols and attitudes was a deliberate provocation to get Serbs to leave Croatia on their own or surrender.

It's part of the psychology of warfare to scare the crap out of your enemy before you fight, and Croatia's Serbs reacted in precisely the ways that Croatia expected. The main difference was that this wasn't just directed at Serb military, it was also directed at Serb civilians in Croatia.

Croatia is still suffering from a Nazi hangover. Just last week Croatia's football federation got slapped with a $20,000 fine for "racist behavior". Apparently some Croatian fans showed up with a Nazi banner and were shouting racist slogans, and you & I know that this isn't the first time.

Found this today....rather interesting. Written by two Albanians of course...

Kosovo and the Islamic World
By Arianit Dobruna and Gent Prokshi
Sunday, 06 July 2008

One of the greatest ironies of the Kosovo question has been seeing Serbia argue against Kosovo amongst the Islamic countries. Serbia that has burned hundreds of mosques in Kosovo and Bosnia and has bloodied its hands with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians just in the last 15 years has the face to sit and argue its case against its former Muslim victims to the world’s Islamic countries.
But knowing Serbian politics, that is not the surprise here, the surprise are those on the receiving end of this disgrace.

When the Republic of Kosovo declared its independence, the last President of Yugoslavia, Stjepan Mesic, who once was also a close adviser to Josip Broz Tito, said, “It is wrong to think that Kosovo sets precedent, because unlike other regions in the world, Kosovo was a full constitutional authoritative body, with the right to veto, like other Yugoslav republics. Also, I hope it [Serbia] will realize that Kosovo’s declaration of independence to separate from it is because of the genocidal crimes that Serbia has taken against the Kosovo up to now. Serbia should apologize for what it has done in Kosovo. Both Serbia and Kosovo were equal bodies in the Yugoslav federation. Thus, Kosovo independence is right and legal.” Kosovo is the seventh independent republic to come out of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The Republic of Kosovo is a European country, located in the southeastern Europe. Its population of over two million is more than 90% of Muslim creed of various ethnicities.

During almost a century of occupation, Serbia established an apartheid, colonial regime in Kosovo to which many African and Middle Eastern countries members of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) can easily relate to. Serbia’s crimes in Kosovo neither begin nor end with Milosevic. Milosevic is only a piece of the iceberg, revealed only thanks to the wide spread of modern information media. Serbia’s crimes were carried out based on well planned memorandums and other blueprints penned around the beginning of 20th century by Serbian romantic nationalists, ideologue statesmen of Greater Serbia. With Serbia acting as a local colonialist power, Kosovo shared the same kind of experiences as the Muslim and African world did with European colonialist powers. Serbia masterfully used prejudices of the relevant era to justify the slaughter of Kosovars as just Muslims, by hoping that in this way the world will allow Serbia to continue to commit atrocities. Colonialist, hegemonic and segregationist policies of Serbia went unhampered for too long as the propaganda machine manipulated world public opinion.

Exploitation of Kosovo’s rich land has been Serbia’s long run dream. Murdering tens of thousands of Kosovars, sending hundreds of thousands of others into flight and then colonizing with Serb population the land left behind. As Kosovo’s rich underground was exploited to build and prosper Serbia, Kosovo remained occupied, poor, with its people continuously repressed, ethnically cleansed, enslaved in famine, isolated, struggling for freedom and the right to run their own country as independent and sovereign. A Serbian writer put it best, “Kosovars were our Negroes,” he reminisced recently.

Serbia destroyed Islamic legacy in Kosovo. Serbia applied forced conversions of Kosovars of Muslim creed to Serbian Christian Orthodoxy. Serbia completely destroyed 649 mosques in the last war, with some five centuries old; desecrated, burglarized or partially destroyed 234 other mosques. Serbia destroyed tens of madrasahs, burned libraries that contained invaluable Koranic scriptures and treatise. Serbia murdered hundreds of Muslim imams.

Serbia tried to portray Kosovo as a threat to the Western world, and itself as a valiant protector of Christendom from the Islamic threat. Thesis such as the “Green corridor” still today inspire publications as The Washington Times and prominent extreme right bloggers in the United States. The implication being that the West should not support the cause of the Muslim Kosovars against Christian Serbs no matter how Serbia acts.

Serbian and Russian obstructionist propaganda, aiming to mislead the world with statements such as Islam poses a threat and Kosovo sets a precedent, remained relentless. Russia has no interest in bringing peace and stability to the world. In its desperation to gain its lost name, Russia is attempting to obstruct the freedom of Kosovars, sadly enough in cooperation with some Islamic countries such as Indonesia, Azerbaijan, and Algeria. While savagely mistreating the Muslim minority in its own country today, Russia cannot be an ally to the Muslim world which it is using through an obstructionist strategy of divide and rule. Russia is not interested in resolving the problems in the Muslim world but rather in exploiting and using these regions for its own geopolitical means. Its desperate colonialist horizons are being expanded from Europe to Asia. Its neighbors, which were fooled and coerced into becoming allies and today are not, went through famine and genocide. And the very sober stories of Chechnya and Afghanistan should make it clear what kind of friend Russia is to Muslims.

Kosovo can be a connection between East and West. Kosovo represents something very unique in the world today. Of a Western military alliance coming to the aid of a Muslim-majority population and a reconstruction and stabilization effort supported by Norwegian NGO’s, United Arab Emirate military hospitals, French and Turkish soldiers and Pakistani policemen. Kosovo represents the proof of a better world, not divided by religion, but united over common humanitarian values. By recognizing Kosovo as other nations have already done, Muslim world and the rest will find an ally, a friend and a reliable business partner who can offer future friendships with the rest of Europe.

Kosovo’s independence along with its democratic constitution allows Islam and other religions to finally breath free. Freedom of speech, religion, and press for Kosovars of Muslim creed are the blessings they have sought for almost a century.

The Republic of Kosovo finally gained its sovereign statehood in coordination with its allies in Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Australia, closing the final chapter of Yugoslavia. Today, Kosovo has a democratic constitution, professional police, stable government, soon to establish a NATO trained army and is in the process of joining major world organizations.

It is time that Kosovo joins the Organization of the Islamic Conference as well. Through OIC Kosovo will setup good relations with a part of the world which it has neglected so far. OIC represents 57 countries and a diversity of people spread across four continents. Kosovo and OIC countries shares similar historic experiences, world’s second biggest religion – Islam, and the need to cooperate economically.

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