tries. Their missionary work is facilitated by the post-war circumstances in Kosovo: Kosovo’s society emerged from the war with an estimated 10,000 dead, about 1 million Albanians expelled from their homes, and hundreds of thousands of properties destroyed. The Serb apartheid of the 1990s and the attempted ethnic cleansing derailed and traumatized Kosovo’s society. Members of such societies are malleable, even more so when one considers the terrible economic situation. Kosovo remains one of the poorest European countries. According to the Kosovo Agency of Statistics, about 45 percent of residents are considered poor, while 18 percent live in extreme poverty. It also continues to be strangled by the side effects of transition, such as the misuse of public resources by politicians and criminals; systemic corruption; a lack of experts for economic development; and above all, the capturing of the state by elements devoid of ethics and morality and with a thirst to take and extort. In such circumstances where despair among the population is endless and the sense of helplessness is a daily occurrence, religious missionaries can easily purchase souls. Although Islamic extremism remains a marginal phenomenon in Kosovo, troubling incidents in recent years show that radicals can pose a danger. In 2009, still-unidentified people beat liberal Muslim theologian Xhabir Hamiti, an outspoken critic of radical Islam and the growing influence of foreign Islamic groups. In the same year, extremists targeted Ejup Krasniqi, a librarian in the faculty of Islamic studies at the University of Prishtina, as he was delivering the Friday sermon in a village near Prishtina. Attackers who accused him of not enforcing the Hadiths of Mohammed beat him. In Drenas, mullah Osman Musliu, an opponent of religious radicalism, was beaten in another attack. Writing in the Kosovo newspapers Java and Koha Ditore, Hamiti has emphasized that “tolerance is the basic foundation of a believer. It is God’s request. Good behavior, justice, love and kindness among all people without any differentiation are holy requests. I don’t see Islam as something rigid, something static, the way someone else might see it.” POLITICIANS ON SIDELINES
XHEMAJL “KASTRIOT” DUKA
The Macedonian-born Duka posed as an imam and operated in Skenderaj for years. His mosque in Marina, built in 1999, was an extremists’ hub. He was accused of manipulating and indoctrinating children at a connected mosque, and was deported in 2010. Photo: Jetmir Idrizi
One of the toughest but most emotional and often irrational debates in Kosovo’s society had to do with the wearing of the headscarf in elementary and middle schools. Enver Hoxhaj, then the minister of education, issued an administrative order in 2010 banning headscarves. He made the decision based on Kosovo’s constitution, which defines the state as a secular one. The majority of Kosovo’s politicians did not take a stand on the issue. They feared that a stand against the requests of the religious fundamentalists would cost them votes in the next elections. This influence should not be overestimated, but imams have a lot of influence on elderly believers. Before the December 2010 elections, Shefqet Krasniqi, an imam who continually stirs up controversy with his religious interpretations and political views, asked people not to vote for Vetevendosje, the third biggest parliamentary group in Kosovo’s Assembly. According to Krasniqi, an imam at the Grand Mosque in Prishtina, to vote for Vetevendosje is a sin. In doing so, he insinuated that the believers should vote for the Justice Party and the New Kosovo Alliance, which had promised to consider Muslims’ requests for the construction of religious buildings. Moreover, the head of the Islamic Community of Kosovo, Naim Ternava, threatened to take the issue of the headscarf ban to the European Court of Human Rights, even though it is impossible because Kosovo, with its contested statehood, cannot address this court. Foes of the Albanian Muslim tradition and Wahhabi militants seek to incite conflict between different layers of Kosovo’s society, and the demand to allow the wearing of the headscarf in schools is just the beginning. If Wahhabis — or Salafis, as some prefer to be called — succeed in making the state of Kosovo succumb to their demands regarding headscarves, then other #3 RELIGION SPRING/SUMMER 2012
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