The Revival of Islam in the Balkans

From Identity to Religiosity

Olivier Roy, Arolda Elbasani, Olivier Roy, Arolda Elbasani, Olivier Roy, Arolda Elbasani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137517845
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

This book shifts analytical focus from macro-politicization and securitization of Islam to Muslims' choices, practices and public expressions of faith. An empirically rich analysis, the book provides rich cross-country evidence on the emergence of autonomous faith communities as well as the evolution of Islam in the broader European context.

Part I

The Prevailing Public Discourse on Islam

1

Islam and Orientalism in Contemporary Albania

Enis Sulstarova

Introduction

The main slogans of the democratic movement in Albania during the years 1990–1992 were ‘Freedom and Democracy’ and ‘We want Albania to be like Europe’ – with good reason. ‘Europe’ was then and is still imagined in Albania to be the land of freedom and democracy. Achievement of EU membership is seen as the end of the transition process from a totalitarian, backward and ‘Eastern’ society to a free, democratic, progressive and ‘Western’ one. Under the spell of this idea of ‘Europe’, as the new telos which has replaced the failed socialist model, the political and cultural elites in Albania have constructed the political myth of the ‘return to Europe’. This is a feature which is common to other ex-communist states in Central and Eastern Europe, at least since the 1980s, when dissident intellectuals put forward the idea that communist regimes were not at the vanguard of historical progress, but were more akin to a modern version of Asian ‘Oriental despotism’. The political myth of the ‘return to Europe’ has served to legitimize and politically orientate the post-communist reforms and policies toward the gravitational centers in Brussels and Washington. The other side of the discourse about joining Europe was the ‘escape from the East’, which primarily referred not only to the recent communist past, but also to the historic ‘backwardness’, ‘mentality and ‘barbarism’ that the region had inherited from a more distant past. In the case of Albania’s political myth of the ‘return to Europe’, the ‘East’ might be more appropriately termed the ‘Orient’ and it represents two intervals – five centuries of Ottoman rule and nearly half a century of the communist regime – between the European past and present of Albanians.

Since the early 1990s, within this essentialist discourse about ‘returning to Europe’ and ‘escaping the East’, Islam in Albania has been considered the main cultural heritage of the Oriental past. The revival of public practices and symbols of Islam is viewed with suspicion by many intellectuals, who worry about the image of Albanians in the eyes of Europe. In this chapter, by relying upon the critique of Orientalism by Edward W. Said (1979), I argue that Islam in the public and secular discourse in Albania is largely viewed as an outsider within Europe and as a possible inhibitor to the European integration of Albania. By contrast, Christianity is seen as an indicator of the European identity of Albanians and as a cultural facilitator to the integration of the country into the European Union (EU). Although alternative discourses about Islam exist in Albania, this local version of Orientalism is hegemonic amongst the cultural elite because of its association with the idea of ‘Europe’ and, consequently, it also frames the counter-responses. For instance, certain Muslim actors in the country present Albanian Islam as part of ‘European Islam’, which is tolerant and different from the radical Islam of the Middle East (Merdjanova 2013: 116–129).

The method adopted in this chapter is that of discourse analysis of texts by Albanian intellectuals and opinion-makers during the post-communist period. The rest of the chapter is organized into three parts. The first part consists of a theoretical discussion of the discursive construction of ‘East’ and ‘Islam’ as constitutive ‘Others’ within Europe. In the second part, through various textual examples, I present the political myth of the ‘return of Albania to Europe’, its Orientalist background, and the place it accords to Islam and Christianity in the national and European identity of Albanians. In the final part, I conclude the chapter by drawing attention to the essentialist and exclusionary nature of this myth, which forecloses the positive association of the Muslim identity with both the nation and ‘Europe’.

The narrative boundaries of Europe

Analyzing the narrative boundaries of Europe is a quest to understand how symbolic power helps to naturalize the ‘hard’ political borders of Europe that have been contested throughout history and that continue to be contested in the present, like the debate about the final borders of the EU (Eder 2006). Given the wide cultural diversity within Europe, the negative definition of Europe (what Europe is not) arguably remains for many Europeans a much more straightforward answer to the question of European identity than any positive definition (Delanty 1995). The most common negative historical definition of Europe and the West has been drawn through its comparison to the ‘East’ and Islam (Said 1979). The roots of this divide extend to the medieval and early modern idea of Christian unity to counter the Muslim threat. In the 15th century in the humanists’ writings, a sense of a ‘European’ identity began to take shape in opposition to the Ottoman Turks: ‘The novelty was that Europe became the reference point for the “sense of uselessness” directed against the “Turk”. The notion of Europe and wars against the Turks were united in an action program of “chasing the Turk out of Europe” ’ (Mastnak 2003: 208). What until then was presented as an opposition between Christianity and Islam now took on the appearance of a struggle between a superior ‘Western’ culture and political consciousness against the barbarian ‘East’ (Bisaha 2004). From this earlier historical attitude toward the ‘barbarians’ coming from the East, the Western elites during the Enlightenment developed the divide between the progressive, rational and secular European civilization on one side and the exotic, fatalistic and backward ‘Eastern’ civilization on the other side. This Orientalist discourse extended to other parts of the world through colonialism and imperialism (Said 1979), but also created imaginary divisions within the European continent itself. Thus, Eastern Europe and the Balkans were treated as liminal zones between proper Europe and Asia (Wolff 1994; Todorova 1997). After the Second World War, ‘Europe’ was once again equated with the West, because communism was the aggressive competitor and a continuous threat to peace, so that the Iron Curtain provided a political border to the free world. The end of the Cold War did not extinguish the Orientalist discourses in Europe.

‘The East’ is indeed Europe’s other and it is continuously being recycled in order to represent European identities. Since the ‘Eastern absence’ is a defining trait of ‘European’ identities, there is no use talking about the end of an East/West divide in European history after the end of the Cold War. The question is not whether the East will be used in the forging of new European identities but how this is being done.

(Neumann 1999: 207)

The post-communist Orientalism is revived in public discourses in Europe that deal with two issues: (1) Islam as the defining Other of Europe and (2) the ‘Europeanization’ of former communist states. The first issue, that of Islam as a constitutive Other of Europe, is exemplified by the popularity of the thesis of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam that was developed by Bernard Lewis (1990), Samuel Huntington (1996) and other analysts of international affairs. This thesis caught the imagination of many people in the West, especially after 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists on European soil and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea of a perennial clash with Islam has featured in the European public spheres in such a way that ‘it is difficult today to reflect upon politics in European countries or the European Union without reflecting upon its encounter with Islam’ (Göle 2006: 249). This becomes apparent when one looks at the debate about Turkey’s potential membership of the EU and at the question concerning the loyalty of Muslim immigrants to liberal European states. While Turkey in the last decades has shown determination to render itself eligible for EU membership, several voices within the EU have risen against such aspirations on the grounds that Turkey is not part of European history and civilization. The closer Turkey comes to the fulfillment of economic, political and legal criteria for EU integration, the more the Muslim religion is stressed as incompatible with Europe.

There are not too subtle indications that an outwardly secular Europe is still too Christian when it comes to the possibility of imagining a Muslim country as part of the European community. One wonders whether Turkey represents a threat to Western civilization or rather an unwelcome reminder of the barely submerged yet inexpressible and anxiety-ridden ‘white’ European Christian identity.

(Casanova 2006: 241)

The discourse on the European identity is again pronounced when the issue of Muslim immigration comes up. The majority of immigrants in countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands come from Maghreb states and Turkey, while in Great Britain there are a substantial number of immigrants of Pakistani origin. Their Muslim background was not so visible 40–50 years ago when as workers they were invited to Western Europe, but it has gained ground recently, turning into a collective designation for immigrants of non-European origin, as an ascribed homogeneous label to differentiate them from the ‘indigenous’ European population. It is no coincidence that in the countries of the EU, the anti-immigrant discourse joins an Islamophobic discourse that ‘seeks to explain ills of the (global) social order by attributing them to Islam’ (Semati 2010: 266). This is most visible in the theories of the extreme right and some public intellectuals in Europe about a new and hidden barbaric invasion realized from the East through immigration and breeding by Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, whose aim is the emergence of an Islamic Europe, for which they have coined the term ‘Eurabia’ (Carr 2006; Orsini 2006). In this discourse, Islam is presented in a negative light, as the antithesis of European values like tolerance, secularism, multiculturalism, gender equality and as the nemesis of Western modernity in general. As demonstrated in Chapter 2 in this volume, some of the Christian clergy join in and give some legitimacy to this discourse propagated by the extremist and racist right, especially when, like in Greece, there is a strong symbiosis between the official religion or the established church and the national identity.

The ‘Europeanization’ process of the former communist states in Europe is represented as a civilization slope that the Eastern European countries should climb in order to achieve the new global utopia of liberal democracy already cherished in Western Europe (Melegh 2006). Consequently, the EU–Eastern enlargement is seen as the extension of peace and progress to a region that represents Western Europe’s past: nationalism, ethnic wars, authoritarianism and underdevelopment. Post-communist countries cannot negotiate the terms of ‘Europeanization’, but are obliged to follow the prescriptions of the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank if they truly want to achieve ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’ and ultimately to become European. For some, ‘Europeanness’ is a given, while others must gain it by hard work in order to overcome and abandon their ‘Oriental’ instincts and cultural traits.

Partly in order to respond to the perceived and genuine material, technological and social backwardness of their countries vis-à-vis Western Europe, and partly to anticipate and respond to the perceptions of Westerners about them, the political and cultural elites in Eastern Europe have (re)constructed their national identities around a ‘lack’ of Europe. In the eyes of modernizing elites, their people lack certain positive characteristics of Western Europeans, and the cultural dimension of Europeanization precisely aims to fill that gap. Many in Eastern Europe adopted the Orientalist view that communism was something essentially non-European which was enforced upon them from Asia and threatened their national and European identity. Therefore, through following the EU’s framework of conditionality, they imagine that their countries are returning to their European home. This ‘return to Europe’ might be considered a political myth, in the sense of a common narrative through which the members of a society can confer significance to their political condition (Bottici 2007). Nevertheless, we should not forget that we are mainly dealing here with elite-generated narratives that try to mold the everyday life of the people and (their) ‘popular’ culture. In a critical vein, this contemporary political and cultural phenomenon has been alternatively called ‘Eastern European Orientalism’ (Kovačević 2008), ‘self-Orientalization’ (Georgiev 2012) or ‘internal Orientalism’ (Neuburger 2007), because the Westernizing national elites see the common people as a whole, or certain groups therein, as being ‘European but not quite’, ‘Oriental’ and even ‘barbaric’. Although internal Orientalism coupled with Europeanization can constitute a means of self-criticism and a genuine effort to improve the well-being of society, it does not remove the essentialization of the differences between West and East, and it perpetuates the existing power relations between the two (Georgiev 2012: 77). The internal Orientalism of many public intellectuals in contemporary Albania is exemplary in this regard, because through the reworking of the myth of a ‘return to Europe’, the ‘Europeanization’ discourse joins that of Islam as the threat to the European identity of all Albanians.

The ‘return to Europe’ and Islam in transitional Albania

The myth of the ‘return to Europe’ and the process of European integration in Albania

The idea of the ‘return to Europe’ (or the West) in Albania has the features of a political myth that shapes the processes of post-communist transition and of EU integration. This myth assumes a perennial European unity and identity that has never existed and further supposes a primordial European identity of Albanians, which cannot be logically sustained by the simple fact that the Albanian nation, as an identity encompassing all the Albanians, came into being only in the second half of the 19th century, through the discourses of some Albanian intellectuals and politicians. Beginning with Albania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire and the modernization of Albanian society, they attributed to their nation a European essence in opposition to the Asian and debased character of the Turks (Sulstarova 2007: 41–66). Moreover, the Albanian version of the ‘return to Europe’ myth, like the versions of other nations in Eastern Europe, posits equivalence between the past and the present by means of a teleological argument. Accordingly, history moves toward greater European unity and progress and not being part of this movement means absenting one’s self from history itself. The myth tells that the main culprits for separating Albania from Europe were the Ottoman invaders between the 15th and the 20th century and then the post-war communist regime until the early 1990s. In light of these two historical separations from Europe, the present aspiration of Albania to join the EU takes on a dramatic significance. The renowned Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare, upon his election in 1996 as an associate member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, addressed this body with these words:

The Albanians, the people I belong to, have lost Europe twice: the first time in the 15th century, together with all the other Balkan peoples, and the second time after the Second World War, when they fell under the Communist rule. I am not overstating the case when I say today that after the break down of Communism, the Albanians live with the anxiety of a third loss of Europe. This would be fatal to them, would be equal to their death.

(Kadare 2001: 83–84)

The myth of a ‘return to Europe’ is simultaneously a quest for a collective answer about a tormenting historical experience. If the Albanians today wonder about the meaning of preserving their distinguished culture throughout history, an answer is given, again by Kadare: ‘To keep the country anchored to the body of the mother continent, that was the main aspiration and the main mission of the Albanian culture’ (ibid.: 84).

In the political and cultural discourses in transitional Albania, the EU integration process is seen as the means of returning Albania to the ‘mother continent’, from which it had been forcefully separated. However, after more than 20 years of transition, to what extent has Albania advanced in fulfilling the criteria for EU membership? The initial enthusiasm and the fact that, since 1991, all Albanian governments have placed EU integration at the top of their agen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Nation, State and Faith in the Post-Communist Era
• Part I: The Prevailing Public Discourse on Islam
• Part II: Muslims’ Pursuit of Faith and Religiosity
• Part III: Religious Beliefs, Public Arguments and Legitimacy
• Conclusions
• Index