Download PDF | (The Islam and Nationalism Series) Arolda Elbasani, Olivier Roy - The Revival of Islam in the Balkans_ From Identity to Religiosity-Palgrave Macmillan (2015).
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Contributors
Arolda Elbasani is Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, Florence. She holds a PhD in social and political science from the European University Institute (EUI), awarded in 2007. Her research interests lay at the intersection of Islamic politics, state-church relations, EU enlargement, political corruption and comparative democratization with a focus on Southeast Europe and Turkey. Her articles have appeared in different journals including Politics and Religion, Democratization, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans and Sudosteuropa. She has also edited European Integration and Transformation in the Western Balkans (2013) and co-edited The Albanian Journal of Politics (2004–2008). Her most recent project investigates Muslims’ differential support for democracy in Albania, Kosovo and Turkey.
Cecilie Endresen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo. She is a historian of religion and a Balkanologist, with a research interest in the dynamic relationship between religion and nationalism, particularly among Romanians and Albanians. Her current research focuses on the ethnic and religious identity changes among Albanians, predominantly among Muslim migrants who embrace Christianity in different ways. Her recent publications include Is the Albanian Religion Really ‘Albanianism’? Religion and Nation According to Muslim and Christian Leaders in Albania (2012); ‘The Nation and the Nun: Mother Teresa, Albania’s Muslim Majority and the Secular State’, in Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations (2014); and ‘Status Report: Albania 100 Years’, in Strategies of Symbolic Nation-Building (2014).
Julianne Funk is a lecturer at the University of Zurich and a research consultant for the Ecumenical Women’s Initiative in Croatia. Her MA and PhD theses (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) investigated religion, conflict and grassroots peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her publications have investigated Bosnian Muslim and Mennonite Christian lived religiosity, coexistence and Muslim women believers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ethno-religious identity and peacebuilding, Islam and reconciliation, and the dialogue between politics and religion. As a peace scholar-practitioner, she moves between her home in Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia, where she remains engaged with local peacebuilding NGOs as a consultant and volunteer. Her current projects focus on Bosnian Islam, Balkan coexistence, diaspora, and the dilemmas of Islam and religiosity for secular Europe.
Jeton Mehmeti is Lecturer in Communication at the University of Prishtina and a senior researcher at GAP Institute, Kosovo. He holds a BA in communication and comparative religion from the International Islamic University, Malaysia, and an MA in public policy from the Central European University, Budapest. His broad research interests include public policy, religious pluralism and inter-cultural communication. He is the author of Tensions between Freedom of Expression and Religious Sensitivity: What Is Wrong with the Danish Cartoons? (2011). His recent publications particularly focus on public policies pertaining to Kosovo, including the state–religion relationship.
Andreja Mesaricˇ is an independent researcher based in London. She previously held a research fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia, and a research and teaching fellowship at the University of Ljubljana. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Ljubljana (2011) and a diploma in Islamic studies from the University of Sarajevo (2007). Her research interests include Islamic revival in the Balkans, and gender and migration. She is currently involved with several voluntary sector projects working with refugees and migrant women in the UK. Her articles have appeared in the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. She is currently working on a book on dress, gender and the Islamic revival in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Laura J. Olson is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder. She holds a PhD from Yale University, Slavic Languages and Literatures, awarded in 1994. She works in the areas of folk and popular culture, gender studies, minority studies and nationalism, and has a particular interest in revival movements. She is the author of Performing Russia (2004) and the co-author, with Svetlana Adonyeva, of Worlds of Russian Village Women (2012; winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize 2013). She is currently working on a book project on Islamic revival and folk revival among Slavic-speaking Muslims (Pomaks) in post-communist Bulgaria.
Olivier Roy is Professor and Head of the Mediterranean Program at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, Florence. He was previously a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Professor Roy is the author of numerous books on topics related to Political Islam, the Middle East, Islam in the West and comparative religions – Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah; Today’s Turkey: A European State? and The Illusions of September 11. His best-known book, The Failure of Political Islam (1994), is a standard text for students of political Islam. His other widely read books, Secularism Confronts Islam and Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, offer new perspectives on the place of Islam in secular societies. He contributes to and is regularly interviewed by the press in a variety of countries.
Behar Sadriu is a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He holds a BA in history focusing on the development of Islam and the Middle East, and an MA in the politics, security and integration of East and Southeast Europe. He has participated in various international conferences with papers on Turkey’s international relations and Islamic trends in Kosovo.
Alexandros Sakellariou is a postdoctoral researcher at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, from which he obtained his PhD in Sociology of Religion in 2008. His interests include politics and religion, church–state relations, religious communities in Greek society, religious freedom, religion and globalization, youth activism and civic participation, and right-wing extremism. His recent publications include ‘From Greek Orthodoxy to Islam: Conversion in Contemporary Greek Society and Public Self-Representation’, Journal of Muslims in Europe (2014); and ‘Religion in Greek Society: State, Public or Private?’ in Religion Beyond Its Private Role in Modern Society (2013). His current project focuses on forms of atheism in contemporary Greek society.
Enis Sulstarova is Lecturer in Sociology and Political Science at the University of Tirana. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Tirana. His main fields of interest include nationalism and the politics of identity in modern Albanian history. Sulstarova is the author of four books (published in the Albanian language) and of several articles in English on public discourses of nationalism, Orientalism and European identity in Albania. Publications include I Am Europe! The Intellectuals and the Idea of Europe in the Years 1918–1939 and 1989–2006 (2012), and the third revised edition of the book Escape from the East: Albanian Orientalism from Naim Frashëri to Ismail Kadare (2013). His current project, supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Germany, analyzes the representation of Islam in public discourses and history textbooks in Albania.
Jelena Tošic´ is a visiting professor at the University of Bern and APPART-Fellow in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include socio-cultural and religious diversity, (forced) migration studies and the anthropology of morality/justice/human rights in Europe, especially in the Balkans, and in the Middle East. Her current project explores legacies and patterns of socio-cultural diversity in the Albanian-Montenegrin borderland. She is the author of ‘ “Reimagining” the Balkans. Diversity Beyond and “Straight Through” the Ethno-National’, in The International Handbook of Diversity Studies (2014); and the special issue ‘Localising Moralities: Sociality, Economy and Temporality in SEE’, 2015 in the Journal for South East Europe and Black Sea Studies (co-edited with Sabine Strasser).
Ksenia Trofimova is a junior research fellow in Religious Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her PhD thesis focused on the popular religious traditions of the Roma in the Balkans, and was based on intensive fieldwork in Serbia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her current project analyzes transformations of popular religiosity in Romani milieus. Her broad research interests include cultural identity studies and cultural memory studies in light of religious practice and the development of religious communities. Her results are published in State, Religion and Church in Russia and Worldwide (2014) and Philosophy and Culture (2012) [in Russian].
Anna Zadrozna ˙ is a visiting researcher at University College London and a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, where she holds a TÜB˙ ITAK-B˙ IDEB fellowship. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, which explores transnational relations between Macedonia and Turkey, focusing on the idea of ‘Turkishness’ as a nexus of memories, practices, politics and belongings. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Macedonia, Turkey and Italy and has worked on diverse research projects since 2007. Her broad research interests include migration and belonging, Islamic practices and beliefs, the anthropology of senses and emotions, gender, vernacular ontologies and state–individual relations, specifically in the Balkans and Turkey. Her most recent article ‘I Am Muslim but I Am a European One’ is published by the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (2014).
Introduction:
Nation, State and Faith in the Post-Communist Era Arolda Elbasani
The growing specter of Muslim migrants has triggered a bourgeoning research on processes of contestation, adaptation and manifestations of Islam in Europe. In contrast, the resurgence of Islam across the postcommunist Balkans, the historical stronghold of Muslims in Europe, has gone largely unnoticed. If we heard about them, it was usually in the context of allegiances to the state, the rise of nationalism and violent conflicts brought to world attention by the media in the early 1990s. The violent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia has certainly sparked some academic interest concerning the Muslim communities involved, but the ferocity of the various conflicts has contributed to constraining research only to the most striking cases and particular moments in time (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997: 1).
The occurrence of war and conflict has, moreover, left the exploration of the Islamic phenomena to the mercy of nationalism and post-conflict paradigms, which have essentialized religion in line with ethno-national divisions of the day (Henig and Bielenin-Lenczowska 2013). Consequently, mainstream research tends to analyze religious groups as a repository of clear-cut ethno-national identities, the ends of which are closely monitored by the state in the interest of imposing communal uniformity and charting well-defined criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Meanwhile, the gradual normalization of the political field and the liberalization of religious conduct in the two decades since the collapse of communism have unleashed a myriad of new encounters between newborn Muslim believers and state-organized religious categories, as well as diverse modalities of ‘being Muslim’ across the region. Post-communist ‘ruptures’ – particularly the trends of secularization, the incoming international influences, and participation within larger European normative spaces and networks – challenge, contrast and overlap with the static, one-size-fits-all ethno-national categories of the organized religious field. In this ‘open’ post-communist religious sphere, believers have the opportunity to search for faith, encounter many sources of identification, and are more apt to choose, replicate, but also resist and reinvent the state-led classificatory systems within which they maneuver. In this context, the new Islamic phenomenon is no longer only the bearer of ethno-national political alternatives but also a symptom of new spaces that cannot be confined within a particular territory, state, nation or any communal identity. Hence, as Bougarel suggests, it is necessary ‘to outline a new approach to Balkan Islam that stresses its internal diversity and recent transformations’ (2003: 346).
This volume focuses on the growing gap between top-down ethnonational categories of state-organized religious fields and believers’ diversified personal experiences, discoveries and formulations of faith. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing and empirically exploring the emerging mosaic of Islamic religiosity, defined here as the way an individual believer experiences his or her relation to religion and faith. Hence, we seek conceptually grounded and empirically informed analysis of the revival of faith in the post-communist era. The underlining questions of this book are: What are the new encounters of faith after the collapse of communism? How do believers navigate the spaces between organized religion and new-found alternatives to faith? How do they choose what it is to be a good Muslim? What importance does it gain in their post-communist lives and how do they pursue it in practice? And finally, where are we heading in this reconfigured relation between state-organized religion and believers’ faith? Obviously, answers to these questions depend on the particularities of time and place, which have to some extent been taken into account in existing research through individual case studies. The added value and contribution of this collective volume is to tackle these questions from a comparative and analytical perspective, allowing us to embody the analysis of singular cases from the Balkans into broader theoretical and empirical findings on sources, patterns and modalities of the postcommunist revival of Islamic faith.
The book thus aims to go beyond the ‘state of the art’ in at least two ways: first, documenting and taking stock of the empirical mosaic of new-found Islamic religiosities; and second, generalizing emerging patterns in the dynamic relationship between faith, organized religion, state and nation across different Balkan countries. Ultimately, it aims to connect research on the revival of Islam in the Balkans to broader and pertinent theoretical issues on the relation between nation, state and religion, revival of faith in postcommunist societies, as well as the evolution and traits of Islam in the larger European context. This chapter opens the debate by challenging the existing research and sketching a new analytical perspective that focuses on believers’ experiences and relations to faith. The first section critically unpacks the existing literature on religion as a fixed ethno-national communal category. The second section outlines the mechanisms that sustain the state-organized religious field and its underlying categories in the post-communist era. This is followed by a short survey of new developments that challenge the official religious sphere and provide believers with new opportunities, ideas and practices to pursue in their daily practice. The subsequent section maps out expected trends in the postcommunist religious landscape. The final section explains the structure of the book and summarizes consequent empirical chapters. The following case studies analyze the experience of religiosity at the intersection of the secular and the sacred, blending a variety of global, international, regional and local processes.
The findings presented herein suggests that Islam, as framed at the top-down political level, remains an important marker of identities, but the experiences of religiosity have increasingly become a more personalized individual attitude, detached from organized religion and doctrinal official prescriptions. Empirical chapters offer ample evidence of a certain misfit between official Islam and other ‘suppliers’ of religion, while believers take ownership of their own local and individual ‘ways’ of being Muslim. The concluding chapter relates and expands these empirical findings to broader questions regarding the many actors who speak for Islam, the role of foreign influences, evolving patterns of religiosity and the dynamics and trends of Islamic phenomenon in Europe.
Islam as a national/ethnic marker
Existing research on Islam, similarly to that concerning other denominations in the Balkans, is permeated by an implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that religion serves to shape and demarcate clear national/ethnic boundaries. Religion in general is reduced to an ‘ethnic marker’, a crucial and divisive source of national identity. According to Creed, scholarly privileging of ethno-national identities, at the expense of local identities and localized forms of knowledge and practice, represents an ‘example of Balkanism par excellence’ (2011: 168). Insistence upon the role of religion in confining communal identities is particularly related to the march of national ideologies and the many vicissitudes of state-building processes in this part of the world. The enmeshment, and often subjugation, of religion to politics of national identity became especially pronounced during the violent collapse of Yugoslavia. Political entities that resulted from the dissolution of the federal state structure all claimed to represent a dominant ethnicnation identified with a specific religion, by effectively managing a transformation process that Verdery has called the ‘extermination of alternative identity choices’ (1994: 38). Yet, it was the appalling bloodshed and destruction in Bosnia-Herzegovina that brought worldwide attention to Muslim populations, their ethnic allegiances and nation and state formation process in the south-eastern corner of Europe. As an influential study puts it, ‘the Bosnian tragedy has made very clear the importance of examining the relationship between the Balkan Muslim communities and the states in which they live, as well as their self-definition in relation to these states’ (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997: 1). Then came Kosovo, another oft-discussed case of conflict that developed along ethno-religious lines, namely between Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Serbs. Subsequently, the unfolding conflicts in Macedonia drew new attention to hard-core divisions between Orthodox Macedonians and Muslim Albanians, both barricading themselves into opposing fronts. The unfolding battles for state authority, power, territory, and independent statehood in the 1990s, all made use of religious labels and symbols as crucial instruments for the reconstruction of a national ‘self’ against the opposing ‘other’ (Duijzings 2000: 157). All the while, churches and mosques became the major targets of destruction and embodied emerging political, ethnic and religious divisions. For many, those events recalled the historical course of ethno-religious entanglement, imbroglios and conflicts of the state-building process in the post-Ottoman Balkans. Centuries of Ottoman rule, and its millet system of organization, whereby religion defined separate communal identities, nurtured a strong sense of belonging, which was determined almost exclusively by religion (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997). The weakening of the empire, in the 19th century, made way for competing European concepts of the organization of modern nation-state, and enabled the emergence of overlapping identities. However, even where religion was eroded by competing sources of identification, institutional legacies, allegiances and daily practices at local level helped to preserve the delineation of faith-based communities, which continued to separate the emerging national units. This was particularly the case regarding the separation of Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors. In the age of state-building, these separate and somehow distinguishable communal identities were promoted, manipulated and usurped by political schemers in order to demarcate their nations, consolidate central state authority, reconfigure borders and, when necessary, wage wars against ‘others’. Modern state-making presses its subjects toward single identities: one cannot keep track of people who choose to be one thing at one point and something else at another. In the Balkans, similar to the ‘construction’ of ethno-national identities in Western Europe, ‘the self-consistent person who “has” one “identity” is the product of a specific historical process: modern nation-state formation’ (Verdery 1994: 37). As Todorova has famously argued, ‘the Balkans [have become] ... European by shedding the last residue of an imperial legacy, widely considered an anomaly at the time and by assuming and emulating the homogenous nation-state as the normative form of social organization’ (1997: 177). Consequently, religion was taken out of the hands of the believers and subjected to various nation-state ideologies and political projects – secularism, patriotism, ethnic mobilization and state control – which had very little to do with faith itself. Attempts by national ‘entrepreneurs’, but also by centers of religious power, to agitate for clear-cut identities and the eradication of elements of blend and mixture were liveliest in border and composite areas, where ethnic and national loyalties were at their most fluid (Duijzings 2000). Islam, as the dominant faith enjoying particular social and legal prerogatives during centuries of Pax Ottomana, became the backbone of political contestation and social engineering in the process of re-imaging new national religious regimes after the dissolution of the empire. The predominantly Christian-Orthodox states that emerged from former Ottoman Balkan territories in the period 1829–1878 – Serbia, Greece, Romania, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Bosnia – identified themselves with the orthodox ‘millet’ in order to consolidate their statehood (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997: 25). Only Albania, which, given its multi-religious population, could not clothe nationalism with a single creed, promoted a new ‘ecumenical’ nation (Clayer 2008; Elbasani 2014). Regardless of their composition, all post-Ottoman Balkan states targeted their Muslim populations as a leftover of the Ottoman occupation, almost a traitor in the midst of the new nations in the making (Katsikas 2009: 539). Even Albania, the only Muslim-majority country, renounced its Muslim population as a synonym of Ottoman backwardness, and made such renunciation the central tenet of state-led reforms aimed to catch up with ‘new European times’ (Clayer 2008). These legacies, ideologies and state-building strategies informed general state policies that were inherently defamatory toward Muslims: branding them as foreigners to be expelled; stigmatizing them vis-à-vis the dominant ethnic group; advocating measures of homogenization; or, at best, recognizing but merely tolerating them as an ethno-religious group. Muslim communities, for their part, found themselves struggling to carve a new place for themselves amidst non-Muslim societies, new nation state ideologies and antagonistic state policies, as well as the shifting fortunes of the European geopolitical order. Indeed, they have been at the very center of the biggest crises that have shaken the region during the last two tumultuous centuries of nation- and state-building processes.
Politically organized religious ‘Fields’: Legacies, categories and transmission mechanisms
Re-wakened nationalisms of the 1990s, and new politics of identity and statehood, which were certainly suffused with ethno-religious symbolisms and old historical interpretations, turned into the dominant lenses through which to interpret Islam also in the post-communist era. To quote the findings of a recent study, ‘the top-down driven hegemonic interpretation of... Muslim politics as trapped in the politics of identity and inter-communal ethno-religious nationalism prevails in the media, political debates and international community’s projects as well as in academic discourses’ (Henig and Bielenin-Lenczowska 2013: 2). Violence has a crucial role in solidifying self-fulfilling prophecies: ‘it makes reality resemble the ideological constructs that underpin the violence’ (Duijzings 2000: 33). Indeed, both during and for some time after the Balkan conflicts, the analysis of the Islamic phenomenon was left at the tender mercy of nationalism and post-conflict studies, which essentialized religion in line with ethno-religious splits of the day and ready-made nation-state categories. Ethno-religious dichotomies often carried the active contribution of political elites to ‘nationalize’ but also ‘centralize’ and ‘manage’ newborn Islamic impulses within the framework of central state authority. Policies of nationalization-cum-etatization of Islam more than anything else served the worldly interests of using faith at the service of concrete political agendas (Hann and Pelkmans 2009: 1520). All modern states maintain boundaries by mastering clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion, but this was especially pertinent in light of the centralized legacy of former communist regimes. Communist states, to a lesser or greater extent, had built up a highly centralized state machinery to appropriate and control all spheres of life including public religions but also intimate spheres of personal piety (Hann 2006). Succeeding postcommunist states capitalized on the power of the central state apparatus to construct, select and use religious symbols as an anchor of political legitimacy. Institutionally, the state continued to closely control nations’ religious life by preserving a multi-tiered system of registration, according to several unilaterally revocable conditions (Stan and Turcescu 2011). State’s ‘management’ of Islam depended on the particular demographic and political context in each political unit, but the use of state muscles to discipline it remained the same. Balkan states were able to exert strong influence over religious life ‘[particularly] through the privileged status given to Orthodoxy ... and through the close administrative and financial links existing between state authorities in charge of religious affairs and religious hierarchies’ (Bougarel 2003: 355). Communist-style centralization and modernization has, thus, bequeathed vestiges of largely interventionist and occasionally hostile state policies to the post-communist institutional formats of managing Islam. Former communist ideological constructs have also spilled over into the post-communist formal arrangements of checking religion at the door of nation-states. Previous state intelligentsias – historians, linguists, ethnographers, writers, artists and students of Marxist ideology – supported by an overstaffed academy and generously funded by the communist state played a crucial role in this regard. In the words of Bougarel, ‘the Communist period favored the development of intellectual elites, who in turn became the standard bearers of new national aspirations’ (2005: 11). It was these former intelligentsias that articulated and jealously guarded their nations’ post-communist ‘cultural heritage’, completed with a pantheon of great thinkers, artists and heroes. Upon regime change in the 1990s, communist-era intellectuals took over key positions in the institutional reproduction of knowledge, generating what Gellner has typically dubbed as ‘diffusion of a schoolmediated, academy-supervised [national] idiom’ (1983: 140). National ideas, privileging a past ‘golden age’ over the contemporary, were further transmitted through literature, historical accounts, and a coy ethnography often without any ‘obligation towards the social and material reality’ of the present (Carmichael 2002: 3). In the wide spectrum of revived Balkan nationalisms, Muslims were commonly viewed as a kind of ethnic ‘fifth column’, a leftover from a previous era, who could never be integrated successfully into the planned modern nation-states. Consequently, any expression of Islam ought to be oppressed, kept out of politics and the public realm or placed under close state surveillance (Khalid 2003). The continuity of a nation’s ‘heritage’, facilitated through former communist intelligentsias and their oft-fabricated accounts of history, thus, contributed to enforce stagnant parameters concerning how history, nation and Islam merged or parted ways in the official memory of each political entity. ‘Official’ or government-sponsored Islam – an organizational concept, which refers to the creation of centralized religious hierarchies approved by the state – serves as yet another powerful interlocutor of transmitting politically conceived nationalized accounts of Islam (Bringa 1995: 199; Epkenhans 2011; Oktem 2011: 162–163; Elbasani 2015). Headed by a Chief Mufti, governed by formal statutes, and closely monitored by the state, central structures are acknowledged as the sole authority in governing all affairs pertinent to their ‘community’ of believers all across the Balkans. Even where pragmatic interests and ideological rifts have divided central structures, the post-communist state has made sure to remedy such problems and affirm the state-selected interlocutors. The religious hierarchy, in return, has helped to establish state oversight over the community of believers and worked to eliminate undesirable influences, often independent of the ‘community’ of believers (Ghodsee 2010: 19). By offering state benefits and co-opting the religious ‘establishment’, post-communist regimes have maintained an intricate relationship between politics and religious structures – the sovereign has retained the prerogative of intervention, Ulamas have been domesticated, and scholarship corrected. Central structures, thus, have more often than not been relegated to a subordinate role, remarkable chiefly for their support of government policies (Akiner 2003: 101–104). Even where the national collective memories embraced Islam, the power mechanisms that entangle state structures, intellectual elites and religious hierarchies worked to enforce the discourse of national Islam(s) – Albanian, Bosnian, Kosovar and so on – which dominates the revival of faith in the post-communist Balkans. It is through this coalition of the powerful supported by the backing of state structures that political constructs of nation, history and tradition are perpetrated and reinforced in each country. These structures, in return, maintain and reproduce inflexible ‘boundary-drawing’ discursive practices on and within Islam itself. All the while, believers’ expressions of piety and observance, as well as referents of faith, are filtered through top-down categories that constitute the state-organized religious field. Defined at the nation-state-level, post-communist Muslims are, thus, much more political, historical and cultural than religious and spiritual. Securitization of Islam, and definition of ‘otherness’, easily taps into such dichotomous divisions that political categories assume and nourish: official or parallel, traditional or global, national or foreign, victim or threat, liberal or radical, and of course useful or harmful. The title of a recent book Rediscovering the Umma: Muslims in the Balkans Between Nationalism and Transnationalism says a good deal about mainstream perception of Islamic revival as being caught in between old ‘national’ and new ‘foreign’ categories (Elbasani 2013b). Not surprisingly, an important strand of research on Islamic revival in the Balkans focuses on ‘creeping’ foreign Salafist influences, interpretations which gained territory in the context of Balkan conflicts and particularly rising concerns on Islamic terrorism after 9/11 (Deliso 2007) and once again after the eventful creation of the Islamic State in 2014. Consequently, the revival of faith is further squeezed into either ‘nationally’ or ‘traditionally’ moderate and ‘externally’ radical interpretations, which capitalize upon notions of local Islam as being challenged by incoming foreign networks.
Resurgence of faith: Believers, choices and diversity in an enlarged religious space
This volume begins with the assumption that national classificatory systems, which delineate clear-cut ethno-religious identities and functions within a politically regulated ‘religious field’, provide a straitjacket to analyze believers’ recovery of faith after the collapse of communism. The top-down assignment of uniform political identities and communal terms of belonging in the process of nation-states’ search for uniformity is one account of the post-communist trajectory of faith. Another account is believers’ own search, selection and pursuit of various ‘identities’ on offer during the opening up of the religious space. The two levels are interrelated. Believers respond to the broad socio-political changes, which affect their personal and communal lives. As Eickelman and Piscatori remind us, ‘boundaries [of religious communities] are shifted by ...the political, economic and social context in which these participants find themselves’ (1990: 4–5). Enrollment within communal identities becomes particularly strong during periods of war and violence, but also during periods of contestation and marginalization, which force believers to select where they belong. Yet, the faithful are active agents who choose, resist and reinvent the broad classificatory systems within which they maneuvre. Local rituals and living practices function as a means of de-authorizing hegemonic perspectives that privilege collective memories and ethno-national identities (Creed 2011). Moreover, believers encounter different sources of identification, and select and weigh the importance of each according to a particular context and point in time. Mixed identity choices are particularly frequent in peripheral settings, where ecclesiastic organizations and state institutions are less powerful, and hence unable to reach and determine believers’ choices and experiences. As Duijzings suggests on the basis of his work in the border areas in Kosovo, ‘there is always friction between the ideal ethno-religious models or ideologies produced by states and religious regimes, and the social reality to which they refer’ (2000: 25). The way Muslims experience and express religiosity in the new post-communist spaces has certainly proven more complex and heterogeneous that the neat national, ethnic, or other hegemonic categories to which they are subjected (Oktem 2011: 156). Anthropological studies furnish ample evidence of Muslims’ diverse ways of ‘being’ Muslim across different localities and moments of transition (Binga 1995; Duijzings 2000; Ghodsee 2010; Henig and Bielenin-Lenczowska 2013). Such localized living experiences of faith help shift analytical attention from centers of power and politics to the margins of religious lives, knowledge and practice. The more one moves out of and away from centrally controlled religious fields, the more one observes Muslim ‘anomalies’ – ethno-religious fusion, heterodox practices, cultural diffusion and plural forms of belongings and believing. Seen from the autonomous spaces of religious practice, piety and ritual believers’ experiences tend to be more fluid and less institutionalized, whilst identities are more ambiguous and situational. Although providing crucial insights into the localized forms of religious expression, current research is mostly confined to single case studies and particular moments of conflict and violence, thus lacking systematic comparative analysis of the long-term continuities but also ruptures of the resurgence of faith since the collapse of communism. This collective endeavor aims to take stock of post-communist disruptions and emerging modalities of revival of faith in a comparative and analytical perspective. We thus go beyond the state of the art depicting ‘stable’ continuities within nationally organized religious spheres and instead analyze the current ‘interruptions’ and believers’ ‘recasting’ of Islamic lives across different cases in the post-communist Balkans. We identify at least three crucial breaks which help to reconfigure the ways in which Muslims in the Balkans grapple with their beliefs and the salience they gain in their religious lives: (1) the imprint of decadeslong socialist secularization, (2) the competitive market of religiosity and (3) the ‘EU-ization’ of the religious sphere. Such disruptions challenge the one-size-fits-all ethno-national formulas and point to new directions of recovery and resurgence of faith after the collapse of communism.
The imprint of socialist-style secularization
Decades of communist-style modernization, and the eviction of religion from the public arena, have led to a ‘[de facto] secularization of Balkan societies and a sharp decline in religious practice’ (Bougarel 2005: 11). Even where struggles for nationhood and statehood have reinforced Muslims’ identification with a core ethnic group, this has produced far from uniform re-Islamization of their identities in the sense of forging uniform practices, the discovery of a global Umma, or mass attendance of communal services. The few campaigns of re-Islamization led by particular political parties and religious institutions, for example, have sparked furious controversies in Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as in Albania (Bougarel 2003: 355; Elbasani and Saatçioglu 2014). Ghodsee’s ˘ observation that Muslims in Bulgaria seem ‘prone to defining religion as an aspect of ethnic identity, rather than a declaration of a belief in the doctrines of a particular organized spiritual community’ charts what seems to be a recurrent phenomenon in many other cases in the Balkans (2010: 24). Typically, more people self-identify with Islam and believe in God than those who attend religious services and serve religious prescriptions. Survey data on religious practices in the Balkans show convincingly that most people only attend important ceremonies at poignant moments in life such as birth, wedding and funerals (University of Oslo 2011). Religious observance is in sharp decline everywhere. Postcommunist Muslims also appear strongly committed to confining religion within the private sphere – away from state institutions, schools, the arts and the public sphere more generally (ibid; Oktem 2011). The ‘return of religion’ thus fits rather well into what Roy describes as a shift from religion – as a coherent corpus of beliefs and dogmas collectively managed by a body of legitimate holders of knowledge – to religiosity, namely, self-formulation and self-expression of personal faith (2007: 7–8). Newborn religiosities seemingly evolve around individual choices and preferences, in a form of ‘pick and choose’ personalized discoveries of faith.
International influences
A second trend, which destabilizes the established religious field, and surfs the wave of personalized religious choices, hints at the emergence of the post-communist free and competitive market of beliefs. The liberalization of religious conduct and the opening of new channels of communication with the world have generated a vivid ‘marketplace’, where foreign encounters – foreign missionaries, migrants, students from abroad, humanitarian organizations and virtual Internet networks – effectively compete with established institutions and traditional ideas to win ‘godless’ souls (Solberg 2007; Tziampiris 2009; Karcic 2010). This is particularly important given that rich Arab associations have targeted Muslim populations in the Balkans as crucial ‘interlocutors’ to diffuse the message of Islam in Europe. These organizations have from early on provided much-needed financial resources – funds for building the necessary infrastructure, scholarships for students, Islamic literature and translations, plentiful religious missionaries and ample humanitarian assistance mixed with proselytization activities – to help local Muslims find the way to ‘pure’ faith. As a result, Arab-influenced doctrines, which propagate a de-territorialized pure Islamic code stripped of local anomalies, have emerged as a powerful feature of incoming new foreign influences in the post-communist era. A substantial body of research highlights the alarming power of well-funded fundamentalist networks to affect indigenous practices and establish local networks (Deliso 2007). Incoming movements have occasionally infiltrated central institutions; made inroads amongst the uprooted and the poor; attracted groups suffering from the hardship of post-socialist economies; and lent a message of hope, morality and justice amidst post-communist corrupt political order (Blumi 2005; Ghodsee 2010). The overemphasized Salafist influences, however, have remained largely confined to specific moments of transition and small circles of believers. ‘[Radical Islamists] are minorities, which have managed to overcome their own marginality only when the escalation of political and ethnic tensions has allowed them to make use of the ...frustrations of the Muslim populations’ (Bougarel 2003: 358). A new body of research shows that paradoxes and resistance that thwarted the diffusion of global Islamic movements have in fact pushed local communities to take ownership of their own familiar ways of practicing and pursuing religiosity (Karic 2002). Additionally, organized communities and individual believers have both resorted to arguments drawn from the ‘moderate’ tradition of the past – a body of solutions that have developed from their country’s historical interaction with the European institutions and ideas – to juxtapose the radical projects that have permitted the free and open market of ideas after the collapse of communism (Elbasani 2015).
The Europeanization of the religious space
A third factor, which disrupts and reconfigures the organized religious field, is Muslims’ participation in a broader European normative space, closely related to the ongoing processes of EU accession (Elbasani 2013a). The promise of EU membership to all countries in the Balkans has brought them into closer contact with the European project, and debates on what it means to be Muslim in the contemporary enlarged Europe. The asymmetrical nature of the EU enlargement process, whereby the EU sets the conditions and candidate countries need to comply in order to advance in the institutional ladder of accession, has created an additional EU-driven structure of restrictions and opportunities for Muslims in the Balkans to articulate their preferences and make their social and political claims in the domestic political arena (Elbasani and Saatçioglu 2014). ˘ On the one hand, EU-level debates on Islam, which are often intermingled with issues of enlargement fatigue, Christian heritage, problems of migration, issues of terrorism, and the uncertainty of Turkey’s accession, add pressure on Muslim believers to position themselves more strongly along the indigenous side of ‘European Muslims’. The term reflects a long history of Muslims’ own engagement with institutional templates and ideological frames emanating from the European continent (Clayer and Germain 2008). Yet, in the post-communist era, the term is now twisted to illustrate Muslims’ unwavering support for the post-1989 project of ‘return’ to Europe and the concrete process of EU accession framed by the Copenhagen criteria – democracy, the rule of law and the market economy. On the other hand, Muslims across the Balkans have discovered that the EU’s democratic institutions and widely accepted citizenship rights provide them with a new window of opportunity to pursue and perform their religiosity in a more liberally regulated public sphere. Muslim communities, associations and believers have frequently mobilized the language of the EU’s norms and values – freedom of speech, opinion, conscience, property, and minority protection – to expand the range of opportunities in the domestic arena. To quote the position of an independent Muslim association in Albania, ‘Muslims ... have a great need for the democracy and the human rights that our common continent has constructed in years’ (MFA 2008: 5). EU institutions and liberal policies guaranteeing equal rights of citizenship are further perceived as a new international layer of protection against restrictive national institutions (Anagnostou 2007: 167; Ghodsee 2010: 177).
Mapping out new trends in post-communist recovery of faith
Given these ruptures in the nationally organized religious fields, we expect the ‘community’ of the faithful to be more scattered, heterogeneous and not particularly concerned with unifying itself or even being represented (Roy 2007: 68–69). Islam in the Balkans has arguably never been homogenous (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997). However, in the post-communist liberalized contexts and enlarged religious spheres believers have additional opportunities to select and borrow from newfound forms of religiosity. Lay believers’ chance of negotiation, personalization and mixing of beliefs promises to uncouple further the relation between lay ‘communities’ evolving religiosities and centrally organized forms of religion. Similarly to the evolution of Islam in Western Europe, new-found religiosities are increasingly personalized, mobile, weakly institutionalized, little concerned with theological interpretations, and often communitarian as a choice of belonging. All the while, the Islamic phenomenon is no longer the bearer of ethno-national alternatives and politically assigned prescriptions, but rather the symptom of new spaces that cannot be easily confined within a particular territory, nation or ethnic group. The first task of our volume is to map out believers’ differential responses to post-communist challenges of the nationally organized religious spaces, and analyze how they adapt to swift changes, oppose rigid prescriptions, and envisage their own ‘local’ spaces. The empirical cases analyzed here provide evidence of different factors at work, and contextualize Muslims’ expressions and pursuit of faith in the locales where they operate. In this way, case studies from the region furnish in-depth idiosyncratic detail on localized versions of Islam coming of age and taking over the categorical divides envisaged at the nation-state level. Besides exploring the emerging mosaic of Islamic religiosities, we seek cross-country parallels, and tease out explanations of the ways in which believers discover and experience their new-found faith. Ultimately, we aim to conceptualize post-communist trends of revival of faith, establish patterns and draw theoretical conclusions concerning where we are heading in the relationship between nation, state and faith, as well as traits of religiosity after the collapse of communism. To this end,specific cases tackle the revival of Islam within a broader conceptual framework, incorporating sub-national, regional, European and globalized influences, which compete with official institutions and national ideas for market ‘shares’.
Outline of the book
The structure of the book aims to delineate and distinguish between different levels of re-discovery and re-definition of faith after the collapse of communism. Following this introductory chapter, which outlines the main issues and sketches our focus on religiosity, the empirical cases are divided into three main parts, each emphasizing separate ‘agents’, related explanations and modalities of revival of faith. Part I focuses on top-down political visions, which generally conceive Islam as a disputed faith in need of state supervision and conjectural reformation in order to fit the ethno-religious fabric of respective nation-states. Chapter 1 by Sulstarova argues that public intellectuals in post-communist Albania have problematized the revival of Islam by employing orientalist stereotypes. Intellectual elites commonly juxtapose Albanians’ ‘European’ identity with the ‘imported’, ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ Islamic baggage. Chapter 2 by Sakellariou outlines a similar account of contemporary panic about Islam in the case of Greece by focusing on the discourse of the Orthodox Church and the Golden Dawn party, the first a traditional and the second a modern agent. Both actors claim to represent and protect the Greek-Orthodox ‘core’ national identity against the Islamic ‘other’.
In the last chapter in this section, Mehmeti offers an innovative analysis of the political ‘neutralization’ of Islam during the creation of the new Kosovar state. His analysis focuses on international community’s priorities in building a multi-national society, and domestic elites’ attempts to dismiss the identification of the Kosovar polity with Islam. All of the cases analyzed here, be they Muslim or Orthodox-majority, show that, at the macro level, Islam is perceived as the foe of nation-states’ collective ‘imaginaries’. Islam, in function of the envisaged national unity and its ‘substantive’ ethnoreligious content, is commonly relegated to the margins of public and political life. Part II of the volume brings together various case studies that shift attention to how believers experience, resist and reinvent such topdown classificatory systems during ‘everyday practice’, and according to contingencies of time and place. Tošic opens up this section by explor- ´ ing what Muslims themselves perceive as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islam and the various ways of ‘being’ Muslim in the context of an urban diversity regime in the north-eastern town of Shkoder in Albania (Chapter 4). In the following Chapter 5, Mesaric draws attention to Muslim believ- ˇ ers’ engagement with the available political-religious discourse, and emerging personal faith(s), through analyzing pious women’s dress practices in Sarajevo. Chapter 6 by Olson follows a similar analytical route in analyzing how diverse piety movements – one traditional and the other influenced by Salafism – recast their relationship to Islam on the basis of personal choice, independence from official authorities and self-organized horizontal transmission networks in rural Bulgaria.
The subsequent analysis by Zadrozna (Chapter 7) focuses on how ˙ Macedonian-speaking Muslims make sense of their faith, and maneuver within broad ethno-religious categories, when deciding about intimate marriage choices and love preferences. Such choices seemingly reflect socio-cultural binds and individual preferences, thus, challenging assumptions of clear-cut ethno-religious boundaries exacerbated by decades of ethnic conflict. In Chapter 8, Trovimova analyzes the syncretic practices of the worship of saints, evolving at the interplay between Sufism and ‘popular’ Islam, among Muslim communities of Roma in Southern Serbia and Macedonia. All the chapters in Part II show that post-communist believers have embraced a relational and negotiable conception of faith, while ‘living’ practices have developed in an increasingly detached manner from the organized religious field and the clear categorical ethno-religious confines set out at the nation-state level. Indeed, secular influences but also sub-national, European and foreign suppliers of religion have been effectively competing with organized religion and nation-state ideologies for the hearts and minds of post-communist believers. Part III of the volume explores how Muslims engage with the public space and construct legitimizing arguments in order to justify their positions on crucial choices facing their post-communist polities, including contested issues such as women’s rights, religious pluralism and membership in the EU. In Chapter 9, Sadriu investigates selected Imams’ contestation of the public ban on the usage of the hijab in Kosovo – with the hijab being represented as a lofty form of morality, a universal human right, a religious commandment and part of Albanian traditional culture. Such legitimizing tropes mobilize the language of Islamic values on the one hand, and European and democratic values on the other.
The next chapter, by Funk (Chapter 10), analyzes Muslim believers’ public pursuit of faith through the practice of Friday prayer and the use of the hijab in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Accordingly, believers’ choices evolve at the intersection of individual and collective concerns and thus go beyond simple dichotomies such as public and private, secular and religious and believer and non-believer that characterize the centrally organized religious field. The last chapter by Endresen juxtaposes public arguments provided by different groups – the central organization of the Sunni community, a Sufi subgroup of it, and a self-organized group of Salafist imams – on contested issues of religious authority, nation and religious other in Albania. The analysis, similar to other chapters in this section, demonstrates that religious groups make use of local traditions, Islamic dogma as well as global patterns and ideas to position themselves on different issues facing their post-communist polities.
The chapters here demonstrate that the faithful navigate between top-down elite/state level discourses, broad frames of ethno-national identities and diverse religious practices and sources of legitimacy, using interchangeably cultural-traditional, religious-conservative and liberal and European-informed arguments. The concluding chapter by Olivier Roy 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. It also draws together main empirical and theoretical findings and outlines some future prognoses on emerging Islamic religiosities and the evolution of Islam in the Balkans and beyond. Going against the main thrust of the existing literature, the concluding chapter emphasizes the diversity of Muslim religiosities playing out at the local level and enacted by local agents – individual believers, religious authorities and state elites. It is precisely the newborn religious actors who contribute to recasting and reconsidering the assumed relationship between religion, ethno-national identities and culture framed at the macro-political level.
The net outcome is the emergence of autonomous faith communities, which embrace a religious attitude, strive for religious freedoms, and aim to put religious norms into practice. The chapter also posits that this is not an insulated phenomenon confined to the Balkans or the post-communist space, but rather a broader trend in the era of globalized religious influences and European-wide patterns of religiosity. Nonetheless, Balkan Muslims deserve a particular place in the context of analysis of European patterns, and the rise of the so-called ‘European Islam’, to the extent they have long encountered and absorbed ideas and models emanating from the European space – including models of separation of church and state, rights attributed to religious minorities, appropriate pursuit of religiosity and ultimately what it is to be a good Muslim in modern and secular European societies.
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