Islam and Orientalism in Contemporary Albania

Abstract

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.