The politics of religious dualism: Naim Frashëri and his elective affinity to religion in the course of 19th-century Albanian activism

Abstract

In standard Albanian studies and Western scholarship, including both the work of religious and political activists and that of less ‘interested’ lay people, historical and textual fact-finding efforts have only confirmed and indeed perpetuated the myth that the thinking of Naim Frashëri was formed and dominated by Bektashism and that his ‘Albanianism’ had a Bektashi foundation. The author intends to scrutinize and disprove this analysis, arguing that while Frashëri’s thinking did indeed have a religious cast, it went far beyond Bektashism in its heterodoxy, being a kind of liberation theology and pantheism, which generated an all-inclusive attitude to Albanian identity, not one limited in any particular way to Bektashism. Methodologically, such a picture must arise if we submit the available empirical evidence to critical analysis from the perspective of social theoretical approaches to religion developed in sociology and anthropology.