Islamophobia in the contemporary Albanian public discourse

Albania is a Southeastern European Muslim majority country¹ that after the fall of the communist regime, in 1991, entered a phase of intense identity-building that included the revision and renegotiation of traditional national narratives, religious identities and cultural belongings. The construction of a new nation-building narrative rendered the question of the Muslim identity of the Albanian population and the place of Islam and Muslim culture in the Albanian society the focus of an intense national debate. The Albanian intellectual elite perceived itself as responsible for the forging of the new national narrative and since then it has been at the forefront of the intellectual attempts to construct the main features of the new post-communist Albanian identity. Although in the post-communist period Albania experienced, to a certain extent, an Islamic revival, nevertheless its effects proved limited given the pronounced secularization of the Albanian population and the general indifference of contemporary Albanians towards religion. Therefore, as Clayer (2003) states, in the post-communist period, Albanian Muslims found themselves in the paradoxical position of ‘a numerical majority in a kind of intellectual, social and political ‘minority’ situation’ (p. 294). Consequently, the articulation of the new nation-building discourse remained mainly in the hands of the secular and Christian Western-oriented cultural elites.