The Tijaniyya: Reformism and Islamic Revival in Interwar Albania

Abstract

Islam in modern Southeastern Europe is mostly studied in terms of institutionalization, nationalization and reforms. This top-down approach allows us to understand only incompletely the transformation of the Islamic religious scene and the relationship between state and religion. Here, I take the case of interwar Albania and de-center the analysis in studying the development of the Tijaniyya—a strongly orthodox North-African brotherhood which spread in this country after 1900—and examine the position of its members in the Islamic religious circles. The spread of this brotherhood was probably stimulated by the interference from the state in the religious sphere, which led to a transfer of the religious vitality to a sector which escaped to the state tutelage. The integration of several members of the Tijaniyya at the heart of the official structures of the Islamic Community in 1930 in order to control them, contributed to an Islamic revival from within the new reformed Islamic institutions, at a time when these institutions seemed more rationalized, controlled and secularized. In the second half of the 1930s, this unexpected Islamic revivalist evolution within the official Islamic institutions came to serve the new politics of King Zog, who abandoned his secularist politics, to fight the “communist danger”.