By Fitim Zekthi
Islamophobia is a bad, vile, ugly disease. It is a form of racism. Like any racism, it has as its source the fear of losing status, the fear of losing the usually dominant role in society and community, etc. Racism makes an immediate illogical categorization of people. The brain uses stereotypes to not waste too much energy during the recognition process. So, in a way, it makes a short circuit (which, as happens in the physics of electricity, makes a mass and burns the circuit) due to helplessness and laziness.
Theodor Adorno said that individuals who have high anxiety want dominance, want order that makes them rule, and are very prone to prejudice. When they "feel" threatened, they always look for culprits outside of themselves. That was all.
Albania and Kosovo (we are not going into the analysis for the world, because it would never end) have a high and very rampant level of racism in every direction.
In Kosovo (in Albania this is more evident in public spaces, of course, but it exists), Islamophobia has long been widespread and has taken hold in public spaces. Journalists, professors, academics, etc. come out from time to time and talk about Kosovo as a secular state that should not deal with religion, they talk about religion as something that should be a private matter, they talk about Islam as a religion that came from invaders, they talk about Christianity as a higher and more Western religion, they speak against the call to prayer or against girls wearing headscarves in schools, they talk about Islam as a religion from which, according to them, terrorism can arise, etc.
It is more or less a Pavlovian behavior that often appears as soon as something related to Islam comes up. In one case a few years ago, when the father of the national football player, Mërgim Mavraj, was being sent to the other world, or they saw the coffin covered with the prostration with which he prayed while alive, they ran to say that he was being buried with the ISIS flag. The same thing happens every year when it is the month of Ramadan. They speak worriedly that people are fasting en masse and closing shops during the day, or that a somewhat religious atmosphere is created. This year it started because of the school schedule, which was changed so that people would be at home at iftar time. Some people in the media, public life or even professors talk about the issue of secularism, talk about Kosovo as a Western country in which religion is and should be a private matter.
It is surprising how they failed to understand what a free society, a plural and democratic society means. It is surprising how even so many years after liberation from Serbia, where the country has become a free and democratic state, these ugly totalitarian, exclusionary, racist mindsets exist.
It is surprising how there are journalists and university professors who fail to understand, who are so mediocre, who in many cases are even so ignorant that they do not understand that religions are not and should not be divided by society and the state into good and bad, Western and Eastern, peaceful and terrorist. Religions are religions, they are a deep and inseparable part of the way in which the identity of many people and society is constructed. This being the case, societies choose not to denounce any religion as evil in itself (when individuals of a faith do stupid things, it is another matter. They should be despised, but not religion).
How could they never understand that there are no inferior and superior cultures? What kind of journalists or professors (there have been those with academic titles who have said such nonsense) are these who have apparently not read anything by Edward Tylor Burnet or Frantz Boas, Lewis Henry Morgan, James Frazer, etc. This has become clear over time and the civilized world, the professors and journalists or the universities of this world have over time eradicated the theses on inferior and superior cultures, on good religions and bad religions, on Western religions or Eastern religions, on “indigenous” religions or religions of the conqueror, on cultured religions and religions of the anti-culture. These are anachronisms, these are ridiculous. These are trumpeted today only by extremists and the ignorant in the world. These are trumpeted by fascists and racists who have nothing to do with seriousness and academia, like Magdi Alam or Pamela Geller, like Robert Spencer or Laura Loomer, etc.
How do these journalists and professors not understand that secularism makes sense in a country where religions are allowed. How do they not understand that secularism is a gene in an interval that has no exact boundaries. If you aim to change a society and make it without religion, if you are going to push towards a society that attacks and fights religion, then you will follow the Jacobin model, which closed churches and killed thousands of priests, then choose secularism according to the Jacobin revolution. It does not seem that these people want this option because it would be madness. This is the extreme option. France itself, with the secularism law of 1905, overturned this approach and softened the stance a lot, but it remains the country with the strictest secularism in the world. Italy, Germany, England, Greece, Spain and dozens of other countries have other variants of secularism, they have a variant where the church, mosque or faith are not private matters, but are present in society and the state takes care that people's religious freedoms are not affected, and even takes care to protect and guarantee them. The USA has an even broader model. In the USA, where the word "secularism" does not exist at all (which is actually nowhere to be found in the Anglo-Saxon world), Thomas Jefferson's phrase "wall of separation" is used. In a letter he sent to the residents of Connecticut (Countess Dunbury) in the 1800 elections, he said that he would erect a wall of separation between the state and the church so that the state would never cross it, but the church would speak and ask the state for a lot when it sees that it is not where it should be. So the church, he said, will climb over this wall and speak to it and even shout at the state. This tradition is still strong today, as strong as religion, religious belief, is found everywhere.
We will cite just one case for illustration. In the case of Sherbert v. Verner (1963), where a woman was denied unemployment benefits because she refused to work on Saturday because of her religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled that religious freedom is protected against laws that hinder religious practice. So religious freedom prevails. Like this decision are many, many others such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993), Employment Division v. Smith (1990). So much for secularism.
On the other hand, you cannot be a journalist, professor or whatever who thinks that Kosovo or Albania, your dear homeland, considers the faith of the majority of your people a faith without culture, non-Western, lower than another faith or a faith that comes from the occupier. We are not mentioning those who say that if you are not Christian you are not Albanian at all, those few drowned in racism because this is sheer cowardice. A patriot, a patriot would not act like this. A patriot does not love, has no love for the mountains and the land, for the rain or the clouds, for the streams and the forests, for the bushes or the fields. A patriot is one who loves the people, his people, the graves and the memories, the sacrifices, the soul of the people of his country. How can you speak like this in an Islamophobic tone and language when you are a patriot? There are no patriots led by racism. Racism is against everyone, even against those who are racist themselves. They themselves are burned, consumed by the fever of racism, suffering and alienated by it.
These are elementary things resolved in time by the world. It is a black page that we have such a mediocre, so banal category that has somehow occupied public spaces. Our best imams and priests in history have spoken with one language when it comes to respect for religion and religious freedoms. They have been killed alongside each other, they have sacrificed alongside each other. Islam and Christianity are two religions of Albanians and if you insult them, if you limit the freedoms of living according to faith, you are simply ignorant or anti-Albanian or both.
