Sunday, March 1st 2026
Islamophobia is an evil, 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, he makes a short circuit (which, as happens in the physics of electricity, makes mass and burns the circuit) due to powerlessness 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 these “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 racism in every direction.
In Kosovo (in Albania this appears more faintly in public spaces obviously, but it exists), Islamophobia has long been widespread and has taken place in public spaces. Journalists, professors, academics, etc., come out from time to time and talk about Kosovo as a secular state which 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 the invaders, they talk about Christianity as a higher and more western religion, they talk about the call to prayer or against girls wearing headscarves in schools, they talk about Islam as a religion from which it can be born, according to theirs, terrorism, etc.
It is more or less a Pavlovian behavior that often appears as soon as something related to Islam comes out. In one case a few years ago, when the father of the national football player Mërgim Mavraj was being escorted to the next world, they saw the coffin covered with the prostration with which he prayed while alive and ran to say that he is being buried with the ISIS flag. The same thing happens every year when it is the month of Ramadan. They talk worriedly that people massively fast and close shops during the day, or that an atmosphere is created to a certain extent religious. This year it started because of the school schedule, which was changed so that people at iftar time are at home. Some people from the media, public life or even professors talk about the violation of secularism, they 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 the liberation from Serbia, where the country has become a free and democratic state, there are these damned totalitarian, exclusionary, racist mindsets.
It is surprising how there are journalists and university professors who fail to understand, who are so mediocre, who in many cases are 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, in the West and eastern, in peaceful and terrorist. Religions are religions, they are a deep and inseparable part of how the identity of many people and society is built. That being the case, societies choose not to vilify any religion as evil in itself (when individuals of a faith do stupid things is another matter. They should be vilified, but not the religion).
How could they never understand that there are no inferior cultures and no superior cultures. What kind of journalists or what professors (there have been academic titles who have said such nonsense) are these who, it seems, have 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 universities of this world have over time eliminated theses on inferior cultures and superior cultures, on good religions and bad religions, on Western religions or Eastern religions, on “autochthonous” religions or religions of the conquerors, on cultured religions and anti-culture religions. These are anachronisms, these are ridiculous. These are trumpeted today only by the 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 like 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 exists in an interval that has no exact boundaries. If you intend 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 the churches and killed thousands of priests, then choose secularism according to the Jacobin revolution. But it doesn’t seem that they want this option, because it would be crazy. This is the extreme variant. France itself, with the law on secularism of 1905, overthrew this approach and greatly softened the attitude, 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 of them. protect and guarantee them.
The USA has an even wider model. In the USA, where the word “secularity” does not exist at all (which is actually not found anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world), Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “separation wall” is used. He, in a letter that he sent to the people of Connecticut (Dunbury County) in the election of 1800, said that he would erect a dividing wall between the state and the church so that the state would never cross it, but the church would speak and ask a lot of the state when it saw that it was not where it should be. So the church, he said, will climb over this wall and speak and even shout at the state. This tradition is strong even today, as strong as religion, religious belief, is found everywhere.
We are mentioning only 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 belief, the Supreme Court held that religious freedom is protected against laws that impede religious practice. So religious freedom prevails. Like this decision, there 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 can’t 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 conqueror. We are not mentioning those who say that if you are not Christian, you are not Albanian at all, those few eyes drowned in racism, that this is nonsense.
A patriot, a patriot would not act like this. A patriot does not love, has no love for mountains and earth, for rain or clouds, for streams and forests, for bushes or for nuts. A patriot is one who loves people, his people, the graves and memories, the sacrifices, the spirit of the people of his country. How can you talk like this with an Islamophobic tone and language when you are a patriot? There are no patriots driven by racism. Racism is against everyone, even against those who are racist themselves. Even they themselves burn, shrivel under the fever of racism, suffer and become alienated by it.
These are elementary things solved by the world over time. It is the black page that we have such a mediocre, so banal category that has somehow occupied the public spaces.
Our best patriarchs and priests in history have spoken with one language when it comes to respect for religion and religious freedoms. They were killed in each other’s arms, they sacrificed in each other’s arms.
Islam and Christianity are two religions of Albanians and you insulted them, you were limiting the freedoms of living according to faith, you are simply ignorant or anti-Albanian, or both.
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Source: prizrenpost
