In the courtyard of the pedagogical school “Pandeli Sotiri”, the physics teacher, Etleva, whose last name has already left my memory, once competently explained to a colleague the difference between the term Muslim and Islamic, commenting on a couple of young Muslims who were passing in front of the school, he a bearded man in shorts and she in black. It took me more than two decades to hear this term again in an Arbana Osman interview with Ben Blushi, where they casually discussed the differences between a Muslim and an Islamist. Blushi uses this term constantly on Facebook as well.<\/p>\n
From what I remember from teacher Etleva and what I understand from Blushi’s explanation, an Islamic is any Muslim believer who, if I can quote Alban Dudushi, “has foreign apparitions”. Dudushi says this in an early Top Story I’ve never forgotten, talking about the ankle-length pants and unconventional beards of some Muslim believers. This also includes unconventional public behavior, as Blushi mentions, for example, not naked on the beach. So, basically, an Islamist is a necessarily extremist Muslim who disrupts the visual comfort of others.<\/p>\n
It is intriguing the fact that this term entered the Albanian language to denote Muslim believers. My theory is this: The term Islamic is normally found in phrases such as: Islamic militant, Islamic extremist and Islamic terrorist. Therefore, as Benjamin has become Ben, the Islamic militant or extremist has been shortened to Islamic.<\/p>\n
It is worth noting that the quality Islamic is not a distortion of the term Islamist, but a fresh neologism. Although a subdivision derived externally from Western Orientalism, the term Islamist, denoting someone who sees Islam not only as a religion of the private sphere but also as a public one, has a clearly defined meaning and neutral linguistic usage according to that meaning.<\/p>\n
While the term “Islamic” is used only with a negative connotation. Detached from the names it describes, the Islamist continues to carry the burden of meaning on his shoulders, thus implying that he is aesthetically foreign, fanatical in belief, and potentially violent. So, essentially Islamic is a euphemism for the word extremist.<\/p>\n
We, Albanians, have a certain tradition of religiously identifying others with nicknames such as Turkish and Kaur. Although these terms may have been conceived in hostile contexts and have a certain negative charge, they identify a whole community facing each other, without claims to divide or reorganize it. The Islamic term works differently. It is not used to exclude Muslims as a community as a whole, but to divide them among themselves, producing an internal moral hierarchy: some are “acceptable Muslims”, others “Islamic” – i.e. problematic, redundant, or undesirable.<\/p>\n
In this sense, the distinction is not merely terminological, but structural. While Turk and Kauri marked a dividing line between communities, Islamic serves to fragment a single community, exposing it to constant judgment, discipline and humiliation from outside.<\/p>\n
Using two names for the same community is a well-known mechanism, dividing it into two, where one term serves to identify the “acceptable”, while the other to stigmatize the “unacceptable”. The Serbs divide us into “Albanci” and “\u0160iptari”. We also divide the Serbs into “Serbs” and “Shkies”. Even within the country, during the communist regime, the same function was performed by labels such as “Anatolian” or “Turkish”, which aimed to present a part of Albanians as culturally inferior and foreign to the national identity.<\/p>\n
This division is not simply a terminological one, but a moral hierarchy hidden in language.<\/p>\n
The same logic is reproduced by the Islamic quality in the discourse towards Muslims. The term Muslim is reserved for the soft, invisible figure, acceptable to the eyes of the cultural majority, while Islamic is used as a label for those who differ in appearance, practice or attitudes – that is, for Muslims who “we don’t like”. So, as a moral nickname, with an exclusionary and denigrating function.<\/p>\n
The quality “Islamic”, apparently due to the natural carelessness of the interview of Arbana and Blush, has become part of the jargon of the Albanian political-cultural elite. This elite, mostly indifferent about the Islamic religion, and in the role of the Euro-Atlantic cultural colonizer, has given itself the powers to classify the followers of Islam in Albania into acceptable and unacceptable based on mainly aesthetic criteria.<\/p>\n
We who have been visually distinct Muslim believers after September 11, 2001, remember with hilarity the arsenal of insults that came from the streets of the city such as: taliban, binland and the like. Some stereotypes such as: bearded, radicals, fanatics, continue to circulate in the public comments of online platforms. Unlike these ordinary insults, it seems that a part of the cultural elite has chosen the Islamic name to express its contempt for a part of the Muslim community, a seemingly more sophisticated term, but in essence, more culturally and politically harmful.<\/p>\n
Normalizing such humiliating terms for Muslims is epic irresponsibility, which plants and crystallizes in the consciousness of Albanian citizens the idea that it is normal look askance or, worse than that, discriminate against other citizens who look or behave differently for religious reasons. This is explained more clearly by the Albanian expert on Islamophobia, Enes Neza, when he says:<\/p>\n
The normalization of this Islamophobic discourse directly influences the shaping of prejudices and the reinforcement of negative perceptions towards Islam and Muslims in the rest of society. And this normalization comes at a high cost for the rights and freedoms of Muslims, because it creates a climate where the language of hatred and discrimination is legitimized and seems acceptable.<\/p>\n
Faced with this fact, it is right that the use of such discriminatory epithets is not normalized in our society, because precisely their normalization has the potential to produce prejudice, marginalization and violence.<\/p>\n
Those who unconsciously have it made this term part of their vocabulary, it is time to delete it from there together with the already discredited idea of potential violence that can come to them from the Muslim believer. This idea was conceived and served brilliantly for the occupation and desecration of many Muslim countries with catastrophic consequences for civilians, but it has already found its final place in the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n
While Blushi himself does not expect any serious reflection on the language and divisions it produces. He has been consistent in his anti-Muslimism as well. His insistence on using the term “Islamic” as a derogatory label, dividing Muslims into acceptable and unacceptable, as well as positioning himself as the arbiter of this division, are not accidental slips, but part of his provocative marketing strategy to attract attention and promote his latest book, the title of which should have been, more representatively, “I am Islamic”.<\/p>\n
Taken from paspaje.com with permission of the author<\/p>\n
We use cookies to improve the experience and to display ads (Google AdSense).
\n By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the use of cookies according to
\n Privacy Policy
\n and
\n Cookies Policy.
\n You can reject non-necessary cookies by clicking “Reject”.<\/p>\n
Source: prizrenpost<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the courtyard of the pedagogical school “Pandeli Sotiri”, the physics teacher, Etleva, whose last name has already left my memory, once competently explained to a colleague the difference between the term Muslim and Islamic, commenting on a couple of young Muslims who were passing in front of the school, he a bearded man in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinions"],"views":15,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}