‘Let’s Just Be Albanians’: A New Movement In Kosovo Calls On Muslims To Abandon Islam

PRISTINA — Vesel Lekaj insists that he and his provocatively named Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith don’t oppose the religion’s adherents. After all, he says, he and many of its other initiators are from Muslim families.

The real target, he told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, is the religious extremism in any form that “has been operating in Kosovo for more than two decades.”

“We, as a sign of dissatisfaction with this phenomenon — that is, extreme and political Islam, but also with Serbian Orthodox extremism — have taken a measure…[with the aim] of stopping it,” Lekaj told a meeting last month of the movement’s founding council in the town of Decan, in Kosovo’s mountainous west.

While there has been indignation from the local Islamic community council, and an otherwise muted public response in this overwhelmingly Muslim country, it is hard to know if Lekaj should be taken at his word.

District prosecutors have launched an investigation to determine whether Lekaj and others involved with the group have committed the crime of incitement to hatred or religious intolerance. “All those statements are being analyzed,” said Shkodran Nikci, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Peja, which has jurisdiction over Decan. “So [we’re investigating] what their aim is and, at the same time, whether there are elements of a criminal offense in their content.”

Article 141 of Kosovo’s Criminal Code, adopted in 2019, allows for fines and up to five years in prison for anyone who “spreads hatred, discord, and intolerance” on religious or other grounds in a “manner that is likely to disturb the public order.”

At its inaugural meeting on October 20, the group gathered under the slogan, “Let’s Just Be Albanians.” An Albanian TV reporter described the three dozen or so supporters — all of them men — as “personalities from different fields from all over Kosovo.”

One of the speakers called the movement an effort to stop those who embrace “anti-national values.” Albanians’ only true religion, other speakers suggested, was “Albanianism.”

Speaking to RFE/RL, Lekaj declined to say who he believed was guilty of “Islamic religious extremism” or its Orthodox analogue. He said the movement was still in its consultative phase and had not yet established a platform.

‘Finished’ With Islam

Kosovo’s population of around 2 million people is thought to be about 93 percent ethnic Albanian, an overwhelming majority of whom are Muslim, along with a small number of Bosniaks and ethnic Turks. There are also around 100,000 ethnic Serbs, most of whom are Orthodox Christians concentrated in the north and south of the country.

Lekaj describes himself and some of his nascent movement’s founders as former Muslims who have “finished” with Islam. “We are no longer on that path, and we should talk [openly] about it,” he said.

The local Muslim community in Decan reacted angrily as news spread of the founding council of the Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith. The Islamic Community of Kosovo (KBI) in Decan expressed “deep indignation” and accused the group’s founders of having “no good intentions for our society.” It called them agents of “divisive elements” and accused them of inciting “interreligious hatred, as well as religious and human intolerance.”

KBI cited centuries of painful history but said Decan was “known for unification and nondisruption,” adding bluntly, “Stop whining.” In some Muslim countries, apostasy can be punished by death, although legal executions are very rare. Islamic scholars frequently disagree over what constitutes the abandonment of Islamic faith in thought, words, and deeds.

Kosovar Grand Mufti Naim Ternava called the movement’s initiators “remnants of the communist-atheist system” that dominated then-Yugoslavia and most of the eastern bloc in the Soviet era. He argued that the Islamic community had contributed to Kosovo’s war of independence from the “Serbian regime in the 1990s” and provided a “purpose for patriotism.”

Lekaj responds casually to prosecutors’ investigation of his movement’s activities, saying it was “normal” and pledged to cooperate if he or others are invited for questioning. “We are a secular state, we’re not an Islamic state nor a theocracy,” he said. “We stand by our words in the voluntary statements we made.”

‘Tragicomic Situation’

Legal and sociological experts in Kosovo interviewed by RFE/RL’s Balkan Service suggested the movement’s proclamations so far were likely to be protected by the constitutional right to free speech.

Ehat Miftaraj, executive director of the nongovernmental Kosovo Law Institute, said that while it’s difficult to recognize motives without knowing more about the founders’ backgrounds, “based on what we’ve heard and seen, I doubt whether this can be considered hate speech.”

Ismail Hasani, a sociologist of religion in Pristina, says religious choice is everyone’s right but called the movement’s initiative on abandoning Islam “a tragicomic situation.” He says he doesn’t think that the Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith is serious. “What might be hidden behind it? Absolutely nothing,” Hasani said, “specifically because it’s a group of people who — frustrated by the situation, dissatisfied with the general societal trends…with the fundamental values of human society — issue an invitation that really has no meaning.”

Hasani also wonders aloud about the investigation into the group. “Ultimately, this is not a movement against religion. It’s not a movement against Islam either, because all those [organizers] — at least the ones I know, I think the majority of them — have a familial background in the Islamic faith.”

The U.S. State Department’s most recent report on religious freedom cited the Kosovar Constitution’s prohibition on religion-based discrimination and guarantee of religious freedom. But it prodded Pristina over enforcement and noted that laws still had not been passed in Kosovo to allow religious groups to acquire legal status, creating obstacles to their effective functioning.

Written by Andy Heil based on reporting by Bekim Bislimi of RFE/RL’s Balkan Service