Gulen Schools in Kosovo

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed an audience in Prizren during an official visit to Kosovo in October 2013: “We all belong to a common history, common culture, common civilization. We are the people who are brethren of that structure. Do not forget, Turkey is Kosovo, Kosovo is Turkey!”

Turkey’s foreign policy in the Balkans promotes a neo-Ottoman agenda, aimed at expanding its influence in former territories of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey exports Islamism under the guise of cultural cooperation. It also seeks economic advantage, using business as leverage to consolidate its national interests.

The Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA) is a vehicle through which Turkey advances its ideological agenda. TIKA is the vanguard of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which supports Muslim Brotherhood chapters around the world. TIKA runs a parallel and complementary foreign policy to official state institutions, coordinating with Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and the Presidency of Religious Affairs to promote the AKP’s Islamist agenda.

TIKA operates like a social welfare agency. In Kosovo, it supports more than 400 projects in the fields of agriculture, health and education. Affordable health care is offered in Kosovo at Turkish-run hospitals and clinics, sponsored by TIKA.

Despite its extensive activities, Zeri reports that the Central Bank of Kosovo has logged only 2.7 million Euros transferred by TIKA to its Kosovo account between 2009 and 2014. TIKA transfers most funds in cash with no official record. It does not want to draw attention to its activities.

Most TIKA funds are used to restore Ottoman monuments and build mosques. For example, TIKA supported restoration of the Sultan Murat Tomb in Kosovo. It rebuilt Ottoman religious sites like the Fatih Mosque and the Sinan Pasha Mosque, which cost 1.2 million Euros. Since 2011, TIKA has restored approximately 30 religious structures from the Ottoman period and 20 new mosques across Kosovo. Erdogan personally pledged funds to build the country’s biggest mosque in Pristina.

In addition, TIKA supports regional Islamic unions and institutions. It subsidizes community based social mobilization projects, which promote Islam. TIKA’s network of Muslim community leaders and imams, which includes imams from Turkey, actively promotes Islam. Its benevolence includes food for the Iftar meal during Ramadan, delivered to impressionable Kosovars in poor rural areas. 

TIKA also sponsors schools in Pristina, Prizren, Gjakova, and Peja. Some schools provide Qur’anic instruction, as well as Turkish language instruction. As many as 20,000 Turks reside in Kosovo, where Turkish is an official language. The Turkish Embassy in Pristina awards 100 scholarships for Kosovars to study in Turkey each year.

But not all schools supported by TIKA are part of the formal education sector. Some function like madrassas, offering Islamic education, thereby contributing to the radicalization of Kosovar youth. The Government of Kosovo acknowledges that more than 300 Kosovars have joined the Islamic State in Syria. The figure dates back a couple of years. Today’s number may be much higher.

Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Centers are also vehicles for Turkish influence. According to its charter, Yunus Emre Centers “provide services abroad to people who want to have education in the fields of Turkish language, culture and art, to improve the friendship between Turkey and other countries.” 

Support for educational institutions is a propaganda tool to foster a positive impression of Turkey among Kosovars. Turkey’s Minister of Education visited Kosovo and publicly asked Kosovo institutions to change history texts in order to portray Ottomans as liberators, rather than as occupants and aggressors.

Erdogan asked the Government of Kosovo to close schools established by Fetullah Gulen, with whom he had a falling out. Kosovo officials acquiesced, though Gulen schools offered quality education to Kosovars.

Turkish businessmen also benefit from Turkey’s aggressive religious and cultural promotion. A well-respected Turkish scholar asks of the AKP, “Are they Islamists or just thieves with a religious rhetoric?”

Turkey is Kosovo’s largest trading partner, after Serbia. The trade volume between Turkey and Kosovo was 206.5 million Euros in 2012. (Export to Kosovo was 199.5 million Euros; import from Kosovo only 7 million Euro). Trade volume slightly decreased in 2013-14 due to an economic slowdown in the region. 

Tenders for some of the biggest public projects in Kosovo have been won by Turkish companies. The Limak Holding Company won the concession to manage the Pristina International Airport. The Çalık-Limak Consortium also acquired the Kosovo Energy Distribution Services. Limak pledged to invest 300 million Euros in the transmission system, but its investment still has not materialized.

The Merdare-Morina highway connecting Kosovo to Albania was built by the Turkish construction company, Enka, in consortium with Bechtel. The enka-Bechtel joint venture just started construction of the Pristina-Hani Elezit highway between Kosovo and Macedonia.

The award of tenders may be subject to political influence. Çalik and Limak are politically well-connected. Erdogan’s son-in-law was the chief executive officer of Çalık Holdings.

The Turkish banking system dominates the financial sector in Kosovo. A majority of Kosovo’s major banks are Turkish, including the Turkish Economic Bank (TEB).

More than 900 Turkish companies operate in Kosovo. About 7,000 Kosovars are employed by Turkish companies in, for example, the food processing and textile sectors. It is hard to be accepted or keep a job in a business where the owner is Turkish if you don’t speak Turkish.

Kadri Veseli, a prominent Kosovo politician, was a former critic of Turkish concerns acquiring Kosovo state enterprises. Veseli bemoaned Turkey’s penetration as bad for both Kosovo’s economy and its EU aspirations.

Since becoming Speaker of Kosovo’s Parliament, however, Vaseli has not said a word about Turkey’s economic dominance. He and other prominent Kosovo politicians, including Foreign Minister Hashim Thaci, have close ties to Erdogan, as well as Turkish business and political leaders.

Turkey has cemented its influence through security cooperation. Around 2,000 Turkish soldiers were deployed as part of the KFOR peacekeeping mission in 1999. There are still 350 Turkish soldiers in Pristina and Prizren. Turkey has indicated its willingness to assume control of Bondsteel, the US base in Kosovo, as US forces withdraw.

Turkey has also shown itself a reliable political partner. Ankara was reluctant to endorse Kosovo’s independence, lest a parallel be drawn with its Kurdish minority. However, Turkey was one of the first countries to recognize Kosovo when it declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s notion of “strategic depth” views Turkey as a regional power and an alternative to the EU for countries like Kosovo. Muslim solidarity is the centerpiece of Davutoğlu’s strategy to expand Turkey’s influence.

Davutoğlu explicitly linked Turkey’s foreign policy to its Ottoman legacy during a trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2009. “The Ottoman centuries of the Balkans were a success story. Now we have to reinvent this.” He announced, “Turkey is back.”

Faster integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions is the best antidote to Turkey’s influence in Kosovo and the Western Balkans. US interests would also be served through intensified engagement in the region.

Closer cooperation between the US and Kosovo would be a bulwark against Turkey’s export of Islamism. It would also prevent the further radicalization of Kosovo society, staunching the flow of Kosovars to join ISIS.

Mr. Phillips is Director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. He served as a Senior Adviser and Foreign Affairs Experts to the US Department of State during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Phillips is author of “Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and US Intervention” (Kennedy School at Harvard University and NBC Publishing).

Gulen Schools of Albania, once a part of the Ottoman Empire

Bos/Hrv/Srp 01 Dec 2010 / 07:10

Albanian Muslims Grapple with Religious Identity

A Turkish brand of Islam now dominates the country’s religious institutions, as local Muslims struggle to find their own spiritual path.

By Altin Raxhimi Tirana

Bamir Topi, the president of Albania, is caught unwittingly on film as he, like any other theatre goer, settles into his seat and looks around to see who else has come to watch the show at Tirana’s main concert hall.

Agron Hoxha fast-forwards the unedited video. The footage shows the host, a prominent local actress of Orthodox Christian origin, as she recites verses by Muslim mystic Rumi and passages from the Koran. She introduces the artists on the stage to a full audience at the capital’s Palace of Congresses.

Tenors and sopranos and mezzos and contraltos chant ilahis, the Muslim answer to Georgian chants, backed by the strings of the Albanian State TV Orchestra.

“The Arabs do not like this,” Hoxha, the public relations chief of the Muslim Community of Albania, MCA, says of the ilahis and the glittery show.

The ‘Arabs’ Hoxha refers to are actually Albanian Muslims; they are believers who embraced forms of Islam that were heavily influenced by some Arab schools of thought after the collapse of communism in the 1990s.

Atheist under communism

Albania was strictly atheist under the Stalinist regime that was in place for the second half of the 20th century. When communism collapsed, overseas Islamic charities came, largely from the Arab peninsula and north-eastern Africa, to assist the Muslim community.

These foreign Islamic groups were the main financial backers for the resurgent MCA, the official organisation that runs Islamic affairs in the country. Albania’s Islamic community was starved of funds and poorly organised, as public worship was outlawed under communism.

Secret worship under communism

Enver Hoxha, the hardline communist leader who ruled Albania for much of the second half of the 20th century, imposed a ban on religion and, in 1976, declared Albania the first atheist state in the world. All forms of religious worship were banned and criminalized. Some believers – of all faiths – practised their religion in secret. Tahir Zenelhasani, now an Islamic educator in Albania, recalls how, during one Ramadan in the late 70s, his father was checked on by three party executives to see if he was fasting. They placed coffee and cigarettes in front of him. His father’s fasting was an open secret in their village, Zenelhasani says. However, one of those supposed to find out whether he was practicing religion had quietly entered his office earlier, drank the coffee and stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray, so protecting Zenelhasani’s father. The ban of religion was lifted when communism collapsed in 1990. The current conflict between the older generation, who secretly practised Ottoman Islam, and younger people, influenced by ‘Arab’ schools of Islam, has been compounded by the absence of significant number of believers among the generation in between, and of home-grown religious leaders - a direct result of imposed atheism.

Seventy per cent of Albania’s 3m population are of Muslim origin, but the number of practicing believers is much smaller. The younger generation discovering religion for the first time after communism, did so via schools and mosques established by foreign, often Arabic, charities.

Up until 2001, Arab and north-east African Islamic organisations funded and ran all but one of the country’s madrasas – schools that provide religious instruction – and built about 400 mosques.

Albanian followers of largely Arabic schools of Islamic thought – including Wahhabism and Salafism - were criticised by fellow Muslims, who found these ‘imported’ brands of Islam culturally alien.

Others were suspicious of so-called Arab groups whose interpretation of Islam was highly controversial in their home states.

Some believe ‘the Arabs’ brought in a strict, intolerant brand of Islam influenced by Arab countries where Christian minorities were virtually inexistent, such as Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Conflicts arose between opposing factions, young ‘Arabs’ who come of age during the nineties found themselves at odds with their elders, many of whom had secretly practised Ottoman Islam under communism.

Differences in prayer styles, whether joined hands should be placed above or below the navel, became the subject of fierce debate. Other disputes included whether to allow marriage between first cousins, banned by Albanian law and among Ottoman Muslims but permitted in many foreign countries.

“At some point in the early 90s, everyone (young Albanian Muslim believers) went through a Salafi stage,” remarks an imam in Tirana, who prefers not to be identified.

During that period, at least 500 Albanians studied theology in Saudi Arabia who then returned to Albania, a country with just 570 mosques, say sources within the Muslim community.

These Arab-influenced followers are easily identifiable: bearded sombre men, initially wearing pants ending above their ankles, huddling in specific jam-packed mosques in Albania’s capital Tirana.

They dislike ‘the Turk’, who they regard as lax and ignorant in religious practice, believing them to adhere to traditions contrary to Islam. They regard the MCA as corrupt and inept.

‘Turk-Arab’ stand off

A group of ‘Arabs’ defied the MCA last March by creating its own official organisation - the League of Albanian Imams. The split was a result of an old stand-off between them and MCA officials.

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on America, the government was forced to examine the background of foreign Islamic charities operating in the country. Some appeared on US and UN lists of organisations suspected of having links to, or funding, terrorist groups. These were closed down or expelled from Albania.

Other groups, some of whom were not on the US or UN lists, chose to leave voluntarily.

“The Arab charities responded to emergencies,” says Tahir Zenelhasani, who runs an Islamic cultural centre in Tirana which draws funding from Arab and Turkish sources.

“When the environment here became unfriendly, they felt it was better to pull out. The Turkish approach was more institutional. They clearly know how to manage.”

Islamic traditions

Called Madhhabs in Arabic and Islamic scholarship, different Islamic traditions developed, interpreting Islamic law differently. There are four main schools of thought. The largest school, the Hanafi, was predominant in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. The Islamic communities in the Balkans and in Turkey have, by and large, adopted it as their official school. The Hanbali school, prevalent in Saudi Arabia, has some praying differences with the Hanafi, school, which had caused problems between youths and traditionalists in Albania. Most Salafi movements follow the Hanbali legal school, as does Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s brand of Islam. “There was more stress on form in the 90s,” says Roald Hysa, a believer who prays the traditional Hanafi way; hands held together under the navel, kneeling and with the feet kept open at the width of the shoulders. The Shafi school, predominant in parts of Egypt, was also brought to Albania by some Egyptian missionaries in the 90s. Maliki legal interpretation is prevalent in Northern Africa and some parts of the Arab peninsula, but its presence in Albania has been relatively small.

While Arab organizations propped up the cash-starved resurgent Islamic community in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism, Turkish religious doctrines have gained favour since.

Turkish Islam is regarded as culturally more in step with Albania’s Muslims and less vulnerable to radicalized religious interpretation.

Private Islamic Turkish charities established religious and non-religious schools in Albania which have become known for good discipline and high academic standards. Diyanet, the Turkish state’s Muslim affairs department, has representatives in the country who are working with Albanian officials and institutions.

“The battle within the Muslim Community has always been between a pro-Arab faction and a pro-Turk faction,” says Pirro Misha, a Tirana-based secular intellectual who monitors religious developments in the country. “It seems now that the Turkish faction is winning decisively.”

Albania’s European ambitions

While Misha has fiercely criticised the more radical expressions of religion by some of ‘the Arabs’, he is worried that the new Turkish influence might just be one element of Ankara’s increasing political and economic ambitions in the region.

“That might damage the European aspirations of the Balkans,” he says.

None but one of the current 30 members of the MCA administration have studied in Arab countries, a reversed ratio compared to ten years ago. Its three-story headquarters was renovated with a 300,000 euro grant from Turkish government’s aid branch TIKA.

A dozen Albanians study theology in Turkey every year now, and Albanian believers have asked the Diyanet, to arrange their hajj – something that was managed by Arab charities and organisations in the past.

Problems have emerged, however. When SEMA, the religious foundation run by the Turkish Gulen movement, took over the madrasa of Tirana, for example, it imposed intensive Turkish language courses.

Zenelhasani’s association complained these language classes put extra pressure on students already following study programmes crammed with Arabic lessons and religious instruction, in addition to the ordinary school curriculum.

Named after its founder, the 69-year-old Anatolian preacher Fetullah Gulen, the Gulen Movement is one of the most important religious groups in Turkey. It has a controlling interest in the country’s largest newspaper Zaman. Its followers are strongly represented within Turkey’s political administration and business elite.The Gulen Movement has expanded internationally by building educational systems. Supporters say its stress on education and moderate practices, that emphasise incorporating secular values into Islamic worship, makes it ‘friendlier’ to the West. Gulen’s vehement condemnation of any form of terrorism or violent protest has also earned him many western allies.

Critics, however, say the Gulen Movement is simply a carefully marketed form of Islam that is superficial and presents a romantic view of the Ottoman Empire.Neo-Ottomanism

This is a view echoed by those who distrust Turkey’s renewed influence in the country - Albania came under direct Ottoman rule for 500 years until the 1912-13 Balkan Wars - as neo-Ottomanism. They believe Turkey merely wishes to expand its influence in former territories of the Ottoman Empire.

In Albania, the Gulen movement has built a chain of non-religious schools, from nursery to university level, which are run by a non-religious foundation. The madrasas are run by the movement’s religious foundation in Albania, Sema.
Five out of seven of Albania’s madrasas are now under Sema’s management. One has been given to another Turkish group, Istanbul Vakfi of Sufi sheikh Osman Nuri Topbas. Another, a madrasa for girls in the second largest city of Durres, is run by the Qatar Foundation.‘The Turk’, the Albanian believer influenced by Turkish Islam, is most often a youth who has studied at Gulen schools in Albania. Typically, he is a clean-shaven, courteous, jacket-and-pants wearing ‘ordinary guy’ who is integrated in society. He will be a non-drinking Muslim, but would not object to hanging out with bon viveurs at alcohol-serving bars.

The Turkish groups playing a role now, like the Gulen movement, are modern schools of thought that did not exist when Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire. Such movements emerged as Turkey sought to accommodate religious worship within a fiercely secular state, supported by the political class loyal to the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.This renewed religious influence is, of course, understandable. The Ottomans, current-day Turks, brought Islam to Albania and elsewhere in the Balkans, when they ruled an empire that stretched from Iran to the Hungarian plains in central Europe and north-eastern Africa.

On the balcony of a bar in a western suburb of Tirana, the Saudi-trained theologian Justinian Topulli acknowledges there was intolerance in the past, but stresses that the so-called ‘Arab’ faction has mellowed.

“I have friends who think of the stupidities they made back then and laugh in shame,” says Topulli, a 27-year-old father of two with a degree from the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia.

A six-angled star, an ornament that looked like the Star of David, was mysteriously erased from the oldest mosque in Tirana. A group of teenagers studying at a Sudanese-funded madrasa in Cerrik in the mid-90s had scratched Allah is Great across 17th century frescoes in Christian Orthodox churches.

The Sudanese foundation was expelled from the country for inciting religious intolerance among the students, and the madrasa was promptly given to Gulen’s Sema foundation.

‘Arabs’ marginalised

Long-bearded Topulli is one of the founders of the League of Albanian Imams. He says it was created as a reaction to what he believes is the degradation of the image of Albania’s Islamic community.

He is concerned that ‘Arab’ Albanian Muslims have been excluded from the debate, and wants the Islamic community to make room for other views on prayers styles, how to determine the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan and the celebration of Eid al-Fitr.

“We don’t want to impose our own [views], but we want to have our ideas included in the public discourse,” says Topulli.

What the ‘Arabs’ have “is mostly a problem of access,” says Besnik Sinani, who has studied the Islamic communities in Albania for his degree at New York University in the US.

“There will be [problems] if groups like the League of Imams do not have a voice in Muslim affairs,” he warns.

Olsi Jazexhi, a Toronto-based commentator on Islam and nationalism in Albania, calls “the Arabs” the “penniless ones”, who must be reintegrated within the mainstream Islamic community in Albania.

  However, Genti Kruja, a senior MCA official, denies that so-called ‘Arabs’ have been excluded. “No one denies Arab-trained clergy access,” he says. “They run Albania’s most important mosques and many of the regional departments.”

The Turkish influence is definitely on the increase, while the so-called Arab one is on the wane. But many see the infighting within Albania’s Muslim community as a straightforward power struggle. The pro-Turk faction is criticised for describing the ‘Arabs’ in terms that imply support for extremism and even terrorism.

The presence of the Albanian president at the ilahi concert this year, sponsored by SEMA and the MCA, demonstrates the government’s active support for Turkish schools of Islam.

At the end of the concert, the MCA’s public relations chief – who is also a product of the Gulen education system - can be seen, along with some stage performers, thanking Topi for attending.

While official support for Turkish Islam may be politically expedient for Albania’s leadership, the MCA is fighting to maintain, even gain, credibility among its believers. Albania’s Muslims are still searching for their own religious path.

“We want an Albanian Islam,” says Ramiz Zekaj of the Albanian Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization, a Tirana-based think tank. “We cannot have one if we don’t even control our own educational institutions.”
This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence's Alumni Initiative, established and funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation.
Albania   (see also Kosovo below)
Epoka University, Tirana    http://www.epoka.edu.al/new/

Organization: Turgut Ozal Education Company    http://www.turgutozal.edu.al/
Turgut Özal  kindergarten, primary and secondary school, high school, TiranaTurgut Özal College, kindergarten, primary, secondary and high school, Durres
Memorial International School of Tirana (secondary and high school)  http://www.mistedu.com/