Altin Raxhimi November 30, 201017:14 A Turkish brand of Islam now dominates the country’s religious institutions, as local Muslims struggle to find their own spiritual path. This article is also available in: Bos/Hrv/Srp 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.
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