Behind the veil

The Albanian case is unique. When the independence of this young European country was again recognized by the international community in 1920, ¹ Islam was the religion of the majority of the population (around 70 per cent of an estimated 800,000 inhabitants). Albania was thus the only predominantly Muslim European state. Unlike the majority of Muslims in Western Europe, Albanian Muslims were neither immigrants nor recent converts to Islam. Nor did they form a “surviving minority,” ² as was the case with Muslim groups living in other Balkan countries; rather we could say that they made up a “surviving majority.” One of the components of the national identity-building process had been to legitimize the existence of a sovereign nation, even if predominantly Muslim, in Europe, in the case of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. ³