Albania

Albania holds two records that sit oddly together: it is the only country in Europe with a Muslim majority, and it is among the least religiously observant societies on the continent. Both are products of the same history.

The territory was Christian, divided between the Latin north and the Orthodox south along the old imperial line, and became largely Muslim under Ottoman rule over several centuries. Conversion here was unusually thorough and unusually shallow at the same time. It brought fiscal and legal advantages, it proceeded gradually, and it left a population where confessional boundaries ran through villages and sometimes through families, with a well documented practice of crypto Christianity and of households maintaining observances on both sides.

Out of that came a national self understanding, formulated during the nineteenth century awakening and usually summarised in Pashko Vasa's line that the religion of Albanians is Albanianism. The point of it was political: a people divided among three confessions could only assert itself as a nation if the confessions were subordinated to it. That formula was available for the communist state to weaponise later.

Sunni Islam is the largest affiliation, followed by Catholicism concentrated in the north around Shkoder and Orthodoxy in the south. Albania is also the world headquarters of the Bektashi order, a Sufi tradition with distinctive doctrine and a heterodox reputation, which relocated to Tirana in 1925 after the Turkish republic closed the tekkes. It is recognised in Albania as one of the four traditional religious communities, which gives it a status it holds nowhere else.

No other state has attempted what Albania attempted in 1967. Enver Hoxha did not restrict religion, tax it, infiltrate it or co-opt it, which is what the other communist governments of Europe did. He abolished it. A campaign begun that year closed every mosque, church, tekke and monastery in the country, more than two thousand buildings, converting them into sports halls, warehouses, cinemas and workshops or demolishing them. Religious practice of any kind, including in private, was made a criminal offence. Clergy of every faith were imprisoned, sent to labour camps or executed. Religious names were banned and people were required to change them. In 1976 the constitution declared the state atheist, in what is generally accepted as the only such constitutional provision ever enacted.

The ban was lifted in 1990 and the first public mass and the first public prayers since 1967 were held that year. What happened next is the part that surprised observers. Religious institutions were rebuilt with foreign funding, hierarchies were reconstituted, and buildings were returned. But two generations had grown up with no religious instruction whatever, and Albanian religiosity today is best described as strong identification with weak practice.

The one thing that clearly did survive is the tradition of coexistence, and it is not a myth: interfaith marriage rates are high, and Albanians report low levels of religious hostility in comparative surveys.

Two cautions. The tolerance narrative is sometimes used to imply the persecution left no damage, which is false, and the reconstruction has been substantially externally funded, which has brought its own arguments about influence.