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The number of countries in the world is about to grow.

If everything goes as announced, Europe will see the birth of a new state, which will be nestled within an existing one: Albania, a republic in the Balkan region, southeast of the Old Continent.

During his speech at the 79th General Assembly of the United Nations, held at the end of September, the president surprised by ensuring that he is willing to cede part of the territory of Albania to a minority Muslim sect with the purpose of creating a state that is “a center of moderation, tolerance and peaceful coexistence”.

The conservative opposition and analysts have criticized the president’s announcement, considering it a smokescreen that seeks to distract attention from the problems that affect Albania, such as corruption or depopulation caused by massive emigration.

The “Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order,” the name that has so far been given to the new country, will occupy about 11 hectares east of Tirana, the Albanian capital, Rama announced.

The new country will house the political headquarters of the Bektashi Muslims, which is the fourth religious community in the Balkan countrybehind Sunni Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholics.

Only members of the clergy and people who work in the state administration will be able to obtain citizenship of the new state, which will not have security forces or courts, according to the press.

However, the creation of the new country seems complicated.

The matter must be approved by the Albanian Parliament, by a qualified majority of 94 of the 140 deputies that comprise it. Rama’s Socialist Party has 75 seats and The conservative opposition has already shown its rejection of the idea.

“Dear Bektashi friends, be careful, Edi Rama only cowardly uses you to distract public opinion from his links with crime and to hide the depopulation of Albania,” denounced the leader of the opposition Democratic Party and former prime minister, Sali Berisha.

“The initiative is unconstitutionalbecause it cedes territorial sovereignty of the country and poses a direct threat to secular society,” former Albanian deputy Romeo Gurakuqi, who is a professor at the London School of Economics, denounced to BBC Mundo.

Rama has assured that his surprising proposal seeks to promote not only interreligious coexistence, but also to promote a more tolerant form of Islam. Likewise, he stated that the approach is in line with Albanian history.

“We are a small nation, but we have given the world good examples of defending humanity,” declared the president, who recalled that after World War II The Balkan country became the only one in Europe to see its Jewish population increase.

“The Jewish community in Albania increased twenty-fold during the Holocaust thanks to Muslim and Christian families protecting them from the Nazis,” he said.

And he recalled that this solidarity was repeated more recently during the fall of Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban, when “we house several thousand Afghans who would otherwise have ended up in the ninth circle of hell: dead, imprisoned or blind forever.”

The new mini-state will be the opposite of the caliphates that radical Islamic groups such as the Taliban or the Islamic State have imposed in Afghanistan and parts of Syria and Iraq, and also of the authoritarian regimes prevailing in countries such as Iran or in most of the of the Gulf. This has been promised by both the Albanian authorities and the Bektashi leaders.

In the future Muslim country the sale and consumption of alcohol will not be prohibited, there will be no segregation according to sex and there will be no dress codes; that is to say that Neither the hijab (Islamic veil) nor the burqa will be mandatory for women.

“God does not prohibit anything, that is why he gave us minds,” declared the cleric Edmond Brahimaj, known to his followers as Baba Mondi, the leader of the Albanian Bektashis, in a recent interview with the American newspaper “The New York Times.”

“All decisions will be made with love and kindness.”added the 65-year-old priest, who was a member of the Albanian army during the communist regime, in subsequent statements.

As announced by Rama, the new State will house this Muslim sect born in the 13th century in Anatolia (Turkey) that respects the great Imam Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law.

“It is an Islamic mystical path that seeks the perfection of man and leads him to God.” This is how the group is defined, as read on its page web.

“They are the great ethnically Turkish Sufi order”The professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán, explained to BBC Mundo.

“Like other Sufi groups, they consider that the divine message has not been well understood and start from the idea that abstaining from drinking alcohol, fasting or making the pilgrimage to Mecca does not make one a better believer,” he explained.

“On the contrary, (the Bektashis) They think those rules are shackles and they force people to do a series of practices and mechanical rites that distort the true religious message, which is above all spiritual,” concluded the professor.

This more lax and relaxed posture also explains why they are more tolerant and more willing to coexist with other beliefs, a situation that has placed them in the crosshairs of the majority currents of Islam over the centuries.

“The Shiites and Sunnis repudiate them, because they say that They have deviated greatly from the true message of the Quran”, stated Gutiérrez de Terán.

For their celebrations and rituals they use music and dance. Likewise, their mosques do not have minarets (towers).

When and how did the Bektashis end up in the Balkans?

At the end of the 19th century, but especially after the First World War, the members of this Muslim sect were forced to move to other areas of the former Ottoman Empire after the authorities of the nascent Turkish republic outlawed the activities of the different religious expressions. and they will withdraw state support.

“The persecution they suffered helped the development of Albanian nationalism”Albanian historian Artan Hoax, who is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh (United States), told BBC Mundo.

According to the 2023 census, approximately 50% of Albania’s 2.4 million inhabitants are Muslims.

The majority of Albanian Muslims are Sunni and approximately 10% belong to the Bektashi community.

Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians make up most of the rest of the population.

Although Rama has assured that his proposal aims to promote coexistence between different confessions, there are those who believe that there are other reasons behind it.

“I think this should be seen as an effort by Rama to appeal to the electorate of this community. Next year there are elections in Albania and Rama’s popularity has been falling due to corruption scandals and emigration and brain drain, which have reached alarming levels,” Hoax noted.

Former deputy Romeo Gurakuqi spoke in similar terms, indicating that “the prime minister has the tendency to pursue strange causes to divert public attention from problems that truly matter to society”.

Gurakuqi justified his statements by the fact that the Bektashi minority had not advocated having their own state, until now.

For his part, the professor of Social Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands), Dimitris Dalakoglou, asserted that the approach seems to be aimed at facilitating the incorporation of Albania into the European Union (EU).

“Albania could be the first country with a majority of Muslim origin in the EU and by promoting Bektashism Rama makes a strategic choice: He promotes a Muslim order independent of external influences and that antagonizes Sunnism and Shiism,” he explained to BBC Mundo. .

Albania applied to join the EU in 2009 and Since 2014 he has been considered an official candidate to join the European club.

The experts consulted by BBC Mundo considered that the Albanian president’s move is risky.

“This concession of power to the betkashi will surely worry Albanian Sunni leaders, who will see their power and international connections threatened,” Dalakoglou noted.

Gurakuqi, meanwhile, denounced that “strengthening a religious sect within a multicultural society does not promote tolerance or coexistence, but rather privileges one community over others”.

However, experts ruled out that the eventual creation of the Muslim mini-state could reignite the powder keg of the Balkans, which at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st saw several wars in what was once Yugoslavia.

Some of the specialists even predicted that the materialization of the proposal will be symbolic and will have no real impact on the rest of the Muslim world.

“I think this is something anecdotal”stated Gutiérrez de Terán.

“I don’t think the rest of the Muslims take seriously a Muslim State where people will be able to drink alcohol in front of a mosque and where women will be able to show their hair,” added the Spanish expert, who recalled that the Bektashis are “inconsequential” for the rest of the Muslims.

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