We are paying an enormous price for our failure to stop the religious radicalization of young people
Recent horrific images of a Kosovo Albanian with bloody hands, holding a knife and apparently beheading a blindfolded man somewhere in Syria or Iraq spread like wildfire over the internet and shook Albanians to the core. The monstrosity and savagery of this act is so disturbing that even writing about it is stomach-turning. While it has been known for a while that a group of young men from Kosovo travelled to Syria and Iraq to participate in jihadist fighting, the gruesome images brought home a nightmarish reality: For the first time, the newest country of Europe was staring at its own creation, little creations that had mutated into monsters – who had turned their world upside down and violated the very meaning of being Albanian. Sons of Kosovo were now taking lives of others in the most barbaric form in the name of some religion and god they discovered during the mutation period of the last 15 years.
What happened? How could a group of innocent boys who grew up like majority of Kosovar boys – watching football, flirting, loving cars, and oblivious to the existence of violent jihad during their boyhood – turn into vicious killers on behalf of one of the most savage terrorist groups that the world has ever seen? Where were their families? Where was the nation that prides and defines itself by its youth? Why did it allow its sons to turn into killers?
It wasn’t always so. A mere two decades ago, in the mid-1990s, life was hard, enduring Serbia’s repressive regime, but the face of the youth was different. Instead of heading east to become jihadists, they headed west, looking for jobs to help families survive. For the rest of us, brought up in Kosovo, life was an improvised act that made up for the lack of a normal childhood that our peers enjoyed in the West. While conflict raged next door in Bosnia and jihadists of all shapes travelled to fight there in the name of Allah, Kosovo’s youth went to underground schools and watched pirated movies at home.
When I was growing up just a few kilometers outside Prishtina, my friends and I never went to a mosque or church to make a religious point. Houses of worship were places where ceremonies took place and where old men went to pray in silence with soft-voiced aged imams who preached a simple creed of humility, respect for the elderly, family and neighbors. Occasionally, these imams engaged in voodoo-like healing practices with patients afflicted with mental issues. But these were relatively harmless belief systems with roots in witchcraft that had nothing to do with turning faith into a hateful and murderous ideology.
By contrast, over the last decade, Kosovo’s religious landscape has been totally transformed with mosques popping up with dizzying speed, sometimes two per village and in Wahhabi-style. Young bearded, strange-looking men speak in foreign tongues in a fire-brand type of preaching that is both un-Albanian and offensive. What is this alien institution, which has crept into our society pushing out all the fundamental values and the religious tolerance that Albanians have held dear for so long? Where did the demand for Saudi-style mosques come from? Why did this nation allow its cultural heritage, like the Orthodox Church in my neighborhood, to be destroyed while allowing a mosque with its alien architecture to rise up just a mile down the road on the banks of the river?
These are questions that every Kosovo Albanian parent, wife, husband, brother, sister, cousin and friend, should ask. These are existential questions that strike to the core of what this nation is. It’s an opportune moment, not only for the security apparatus to wake up, but for all Kosovars to stop what they are doing and take a hard look at themselves, and examine their families, their sons and daughters. What have they become? Why are 16-year-olds going to Wahhabi-style mosques all over Kosovo? Why are teenagers at the mosque in the first place? That may be an institution where an Iraqi, Afghani, or Syrian teenager spends his time, but it is not a natural place for boys in Kosovo to learn about life’s lessons. It has never been and it should never be a place where sons of Kosovo get an education about anything, least of all in religion.
This is not an Islamophobic perspective, but it is a perspective that vehemently rejects the Islamification of Kosovo’s youth. For those who still have the illusion that somehow the nation must strike a tenuous balance between freedom of speech and security, they are living in ultimate denial – and the price for this misapplied principle will be enormous to the country.
A basic tenet of modern society, free speech is the most sacred value of democracy and it should be protected. But Kosovo, especially Muslim Kosovo, should not confuse free speech with the insidious language of preaching an extreme form of Islam in mosques. It’s almost laughable to link the problem of the radicalization of youth with free speech. It’s a shameful failure of Kosovo’s institutions to do their work and stop infiltration of extremists in the country. Millions of dollars have been funneled through thinly disguised Islamist NGOs and charities to build mosques and influence large swaths of the younger generation. Orphanages have been built where children as young as five are inundated with religious teachings. CDs with sermons from religious figures from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have been distributed in high schools. Mosques overflow with youthful prayers, occupying the sidewalks while the nation sits by and watches them, while some of them take things to the limit and quietly slip through the borders to join brutal organizations that kill in the name of Allah.
It is misguided to think that those young jihadists are just a few outliers and outright criminals. It’s true that a majority of Kosovo’s young are outraged by these acts of barbarism and abhor those who took that route. But this argument misses the point, for while these may be extreme cases, the economic and social environment in Kosovo these days is ripe for extremism to spread its toxic teachings and indoctrinate ever larger numbers of young people.
That is why pooh-poohing these incidents is dangerous and will only reinforce the idea that both Kosovo’s institutions and people in general are complicit in the radicalization of the youth. Kosovars should rise up now and stop the march of this malignant and dangerous trend.