Islam in Kosovo

From 1389 until 1912, Kosovo was officially governed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire and a high level of Islamization occurred among Catholic and Orthodox Albanians, mainly due to Sufi orders and socio-political opportunism.

So far as Catholic Albanians were concerned, the Catholic church was less powerful and privileged within the Ottoman Empire than the Serbian Orthodox Church (and less well staffed); the Bektashi Order of dervishes carried out a conversion campaign which stressed the similarities between their version of Islam and Christianity (the Bektashis drank wine and had a quasi-Trinitarian doctrine).

[9] A phenomenon of "crypto-Catholicism" developed in Kosovo Albanian society, where large numbers of people would convert officially to Islam but follow Catholic rites in private.

[10] In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte wrote that her Albanian escort from Belgrade to Istanbul claimed to go to the mosque on Fridays and church on Sundays.

[11] At any rate, by 1750, most Christian families had converted to Islam, for the benefits of social networking of the citizens and for financial soundness.

[14] In all, eighteen months of the Yugoslav Serb counterinsurgency campaign between 1998 and 1999 within Kosovo resulted in 225 or a third out of a total of 600 mosques being damaged, vandalised, or destroyed alongside other Islamic architecture during the conflict.

[15][16][14] Sufi lodges (tekkes), Muslim theological schools (madrasas) and Islamic libraries sustained damage or destruction resulting in the loss of rare books, manuscripts and other collections of literature.

[15][19] In the aftermath of the war, a wave of revenge attacks on dozens of Serbian Orthodox churches by Muslim Albanians resulting in being damaged or destroyed.