Islam in the People's Socialist Republic of Albania

Secularizing tenets borrowed from the National Awakening and interwar period were continued and more radical approaches were adopted to sideline religion from the public sphere, allowing Albania to declare itself an atheist state in 1967.

The effects and legacy of persecution through forced de-Islamization of society led to post-war generations born under the Albanian communist regime having minimal to almost no knowledge of Islam.

[4] In 1949, a law was passed that required religious institutions to inculcate feelings of loyalty among their adherents to the Albanian communist party and that all religions had to have their headquarters in Albania.

[9] Some of those included financial assistance, the exemption of future Muslim clergy doing army service which was supported while a translation of the Quran into Albanian was rejected.

[15] In 1965 the communist regime initiated a cultural revolution based on the Chinese model that saw the wide scale destruction of most mosque minarets due to them being a prominent feature of Islamic architecture.

[16] Within the context of the communist regime's anti religion policies, from the 1960s onward parents were encouraged to give newborn children non-religious given names.

[20] Few scholars that resisted those anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish propaganda trends were persecuted while the communist regime highlighted myths related to medieval Albanians by interpreting them as the "heroic Illyrian proletariat".

[22][23][24][25] The Muslim Sunni and Bektashi clergy alongside their Catholic and Orthodox counterparts suffered severe persecution and to prevent a decentralization of authority in Albania, many of their leaders were killed.

[15] Pilgrimage thereafter amongst Bektashi adherents to those shrines became limited occurring only in certain locations and indirectly through gatherings like picnics near those sites such as the Sari Salltëk tyrbe in Krujë.

[15] As it was declared a monument of culture as well, the Ethem Bey mosque of Tiranë was allowed to function as a place of prayer and Islamic ritual, though only for foreign Muslim diplomats.

[33] As such during the late communist period, the proportion of Catholics and Albanian Muslims of these regions grew larger than the Orthodox community of southern Albania.