The Prophet, His Mevlud, and the Building of the Albanian Nation-State

Abstract

This chapter aims to explain how the mevlud ( mawlid in Arabic, mevlit in Turkish) was linked to processes of nation-state building in Albania. For Albanians the term mevlud has various meanings, relating to the birth or birthday of the Prophet, celebratory events connected with his birth, and the artistic forms or genres that evolve along with and accompany these celebrations, such as panegyric poems. The present chapter concerns the latter two meanings, and treats them separately. Its first section analyses how translations into Albanian of the most widespread Turkish mevlit text, S ü leyman Ç elebi’s Vesîletü’n-Necât , underpinned the process of nation-building after the end of the Ottoman period, and contributed to forming an Islamic national literature and diffusing the Albanian language. Our second section analyses the affirmation of the mevlud festival as a symbol of Sunnī Islam during the interwar period and its subsequent suppression by the Communist regime, which substantially erased the community’s memory of the mevlud celebrations. Our aim is to understand the incorporation of the Sunnī authorities into national ideologies, and how they in turn use the mevlud ritual as a means of legitimis-ing their identity and leadership. The final section of the chapter examines the post-socialist revival of mevlud practices, secularised (and nationalised) by Sunnī national authorities and reshaped by foreign actors in a plural religious setting where believers, who are expressing their individual (and by now highly diversified) religiosity, know such traditions only superficially. Our aim is to understand how first socialist secularisation and then Salafist/globalised literalism decultured and alienated this ritual.