The politics of religious dualism: Naim Frashëri and his elective affinity to religion in the course of 19th-century Albanian activism

In standard Albanian studies and Western scholarship, including both the work of religious and political activists and that of less ‘interested’ lay people, historical and textual fact-finding efforts have only confirmed and indeed perpetuated the myth that the thinking of Naim Frashëri was formed and dominated by Bektashism and that his ‘Albanianism’ had a Bektashi foundation. The author intends to scrutinize and disprove this analysis, arguing that while Frashëri’s thinking did indeed have a religious cast, it went far beyond Bektashism in its heterodoxy, being a kind of liberation theology and pantheism, which generated an all-inclusive attitude to Albanian identity, not one limited in any particular way to Bektashism. Methodologically, such a picture must arise if we submit the available empirical evidence to critical analysis from the perspective of social theoretical approaches to religion developed in sociology and anthropology.