If you have any other questions, ask away.
Thanks
I dunno, I'm not quite sure what an "official" split would mean besides claiming that Bektashism was its own religion, and I can say that no, that wasn't the government's position. They described it as an Islamic sect. Sunnis and Bektashis already had their own leaderships, like the latter had the Dede Baba who was the religious head. I do know that when the conservative Dede Baba killed himself in 1947 there arose two rival Dede Babas: one appointed in Albania and another in Egypt (where the King was a descendant of an Albanian ruler named Muhammad Ali Pasha.)
So did they make an official split between sunni and bektashi or not?
In Albania most Muslims were adherents to Sunni Islam, but a sizable amount were also linked to the Bektashi sect, whose relations with the Turks were quite poor by the time the Albanian independence movement got under way, and so they tended to be the most consistent of all the religions in supporting said movement. In 1920 or so they were expelled from Turkey and Albania became the center of Bektashism. So by the time the partisans liberated Tirana it had become the most "national" of all the religions in Albania. Naim Frashëri had proposed uniting Muslims and Christians via Bektashism and thus creating one big "national" religion to complement Albanian statehood. Sunni Muslims, at least back then and among fundamentalists today, consider Bektashism to be a heretical sect because it incorporates various Christian and to a lesser extent pagan views. The Albanian government did try to promote a separate Bektashi identity while still acknowledging it was an Islamic sect.
I see this statement about Albania a lot "control over the Muslim faith by formalizing the split between the*Sunni*and*Bektashi*sects" do you know of any elaborations?
k
I can't think of specific works, no. Of course any communist is going to say what Bland said. It's just common sense.
Well of course in practice they did not, but rhetorically, i am assuming they did. Do you have a quote of this?
In practice they did not, no. They replaced production for social needs in favor of production for profit. Working-class democracy in the time of Lenin and Stalin was done away with and a social-fascist regime came to the fore, which repressed the working-class and defended the new bourgeoisie.
