Perfume permeates the air inside the Uhud mosque in the southwestern Kosovo city of Prizren, the country’s unofficial cultural capital and for centuries a major Balkan crossroad for traders and religions.
Women read aloud in unison from the pages of the Quran, their heads draped in brightly-coloured scarves.
Mejreme Uka clutches the holy book and leads the reading while the smart phone beside her lights up with social media notifications.
Uka is one of a growing number of female preachers in Kosovo’s Islamic community, a novelty in modern-day Kosovo but in fact a revival of an Ottoman-era practice that died out with the advent of communism. And Turkey is paying for it.
“Times are changing,” Uka told BIRN, sitting in the centre of the mosque at the spot usually reserved for the imam.
“In the past, female preachers could not read the Quran. But now, slowly and rightfully so, religion is becoming modernised and things are falling into place.”
Most of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, the majority of its 1.8 million inhabitants, are Muslim, but many do not actively practice their religion and the country is officially a secular state.
The end of communism with the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia, and the trauma of a 1998-99 war to break away from Serbia, has contributed to a revival of Islam among some Kosovo Albanians, and now, after a century-long absence, women are again preaching from the Quran.
“This is not a new tradition in Kosovo,” said Besa Ismaili, founder of the Women’s Department of the Kosovo Islamic Community, recalling centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule in the Balkans.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
