Escaping in order to believe

In this Prishtina Talks conversation, Burhan Fili — imam, poet, writer and one of the best-known figures of Islam in the Albanian diaspora — tells the story of his escape from communist Albania, and of the road that took him from the shore of a lake to the United States, on to Cairo, and back home again after nearly two decades.

Fili does not begin with the escape but with a harder question: why faith had already weakened long before it was officially banned. He traces the answer to the fall of the caliphate and the sense of orphanhood it left behind among the Muslims of the world, to the severing of the hajj — for Albanians the one window onto the world — and to the isolation of the country after the great post-war agreements. He remembers the village where a returning pilgrim was received as the ambassador of a whole people, and how a single generation was enough for that tradition to go out.

The heart of the conversation is an anatomy of what the regime did to the Albanian family: the cooperative that took the mother out of the house and left the child to the nursery, the changing of names, the closing of the madrasas across the districts, the forcible removal of the headscarf — where, as Fili recounts, Catholic and Muslim women wept alike in front of the trucks — and the official banning of religion in 1967. Above all of it stood fear: the spying inside the family, where a son reported on his father and a brother on his brother, and the rule of the Sigurimi that wherever three people gathered, one of them was theirs. Against that background his escape reads not as a flight for bread, but as a search for the freedom to believe — two hours swimming across the lake at the end of July, without his mother's knowledge, so that she would have nothing to tell under torture.

The second half follows the life that came after: the refugee camp and what it meant to stand as a Muslim in a wholly unfamiliar world, the decision to study in Cairo and the meeting that demolished the propaganda that “a Kosovar cannot be trusted”, the years as an imam in America and the programme in Albanian. It closes with his return to Albania after communism fell — from swimming a lake to a red carpet — and with a message about working together, about keeping the family, and about never feeling inferior anywhere.

Some of the points covered: 📌 Why faith weakened long before it was officially banned 📌 The fall of the caliphate, and the sense of orphanhood among Muslims 📌 The severed hajj, and pilgrims as the ambassadors of a people 📌 The isolation of Albania, and a tree with its roots cut 📌 The cooperative, the nursery, and the mother taken out of the house 📌 Spying within the family: “wherever three gather, one is ours” 📌 The forcible removal of the headscarf, and the banning of religion in 1967 📌 The night of the escape across the lake, and why his mother was not told 📌 Cairo, the Kosovar students, and the collapse of the propaganda about “faithlessness” 📌 The return home, and a message of cooperation and pride

📍 Prishtina Talks