Kosovo is ostensibly a secular state, but the fact that this group is being investigated is yet another indication of how Sharia hangs over all majority-Muslim states, with many believing that it constitutes a law above whatever the constitution or other relevant law may say.
“‘Let’s Just Be Albanians’: A New Movement In Kosovo Calls On Muslims To Abandon Islam,” by Bekim Bislimi and Andy Heil, RFE/RL, November 2, 2023:
PRISTINA — Vesel Lekaj insists that he and his provocatively named Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith don’t oppose the religion’s adherents. After all, he says, he and many of its other initiators are from Muslim families.
The real target, he told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, is the religious extremism in any form that “has been operating in Kosovo for more than two decades.”
“We, as a sign of dissatisfaction with this phenomenon — that is, extreme and political Islam, but also with Serbian Orthodox extremism — have taken a measure…[with the aim] of stopping it,” Lekaj told a meeting last month of the movement’s founding council in the town of Decan, in Kosovo’s mountainous west.
While there has been indignation from the local Islamic community council, and an otherwise muted public response in this overwhelmingly Muslim country, it is hard to know if Lekaj should be taken at his word.
District prosecutors have launched an investigation to determine whether Lekaj and others involved with the group have committed the crime of incitement to hatred or religious intolerance. “All those statements are being analyzed,” said Shkodran Nikci, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Peja, which has jurisdiction over Decan. “So [we’re investigating] what their aim is and, at the same time, whether there are elements of a criminal offense in their content.”
Article 141 of Kosovo’s Criminal Code, adopted in 2019, allows for fines and up to five years in prison for anyone who “spreads hatred, discord, and intolerance” on religious or other grounds in a “manner that is likely to disturb the public order.”…
Lekaj describes himself and some of his nascent movement’s founders as former Muslims who have “finished” with Islam. “We are no longer on that path, and we should talk [openly] about it,” he said.
The local Muslim community in Decan reacted angrily as news spread of the founding council of the Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith. The Islamic Community of Kosovo (KBI) in Decan expressed “deep indignation” and accused the group’s founders of having “no good intentions for our society.” It called them agents of “divisive elements” and accused them of inciting “interreligious hatred, as well as religious and human intolerance.”…
Lekaj responds casually to prosecutors’ investigation of his movement’s activities, saying it was “normal” and pledged to cooperate if he or others are invited for questioning. “We are a secular state, we’re not an Islamic state nor a theocracy,” he said. “We stand by our words in the voluntary statements we made.”…
Wellington says
I wish this guy well but he had best be very careful. Islam does not take criticism well. In fact, it doesn’t take it at all.
Westman says
Translations of KBI accusations:
“no good intentions for our society.” – How dare you offer those wanting to leave Islam a safe passage, we own them!
“interreligious hatred…” – We are obscuring our hatred of Jews with a smoke cloud of projection.
”religious and human intolerance.” – More projection. If we had control your life would be in miserable servitude to us or off the planet.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
The direct result of one of the few things NATO did since the end of the Cold War. They forced the partition of Serbia, and now ethnic Albanians, who could have abandoned islam had Kosovo still remained a part of Serbia, now have to fear persecution by Kosovo lawyers
So would these prosecutors lift a finger to oppose anti Serbian-Orthodox hatred by muslims?