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Ramadan Ramadani

Ramadan Ramadani holds a PhD in Ottoman history. An activist of many years in formal and non-formal civic initiatives, as well as an author and a columnist.

The interview was recorded in 2015.


Frosina Pandurska: I`d say the general public met you and had the opportunity to hear about you through the media, mainly about the construction of the Burmali Mosque, that is in 2009. You also have a doctorate in oriental sciences, if I am not mistaken, and you have also worked as an analyst. You are also a hodja. Since we`ve been communicating in recent years, I would like to ask you: what have you been identifying with lately? What is your main activity at the moment?

RAMADAN RAMADANI: Yes. Lately, and in recent years, I have been working at the Institute that I established myself. It is called the Institute of Free Thought “Nisma” (Initiative), based in Skopje, and that is the main activity with which I identify. By the way, now I have a doctorate in history from the Ottoman period. I also used to write before the Council for the reconstruction of the Burmali Mosque, and I am writing nowadays as well, I have regular weekly articles in Albanian and Macedonian languages, in the weekly “Fokus” and the electronic portal Portalb.mk.

FP: So, you also worked as a hodja/Islamic preacher. So you also acted as a hodja/Islamic precher. Are you still doing that?

RR: No. I have not been active for three years now and I do not have, so to speak, a religious or clerical function, but I am a hodja/Islamic preacher, that is, by title and a first vocation.

FP: How do you declare yourself from a religious point of view?

RR: A Muslim.

FP: Now we are going totalk a little more about general issues. So it is very important in this type of conversation to distinguish between what is faith and what is religion.

RR: Yes. If, if there were in our languages, in Albanian and Macedonian that is, any difference between the words faith and religion, it would be the difference in codes of conduct or in the capacity to practice religious rules in a religious life. I think this would be a sort of difference, although the words faith and religion in our languages ​​are often used interchangeably. I, for myself, prefer to use the word faith, because it covers more, in the sense what one feels and has in relation to his God and the truths he has in his life. The word religion often has the meaning of the rules we follow or should follow in our lives.

FP: You mentioned that you were engaged in, that is, you did research in the field of Oriental studies. Surely, I believe you are familiar with many historical battles that have been fought in the name of religion. Although the question is general, I am interested in your position.

RR: Yes. I have always been guided by the maxim of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who says that “all great ideas, once into the hands of men, they diminish,” and he wrote this in his book, “Introduction to Metaphysics”, and this is true of most relations of faith with man, and conditionally with society and with the people, and with humans among themselves. Here, somehow, in these relations, it often happens that faith is used as the main motivator for the death of people, something that regularly happens in war. This has two treatments. One is positive if I can express myself in these terms because every single day… because it deals with death, and everything related to death must have something metaphysical in it. So, when someone asks you to let something go, to sacrifice, be it a person or a commodity in the name of something, it must have some kind of reward or counter-reward in the metaphysical aspect as well. While the other aspect, which often happens in history, and such phenomena can be seen somewhere in the world today, is the abuse of faith, generally in the form of instrumented policy, where different people do not know, do not want, or do not have the opportunity to build their platforms with clear political demands, often abuse or use religious motives, symbols or phenomena, and norms.

FP: What does Jihad mean to you? How do you perceive this term?

RR: Jihad. Yes, jihad is originally a religious institution in Islam, and it is a complex institution that encompasses many aspects. So, first, it covers as to identify it, it covers both the personal level and the social level, and the institutional level. The personal level is every human endeavor for the good, according to religious rules, and… is jihad in itself. It is a known Islamic saying that the greatest jihad is in fact the human effort with one’s ego. So our effort to defeat our vices, our passions, and so on, in everyday life, it is also jihad, just like social jihad that starts with planting a flower, a plant, providing water for the population, and many, many other efforts that are known as an institution, to what is known as an institution and in the Islamic faith – that is the commandment of good and the prohibition of evil. And on the institutional level where, when it comes to the implied religious norms… codified in the state order and where jihad is divided into defensive jihad or on offensive jihad. We, the Sunni Muslims, who are the majority of the Muslims in the world, do not have the institution, for now, to make offensive jihad anywhere in the world, but only defensive jihad, which means that every person whose life, wealth or honor is at risk, can do jihad to protect them.

FP: Thank you very much for this explanation. Because we mention personal belief, and religion as a broader… general concept, your understanding of religion, is it a personal or private matter?

RR: The religion to which I belong, Islam, has no strict or clear division between whether it is, say, private or social. This, because the man is in himself a social being and throughout his life, with his interactions with the society he must have the public part as well, therefore, I could not make such a strict division or intersect between what is private or public religious.

FP: Secularism started in Western European countries, to say the least, and we as a country are also said to live in a secular society. What do you think, is this true or not about Macedonia?

RR: Yes. There are two aspects to this. Contrary to all the differences of secularism in the world, which is sometimes expressed by the term laicism and somewhere secularism, the minimum of secularism is to be the opposite of theocracy. So, if a… one state, one society, is not governed by religious rules and religious codes of any religion, then that society and that state is secular in itself. Then, this secularism varies from secularisms… of different types, depending on the society and the nation that implements them. In our country, the issue becomes even more complex, so it is further complicated due to one function that secularism has here in Macedonia, and that is that we are a multiethnic country, and here our secularism has a function of neutrality, which means that in addition to the church or the mosque not running the country, it is also a guarantee that one of the religions does not lead us because it is a multi-confessional society.

FP: We often witness some religious communities calling for traditional values. For example… we have many examples, for example, I do not know, here, one example can be issues related to the right to abortion and so on. In your opinion, what is the limit of the action of religion in this context?

RR: I think that if I can treat something like a borderline issue here, it is the politicizing or exploitation or political instrumentalizing of religious institutions, motives, and symbols. As long as, for example, the churches or mosques are not used for politicization or political purposes, then it is fine, it is even preferred in societies, that is, who should not forget that they have gone through a wild period of faith, that is, monistic and communist period, it is preferred that faith playsthe role of an educator of morality, ethics, and several behaviors, whether for social values, or family values, ​​or the personal values ​​of each person.

FP: So you think that religious communities are an equal part of the civil society, and they should also work on, say, some policies.

RR: Yes, but there are two problems. The first is that in our country the civil sector has never been fully treated with all its historical finesse. We as a population in Macedonia, both Albanians and Macedonians as a majority, but other citizens as well, have always seen the civil sector only as something from the west or something that has come from outside. Everything that the church, the mosque did, that is, whether they were public kitchens or something else, was in fact part of a sector and a civil engagement of the citizens. And the second problem is in the leading organizations of our faiths here, specifically the Macedonian Orthodox Church and the Islamic Religious Community, which have seldom realized that they can be great partners with the civil sector because they have the same target group. And none of the organizations disputed their power or their representation or their legitimacy, while this never happened from the opposite side. So we have seen many times opposite views of these religious institutions towards the civil sector.

FP: People, citizens who may not be believers, notice the visible part of the religion only through the construction of religious buildings. We are witnessing a mapping, say, construction of mosques and churches, in rural and urban areas. What is your position on this? Can newly built buildings, religious buildings, attract believers?

RR: I think that to fully analyze this issue, some numbers are needed. The first is the true lack of mosques and churches and other religious buildings in Macedonia because, let’s not forget, I will mention the last period of monism, where we had a lack of them, so not that the religion was banned completely, as it happened in Albania or elsewhere, but here in our country there was a distancing from faith, and there was also a constraint like that… [THE ADHAN BEGINS]

I did not know if we were done with it.

FP: Yes, yes, in the end. So, lately, we are witnessing the construction of many religious buildings, whether it is Christian… about churches or mosques, I am interested in what you think, whether the construction of these buildings can really attract believers or keep them?

RR: I think that …

FP: … Albanian…

RR: … yes. I think that in order to have an opinion on this issue, we lack statistics. First, the religious communities should tell us how much such religious buildings are really lacking and that the population needs them. For example, it is not normal that a… several neighborhoods, like Chair, which maybe have 10 or 20 thousand inhabitants, mainly Muslims, do not have one prayer facility, it is also not normal, for example, that the entire neighborhood in Aerodrom has only one or no church at all, while 20 or 15 thousand Orthodox Christians live there. But these numbers need to be provided by religious communities. The second one is the tendency of the population or individuals to build religious buildings on their initiative, which then the religious communities take as their own – something that often happens in Macedonia, where there are various local initiatives for the construction of religious buildings, be it in villages or cities. And third, to say, is the politicization or instrumentalization of cultural heritage through the construction of religious buildings, something that in our case appeared glaringly through the construction of a large cross on Vodno, and it was an overture to, say, several very long minarets, for example, such as the example in Aracinovo and which can be explained only by the cross of Vodno. So, you can not explain it any other way, neither religiously, nor in any other way, except with the great cross that was built over the city that is of everyone.

FP: According to the latest research, over 90% of the population in the country declared themselves as believers, regardless of which religious community they belong to. Do you think this is a real percentage? And let’s talk a little bit about, say, belonging to a certain religion and belief.

RR: Yes. So about this, I believe that this number is accurate to some extent, as much as it can statistically be because in our country religion is still seen as an identification and affiliation line. So it is not only the aspect of whether a person is a believer or not that is taken into account, but simply as an affiliation, that is, whether it is normative or not, and as a line for identifying who that citizen is. I think that if there were other statistics and other whole numbers, I say again this is the job of the religious communities in the country, as citizens, we could have a more complete picture of how religious we really are because it is fundamentally different, that is, someone being a Muslim or an Orthodox Christian, the norms differ both in quantitative and qualitative terms and are completely different. And if these measurements were made separately for each religious community, they would be [inaudible] as citizens to have a mirror, because it is one thing when someone says that he is, for example, a Christian in Egypt, it is another when someone says that he is a Christian in Norway, it is different when someone says that he is a Muslim in Macedonia, it is different when someone says that he is a Muslim in Turkey. So, both these subtleties and these facts would be more complete to have a more complete approach to this issue.

FP: You mentioned the cross on Vodno, and we can say that in that period the trend of symbols massively continues marking the territory, that is not only with crosses but with religious buildings and so on. But what has been observed, at least for Christian religious buildings, is that all these new buildings are in fact empty or locked up most of the time.

RR: The religious building, that is…

FP: In this context, I would like to ask if the presence of a religious object is necessary for someone to be a believer?

RR: No. So, especially in Islam, the principle of a mosque or a place of prayer in order to be a Muslim does not apply. The Islamic tradition says, according to Muhammad (PBUH), that “the earth has become a place of prayer for me.” So, prayer is allowed in any place and at any time. What can be noticed, now I say again that we do not have statistics and that is the tendency for political, ethnic, somewhere and party instrumentalization in religious grandeur. But this issue, I shall repeat, is within the religious communities that should not allow one of their symbols, objects, or motives to become a property or an opportunity for political abuse by anyone.

FP: By education, you are a theologian, initially. Can you tell me about your experience with faith as a believer?

RR: Yes. My experience as a believer, when I look back, is different, because I have been a believer since I knew about myself, and with all those quests, existential questions I`ve had since childhood, I decided to go to religious high school and to explore the faith. Practically, I have been studying faith since I started living it, so it is a natural process of developing my feelings, my thoughts, and I have always tried to find the right one, while the complete truth can never be found except without faith… except with faith… because truth contains the metaphysical aspect and all our great questions about life and death have certainly included the greatest super-being that directs our lives – that is God.

FP: At the beginning, we mentioned that you worked, you also acted like a hodja/islamic preacher. Can you talk a little bit about that experience? For how long… maybe about contacts with people…

RR: Yes, for 10 years, so I worked as a khatib (assistant to the hodja/islamic preacher) in the Isa Beg mosque in Skopje. Before that, I was engaged many times and for many years during the month of Ramadan, part-time in the country and abroad, where there was an Albanian diaspora, so in Switzerland and Canada, and throughout my activity I have tried to be the human which will be a bridge between what I know as a civic engagement, that is, generally social and civic engagement. One experience I would like to highlight is my part-time engagement during the 2001 war, here in Skopje. I was a hodja/islamic preacher in a place of prayer in Vizbegovo and together with me, other people were participating in a civic activity that was related to stopping the demolition of several buildings by the then government.

FP: So, in the period you mentioned in 2001, I guess it was hard to be a hodja/islamic preacher. What was your personal role, what was the role of the other clergy in keeping the peace?

RR: Well, I think that in general, the religious clergy had a positive role in everything that happened back then in Macedonia during the armed conflict, during the 6 months or whatever it lasted. Certainly, there may have been bad episodes that I cannot remember at the moment, which were at the level of instrumentalization of religion, whether ethnic or political. As for myself, I remember the civic action we had in Vizbegovo, where I was active as a hodja/islamic preacher and together with the whole community we marched and went to the houses that were planned to be demolished. Then the inspection and the police withdrew from that place because they saw that they could not do anything against the crowd. So, it was a social civil action that we did peacefully, with a large presence of people.

FP: Did people trustyou then?

RR: Yes. I believe that they trusted me because I alwaysattempted to do what I was supposed to do, in my opinion, every religious leader should overcome his ego or his subjective evaluations of questions or phenomena. I have always tried to maintain the (spiritual) purity of the faith and the (spiritual) purity of the religious institutions I have represented, and I believe that it may have influenced me to be trusted and I think I am still trustworthy to the people.

FP: How loud were the religious communities in 2001, the IRC and the MOC, how much, mainly, towards appealing, calming down the…?

RR: … I do not remember the religious communities being at the required level, either qualitatively or quantitatively, in the self-organization of the believers. I have said before that the clergy were generally positive, but this does not apply to religious institutions. In a place, in a society and a country where we have 90% religious people, maybe they could play a bigger role in calming the situation and confrontations: ethnic, political, or social in general.

FP: Do you think that they were constructive or added gas to the…

RR: No. I just believe they did not do what they could have done. So, they could have done more, now I do not remember the details if there were incidents from that aspect. But I don’t think they were as loud as they should have been.

FP: We talked about whether the citizens trusted you in the specific case, but do you think that in that period of conflict in Macedonia the citizens believed in these large religious communities at all?

RR: Yes. I think they believed in them because the conflict was a conflict, that is, essentially, of the regime with the citizens, and then it spread to interethnic relations, but it failed to develop to the stage of having a disruption of inter-religious relations. In particular, in this regard, I would like to emphasize two groups or communities in Macedonia that in my opinion play a key role in the affirmation of large communities, namely the Torbeshi – meaning Muslims who speak Macedonian and Albanians who belong to the Orthodox Christian faith. I think that by engaging them, presenting them and their presence in the public as much as possible, they could have played a very constructive role in the generally good condition of the society.

FP: Unfortunately, most often, in times of conflict or war, religious buildings are… first on the list of destruction, according to some, the biggest symbols… why, what do you think?

RR: Yes. It is related to the symbol of visibility, but now with the latest developments in the world, it is understood that destruction of historical and cultural heritage is a genocide, specifically, that is, now according to UNESCO Director Irina Bokova, the destruction of these buildings is considered genocide in itself. I believe this is happening, in conflicts, it is happening more and the reason is the deletion of symbols, as it happened in parts of Bosnia. For example, in the Republika Srpska in Bosnia, several cultural and historical sites have been wiped off the face of the earth and alienated, in order to not have a presence of such symbols.

FP: Unfortunately, lately, we have been revolving around religious buildings all the time, but also around conflicts. In 2009, you probably remember the first student protest against the construction of a church in the square of Skopje, and on the other hand, the counter-protest, the so-called first counter-protest of a group of citizens who were well armed with religious symbols and above all they were angry. I was a journalist at that time, I was at the scene, so to speak, I had a very good opportunity to see what was happening. Besides people and conflicts in recent times, we have internal turmoil and conflicts in the IRC, so can you tell us your opinion about these two events?

RR: Yes. Unfortunately, apart from all the abuses of religious symbols, here in our country it often happened that religion was a motive for political recruitment and this happened even then, during the counter-protest against the students of Architecture who had a request for a secular square, which belongs to all, so they were not specifically against the church, but against objects that could undermine secularism. Another case, even more glaring, happened later, with the case of loss of the Municipality of Center by the government, where under the pretext that the new government would demolish the church, they gathered, with the same iconography that looked like the attacks of the Crusaders in the Middle Ages. The attacks of the Crusaders which, let us never forget: the whole population here back then was Bogomil-Christian had suffered, others too and so on. But it suffered precisely from that political instrumentalization that someone in Western Europe had done, that is, for the liberation of Jerusalem… this after… (speaks in Macedonian) I am done..

FP: Tell us about the IRC.

RR: Unfortunately, the Islamic Religious Community in Macedonia, in my opinion, is the only institution that has not been reformed. So, with this age, and with this unreformedness, it may be able to compete only with the Macedonian Academy of Sciences, and with no other institution. There is still staff in the Islamic religious community who were appointed by the monistic system, and I remember that the same people who were leaders in that communist era, when I was in high school in the 80s, so 86′ –  90′, when I was in high school, those people still have the main say in this organization. I believe that with the arrival of new times, new situations, there will be reforms in both the Macedonian Orthodox Church and the Islamic Religious Community.

FP: Declaratively, but also formally, there is a Commission for interreligious…

RR: Commission for Relations with Religious Communities…

FP: … religious communities. And certainly many other, I`d say, networks, where religions communicate, representatives of religions. To what extent, in general, now I am talking about the whole world, is inter-religious tolerance  the basis for a peaceful society?

RR: Yes, I think it is a very important factor, that is, inter-religious tolerance and religious coexistence between communities, especially in places like ours, such as Macedonia where there are different religions. This is not the work of the commissions, or some institutions, but the work of the people themselves who are on sites The best coexistence in ethnically, religiously, confessionally mixed places is always being held more by those religious leaders who are in that place, than someone, let`s say, from Skopje or some commission. Another thing that happened in Macedonia is that the state institution that is obliged to communicate with religious communities is completely defocused from its primary work, so the Commission for Relations with Religious Communities often knows how to do things for religious communities, works that are not theirs, that is, it is often abused to put pressure on the Bektashi Community in favor of the Islamic Religious Community, but also on the other church, that of Mr. Vranishkovski, in favor of the Macedonian Orthodox Church. And second, it is not performing its primary function, which is the relations of the state with the religious communities in the state. Other than that, we have the institution, that is, which is made up of all the religious communities that had some good views… they tried to convey them, but they consist of religious organizations.

FP: Does this mean that the representatives of the commission themselves had to go through a process of awareness or getting acquainted with, say, the norms and rules according to which [inaudible] some religious communities?

RR: Well, no. The first is that they are not familiar with the character of the state, primarily, and the secular character of the state, which we explained at the beginning of the conversation that here in Macedonia it also has the function of neutrality,  which means thathe state belongs to all religious communities and to none at the same time. So, from this point of view, no state commission or a state body can be used for only one religious community, whichever it may be.

FP: With the recent events, that is, in Kumanovo, nationalism was somehow brought back to the main table. But, fortunately, a large part of citizens recognized this and appeared on social networks, that is, wonderful letters, videos, about the coexistence that exists in Macedonia, which in my opinion is a very important phenomenon at the moment.

RR: Yes. I think that Kumanovo… that Kumanovo was a big test of the divisions in Macedonia that we cannot hide and are often very large, especially between the two large communities: Macedonians and Albanians, and are an adaptable field for political instrumentalization. The Kumanovo case, apart from being fast, was somehow inexplicable, which made it suspicious. Another thing was that there was no support, so from the ethnicity itself, specifically the Albanians who were the majority in that neighborhood, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, we had victims on both sides, we had police victims, Macedonians, Serbs, and Albanians, so all this made a situation that if there was an order or a script to inflame interethnic relations, I think it turned out to be very unsuccessful.

FP: I guess it will remain that way, because at this moment people are somehow tired of that topic, that there is  space for inter-ethnic conflicts, especially between Macedonians and Albanians.

RR: Yes. Not only that, but we know that our country is now going through the deepest democratic crisis it has ever had. In 2001, the institutions were not being ruined as they are at the moment, and it is a political conflict that is based on civil issues, so no one took the state from the Macedonians or Albanians, but someone took it, occupied it and used the state of all citizens for personal purposes, whether to buy land at bargain prices on Vodno, to buy a luxury Mercedes, or to employ the sons of his uncles.

FP: There are three more questions.

RR: Are there now? Wow… I got tired…

FP: [LAUGHS] We are done, we are done… Can you tell me what was the subject of your doctorate?

RR: The subject of the doctorate was “The culture of books and reading among Muslims in Macedonia during the Ottoman period, with an emphasis and focus on oriental manuscripts.”

FP: Were there any points of contact with  faith, i.e. with [inaudible]

RR: No, except for the materials, because most of the manuscripts that have remained in Macedonia as cultural and historical heritage, most of them are in fact the religious works themselves, that is, they are either conscripts/transcripts of the Qur’an or religious sciences. Besides them, there was certainly literature as well, history and other fields.

FP: Perhaps a slightly more abstract question, [inaudible] religions on people?

RR: Religion in itself, faith, is the relationship of God with the human, so that relationship cannot exist without people, but faith in itself or religion, has all the norms that make a human a deputy of God on earth, and that this  deputy is ordered  do good. Unfortunately, we are the ones who, in the name of the Lord, maintain silence, maintain peace, and maintain orderon earth.

FP: We live in a time of globalization, challenges, terrorist attacks, and so on. What should be the role of the great religions?

RR: I think the role of faith should be as it was in the past, and that is to consolidate, maintain, and develop man’s relationship with God, and to remind them of goodness. Reminding us of goodness is something that is in general and in most cases  done by faith, so it is faith that tells us that we will have an ontological reward fort our sacrifice, our patience, and for all our virtues

FP: Finally, can there be peace without faith?

RR: No…  I… me… I think that there can be no complete peace without the involvement of the religious aspect in it, and this is related to human nature which consists of the soul and has its soulful needs. It is not all about economic, political, or financial peace, but also about peace of mind, which is provided only through a quality transmitter of human feelings, and that is faith.

FP: Finally, what is peace for you personally?

RR: For me personally, peaceis that I am at peace with my Lord and with the people around me.

FP: Thank you… I got you a little bit tired,but it was great.

RR: We shall see.

FP: I do not have books with me but I will…

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