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Albania’s Population 80% Muslim
Tirana | 13 October 2009 | Gjergj Erebara
A previously unpublished survey, which identifies religious affiliation, suggests that Muslims make up just under 80 per cent of Albania’s population, a figure much higher than previously thought.
The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey organised by the National Institute for Statistics, INSTAT, in 2005 for UNICEF, was interested in revealing the health situation of mothers and children but also included questions on religious adherence.
More than 5,000 families were interviewed. In all, 79.9 per cent of respondents identified as Muslims.
Previous estimates indicated that 70 per cent of Albanians were Muslims, 20 per cent Christian Orthodox and 10 per cent Catholics.
The new survey found that the number of adherents of Shia Bektashi Islam, which has its world headquarters in Tirana and claims to be a separate religion, was negligible. The survey, thus, categorised Bektashis as others.
Religious observances were banned in Albania in 1967 by the communist regime of former Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who proclaimed an athiest state. In November 1990, on the eve of the collapse of the communist regime, Albania began allowing private religious practices. Since then, there has been widespread debate as to whether Albania is a Muslim country or not.
Based on the survey, Muslims constitute a 2.5 million majority within the 3.1-strong population. The survey does not take into account the circa one million Albanians who migrated to western Europe after the collapse of communism.
Duing the 1990s, several new religious groups arrived in Albania, including evangelical churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and new Islamic sects such as the Selefi. Conversions and proselytising by the newly established Christian movements aroused speculation among intellectuals in Tirana that Albania no longer had a Muslim majority.
Some scholars even considered most of Albania’s Muslim population to be “crypto-Christians”, claiming that they are Muslim in appearance and Christian in terms of their beliefs. Source: Balkaninight
Jehovah’s Witnesses are considered a dangerous cult in many European countries and definitely under investigation because governments are concerned by the mind manipulation, child molestation cover-ups, breaking up of families due to shunning, as well as other atrocities taking place within the religion.
Victims of Watchtower hard-line organizational policies are speaking up to government officials about their experiences and they are responding with assistance.
Since the survey was intended for something else, I will make the [arguably risky] assumption that the sample selection was done well enough to get a representative sample for that purpose.
Is there any information that could help determine the fitness of the data for religious affiliation estimates? The sample size is certainly large enough, but is it really a geographically dispersed random sample? Given the extreme regional variation of religious affiliation in Albania, one could easily obtain even a sample of ten thousand families that are almost all of the same religion.