If the religions of the world were to gather in a Great Museum, Bektashism would occupy a small room there. This small room, which in this case would be in Albania, would show some unpleasant things. And here's why.

The history of Bektashism is new, not even 800 years old. Bektashism is considered a deviation and is not supported by any major state like other religions. It is an outcast, a rebellious troublemaker and principle breaker, a bad reader of the Koran, and even a kind of graft.

Indeed, there is no religious product more grafted between Sunni Islam and Orthodox Christianity than Bektashism. This grafting of prehistoric trees took place in Albania in the 18th century, in the country where Islam and Christianity coexisted inside a bed, inside a house, inside a village, a neighborhood, and a province, and because of this long coexistence, a new product was born.

This was Albanian Bektashism. A graft. A way of survival.

After Skanderbeg, Bektashism was the only form of Albanian protest against the Turkish Empire. Christians who were violently converted to Sunnis gladly embraced Bektashism. The tekkes were more welcoming than the mosques, there you could sleep as much as you wanted, eat well, drink, and sing. As a Bektashi you could pray twice a day and have more time left for work. As a Sunni, you have to pray five times a day and you will work less. Women entered the tekkes freely whenever they wanted, in the presence of men.

Bektashism was more practical than Islam and this was convenient to some Albanians of the Middle Ages who were used to daily work, that unlike the Arabs, who cannot plant the desert and have a lot of time to pray, they had to work the fields every day as they had done in generations.

Bektashism was therefore an elegant rejection of Islam. It was a kind of opportunism. It's as if the Albanians were saying to the Turks: We will become Muslims but in our own way. And a not small part of the, became bektashi. But unlike the Orthodox who had Greece, the Catholics who had Austria-Hungary, and the Muslims who had Turkey, the Bektashis only had Albania.

That's why they didn't enter service for any other country, they weren't manipulated by any other country because nobody wanted them but Albania, which they also loved as the only Motherland. If Albania were bigger, there would be more of them.

But Bektashism was not always a jovial dervish who sat in the shade of a tekke, drank raki, and then sang and healed women with mystical methods. Its life has not been so happy every day.

Bektashism has had many battles with Sunni Islam which was the dominant religion in the Ottoman Empire. The Turks banned Bektashism twice and closed their gates. Once in 1826, when the Sultan killed 4000 Bektashi janissaries overnight, the second time in 1925 when all the dervishes were evicted by Turkey. Although Ataturk was secular, he did not close the mosques, but he did shut down the tekkes.

Not only because the Bektashi leader of 1925, Sali Njazi, who was expelled by Ataturk, was an Albanian from Kolonja, but mainly because of this Albanian tradition of opportunistic rejection of the Ottoman Empire, Ahmet Zogu sheltered the Bektashis. If he had not done it, Bektashism would have disappeared. No one else in the Balkans could accommodate the Bektashis, certainly not in Europe, but neither in Turkey, nor in Iran, and even less in Arabia. Bektashism was the bad boy of Islam that Albania adopted.

Bektashism was a way to suffer less, therefore the story of the Bektashis is the story of resistance to violence, during the fatal invasion of the Turkish Empire, which is the greatest disaster that has befallen us throughout history.

At about the same time when Europeans set out to colonize the Americas in the late 1400s, the Turks set out to conquer Europe. Since they failed several times, they stopped in the Balkans and there they disfigured us for 500 years.

When they fled, they left behind no bridge, no road, no port, no construction, no institution, no hospital, no school, but only dust and misery, and when I see that today they call us brothers and I honestly believe that they mean it, I think that the love relationship between brothers in medieval Turkey was something very bloody.

But you can't choose the invaders and we didn't choose the Turks. In a sense, they were our unlucky lottery.

The biggest damage the Turks did to us was that they stripped us of our desire for work. They turned us into lazy people, a quality that still shines in our chests. Not even the most patriotic historians can explain what work we did for 500 years, except that we fed and prayed, waiting for God to do for us what we did not do for ourselves.

The second damage was the destruction of our homogeneity as a people. This small division with a big impact, which some call a significant division with a minor impact, is a Turkish gift that we pretend we chose ourselves and refer to as tolerance in modern terms. In reality, we did not choose this gift; it was imposed on us. They forcibly converted us, taking away our children, property, and weapons—very often even our lives.

Therefore, when we emerged from this hell, they further massacred us by robbing our territories because we lacked the power to protect the lands where we lived. We emerged as a nation without a state because the Turks destroyed our state and nearly our nation. If it were not for the Turkish Empire, Albania would not have been divided as it was in 1913, and today it would be a country twice as large. Surely, all Albanians, or at least most of them, would live within their own state.

But it doesn't end there. If it weren't for the Turkish Empire, Albanian communism wouldn't have been so tragic. Communism was the last closing phase of the Ottoman Empire; it was a kind of blinding after a long time in the dark. The roots of Albanian communism are watered by the Turkish Empire, and this dirty water continues to flow through the foundations of our house even now as we speak.

This is the truth.

That is why the debate about Bektashism, as a project of resistance to the Turkish Empire, is so urgent, cunning, and dishonest today. The remnants of the Turkish Empire continue to haunt Bektashism, along with our forgotten memories.

The Bektashi showcase that could be presented would highlight the beauty of the Turkish Empire, of which the Bektashi themselves are a product. This aspect of history has been hidden from both the Albanians and the world very cleverly, to the extent that we are the only people who regard Skenderbeu as the father of the nation while simultaneously considering his enemies as brothers.

Being an atheist, I find this debate uninteresting. The more I understand, the more convinced I become that God does exist, but only in our minds. I believe religions have hindered the progress of humanity, stunted science, attacked the arts, and caused divisions in the world; therefore, they do not deserve a place within the state.

A modern state has only one task: to ensure that religions retreat equally, without encouraging competition among them to see who can move toward extinction the slowest.

The discussion about a religious state fascinates me as much as beautiful literature. I could write hundreds of pages imagining life inside the "state within the state," filled with music, toys, tambourines, entertainment, and dervishes on buggies managing the traffic of an unending religious pilgrimage.

A country where free ashura is served to sweeten the bitter tongues of the world would be much more exotic than the Vatican, where they give you nothing, and far more liberal than Mecca, where you must undress on command. Tirana and Albania could earn millions from this flow of pilgrims, but this is merely a literary fantasy.

The most intriguing part of this country—without police, army, taxes, elections, trade unions, televisions, traffic, ports, or airports—would be the Museum dedicated to the Albanian Resistance, of which the Bektashis are a part. In this Museum, I would serve every night as a guard, protecting it from those who wish to burn it, just as it was burned before.