After Albania, we would head to Montenegro before making our way back to Sarajevo. So far, we had visited Muslim communities in Serbia, Kosovo and North Macedonia, marvelling at their history and the wealth of their heritage. I’d travelled with my family from London to start the journey in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The trip would become the premise for my new book. I was hoping to see this part of the continent as he did, when it really was Muslim Europe – under Ottoman rule at the height of the empire’s powers. I’d come to Gjirokastër as part of a family road trip to seek out Europe’s living indigenous Muslim presence and to follow in Evliya’s footsteps. This is the literary heritage of modern travel writing.Ī cobbled street in the old bazaar district of Gjirokastër. Yet their writings were often presented as romantic wanderings and were heavily relied upon by many later travel writers for socio-historical context. They viewed the world from a lofty position where they felt themselves superior by default. These were people travelling either for the purposes of colonising a place or part of the class of people doing so. Earlier we had heard the adhan from the town’s solitary mosque, but no one rushed to get to the prayers, nor was there any remainder of the numerous institutes of Islamic education Ergiri had once been famed for.Įvliya’s translated works offer one of the only Muslim perspectives on Muslim Europe – one that embraces the culture and heritage as its own and not something foreign, alien or inferior.Īll other travel writing on the region in the English language had been authored by those from the same narrow demographic: white, western, privileged, Christian and, more worryingly, of the colonial classes. It was clearly no longer a place where people were “addicted to prayer”, as Evliya had described it. Without his translated works, Idar and I would never have known just how Muslim Gjirokastër had once been. I had read numerous works on the Balkans, but none acknowledged the region’s Muslim culture the way Evliya did. I remember no other representation of Islam in Albania in the entire movie.

In Hollywood’s Taken trilogy, Albania is reduced to the abode of ruthless, violent human traffickers, and the only reference to their faith that I can recall is when they are seen swearing by Allah to avenge their son’s death by killing the film’s white American hero.

These stereotypes have been reinforced by modern popular culture. Photograph: Tharik HussainĪlbania’s popular image today is built on the negative representations by early 20th-century white western travellers such as Edith Durham, who depicted Albania as lawless, and Rose Wilder Lane, who said Albanians were “living in the childhood of the Aryan race” – meaning they were behind her in the evolutionary process. An Ottoman merchant’s house in Gjirokastër, Albania.

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