Albania, the Muslim World's Most Pro-American State

The Muslim World's Most Tolerant Nation

By Nathan Thrall

TIRANA, Albania—On a summer night in downtown Tirana, crowded cafes, restaurants, and nightclubs surround darkened old Politburo villas in an area known as "the block," where once only the highest Communist Party officials were permitted to roam. In this Muslim-majority nation, tan brunettes bare pierced midriffs, young men down shots of the national drink—a grape brandy called raki—couples make out on strobe-lighted dance floors, and restaurants serve loin of pork.

Although one of the poorest countries in Europe, where less than two decades ago almost no one owned a car, Albania soon became the world's per-capita Mercedes capital, thanks, in part, to an infamous mafia that made this land a haven for trafficking in everything from sex slaves, arms, heroin, and cannabis to organs harvested from Serbs abducted from Kosovo (or so several journalists and a former U.N. chief war crimes prosecutor have alleged).

Far from implementing anything resembling Sharia, the only ancient law still practiced here is the medieval Kanun, a code whose most famous prescriptions regulate the hakmarrje, or blood feud, the subject of Man Booker International Prize-winner Ismail Kadare's novel Broken April and the primary means by which Albanian clans and families can restore their honor. (Blood-feuding continues here to this day; a 2001 study cited government statistics classifying vendetta and revenge as the motive for 73 percent of the country's violent deaths.)

So fierce was the inter-clan fighting over the centuries that when a woman's father and brothers had all been lost to feuding, she was obliged by the Kanun to become the man of the house by swearing an oath of lifelong virginity. So sworn, a virgin kept her vow on punishment of death but was ever after treated by her compatriots as a man.

more see: http://www.slate.com/id/2226840/entry/2226843/