Why Muslims In War-Torn Kosovo Are Turning To Catholicism
(ANALYSIS) Kosovo, the war-torn Muslim-majority Balkan nation of 1.5 million people has witnessed a growing trend of Muslims converting to Catholicism. A group called the Decanski Movement Association has been promoting the voluntary exit from Islam, while also preserving Albanian national identity and values under the motto: “We are no longer Muslims.”
Catholicism is seen as the original faith of majority Albanians living in Kosovo, and neighboring Albania, by these representatives of the movement. They argue that emotionally, Albanians have always connected with the Catholic religion, but they remained in hiding as “crypto-Catholics” and practiced Catholicism only in their personal spaces of comfort.
In Kosovo, the population is 95.6 percent Muslims, 2.2 percent Catholic and 1.4 percent Orthodox. The remainder are are either Protestants or Jewish. The people spearheading the movement claim that both Islam and Serbian Orthodoxy are harmful to Albanians and their identity. As a result, Catholicism has become the faith most are turning to in recent years.
Historically, what is now Kosovo was conquered by the Romans before the Christian era and later ruled by Bulgarians and Serbs — both Christians — for centuries. Islam was imposed upon people in Kosovo in the year 1455 by the Ottoman Empire during its rule and later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which Kosovo was a part of before the nation split up in the early 1990s.
Most ethnic Albanians were forcibly converted to Islam when high taxes were imposed on Catholics by the Ottomans. In fact. the current movement of religious conversion to Catholicism is seen as a return of their original identity. Despite the large number of Islamic believers, Catholicism and Orthodoxy remain among the dominant religions in Kosovo, once an autonomous province of Serbia.
Things had started to change during the war in Kosovo between 1998 and 1999, when Serbian forces destroyed Islamic facilities, libraries and archives. In turn, Albanians destroyed Orthodox churches. Before NATO intervention in 1999, representatives of three religious communities held an interfaith dialogue to stop the misuse of religion for political reasons on both sides and called on all parties to no longer use religious symbols to promote violence and intolerance.
Years after the war ended, many Serbian Orthodox places of worship continued to be targeted. In 2016, an armed group of Kosovo Albanians affiliated with ISIS was arrested near the gate of the Visoki Dečani Serbian Orthodox Monastery. This monastery — built by Serbian King Stefan Decanski in the 14th century — is now protected by the NATO-led Kosovo Force and Kosovo's military. It remains a prime target for Kosovo Albanian political and religious extremists.
By contrast, Catholic places of worship have not been targeted by Albanians with the same regularity. As recently as 2023, of the 73 incidents involving violence against religious sites, 49 targeted Muslim properties, 22 Serbian Orthodox sites and just two were Catholic.
The most prominent Catholic figure in Kosovo is Saint Mother Teresa. Although born in neighboring Macedonia, she dedicated her life to religious service in Kosovo’s quiet village of Letnica, where she died in August 1997. The Church of the Blessed Lady in Letnica, where Mother Teresa embraced a life of religious devotion, serves a community of about 500 Catholics, mostly Albanians, with a few Croatians living among them.
To honor Saint Mother Teresa’s charitable work, which helped rebuild the lives of Albanians suffering from Serbian repression in the late 1990s, a high school was demolished to make way for a grand Italianate-style cathedral in the heart of Kosovo's capital Pristina.
Mother Teresa's charitable organization, which had 7,000 volunteers and 1,700 doctors operating in 92 clinics across Kosovo, provided essential services to the wounded, ran a maternity clinic in Pristina, assisted the disabled and elderly and also distributed food and clothing to over 30,000 needy families.
Many viewed the cathedral’s construction as a legacy of the late former President Ibrahim Rugova. He led Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority in their resistance against Serbian repression during the 1990s and sought to demonstrate to Europe that Kosovo, a young Muslim-majority nation, was open and tolerant.
Kosovo is also seeking recognition of its statehood from the Vatican, which has maintained a principled stance by respecting Serbia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and has not recognized Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008.
Representatives of the Catholic conversion movement argue that the right to religious belief is an individual right and that Kosovo, as a secular state, allows religious activities to operate freely without state interference.
The recent trends of religious conversion have not rattled Kosovo’s politicians. Kosovo has been long seeking membership into the European Union, selling itself to the world as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious place. These conversions are building a political premise for them to prove that Kosovo is closer to Europe by trying to establish Catholicism as central to their identity given Europe’s strained relationship with Islam.
Sonia Sarkar is a journalist based in India. She writes on conflict, religion, politics, health and gender rights from Southeast Asia. Her work has appeared in a range of international publications, including the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia and Al Jazeera.