Placing the national belonging ahead of any religious belonging was a political act witht the aim of popular mobilisation. - p. 190
The internal religious divide between Catholic, Christian Orthodox and Muslim Albanians, coupled with the threat of incoming ethnoreligious mobilisation in the neighborhood as noted by Hupchick, pressed the leaders of the Albanian Rebirth Movement to construct the idea of ethnic and national belonging as the supreme identity signifier in the ethnonationalist discourse. - p 185, 186
Such supreme value of supra-religious, national identity was projected ... - p. 186
... Frasheri and ideologists from the National Rebirth Movement were compelled to produce an idealised depiction of Albanians as being too ancient and too autochthonous to be identified with any religious belonging - p 187, 188
Hence the myth of Albanian 'indifference to religion‘ which, according to Malcolm, represents one of the "essential characteristics imputed to the Albanians"... - p 187
Pashko Vasa.... the poem attaches two important negative connotations of the religion: (a) it is of an alien extract (b) it is the source of ethnic/national divide - p 190
Placing the national belonging ahead of any religious belonging was a political act witht the aim of popular mobilisation. - p. 190
