I am Muslim.. Novel. “Onufri”, Tirana 2025.
Writes: Agim Vinca
Ben Blushi (1969) is today the most widely read Albanian writer.
His works are “bestsellers.” But before I talk about him as a writer, let me evoke a memory. I am the only person in this room, if not in all of Kosovo, who met Ben Blushi when he was a child.
This happened in 1974, when I first went to Albania. It was a coincidence. The meeting took place on the boulevard, near the ministry buildings. It was a Sunday. I was returning from the National Library to the hotel (at that time the National Library was also open on Sundays before noon, until 12 noon), while Ben and his father, Kiçon, had gone for a walk on the boulevard or were going somewhere.
Ben must have been five years old or a little more then, and his father, Kiço, was holding his hand. We met face to face and greeted each other. We talked a little while standing. I had written something about Kiço Blushi as a writer, I think about a book of his stories, and he thanked me. His son was impatient; he was pulling his father to leave. He seemed a bit wild to me. But it wasn't his fault, I was a stranger and he hadn't come out to listen to conversations between two adults, talking nonsense (about literature), but perhaps to visit his grandparents, to see a show at the Puppet Theater, or to have some ice cream in one of the Tirana confectioneries.
I remember that meeting well, I don't know about Ben. I'm evoking it here tonight to show that Ben Blushi, like all of us, was a child, but unlike us, he was also a character in a literary work, his father's famous novel Beni eçen svete, which is also referred to in the work being promoted tonight here in Prizren. ("... I've always walked alone. In fact, I've done even more. I walked alone and alone, p. 214). While we're here, let's say that our children really liked the novel Beni eçen svete (it may seem incredible, but my son, for example, read it seven times), and we've all seen it as a film with a script by the author and directed by Xhanfize Keko. (One of the best Albanian films of the communist era). When talking about Ben Blushi as a writer, one fact cannot be left out: three generations of writers in one family: grandfather, father, son (grandson).
Grandfather, Professor Dhimitër Shuteriqi, researcher and writer; long-time president of the Albanian Writers' League; father, the young writer Kiço Blushi, who calls himself the daughter of the "patriarch of letters" and the son, or rather the grandson, who came onto the scene relatively late as a writer (he debuted in 2008, with the novel Të jetosh Fejesa, plaku, televizori (1971). 1 1 në ishol), but who is surpassing his predecessors not only in terms of the circulation of his works and the number of readers, but also in terms of his fame as a writer. Almost every work by Ben Blushi, from the first, Të jetosh në ishol (2008), to the latest, Jam muşliman (2025), has sparked and continues to spark debate, and not only debate, but also passion. Why? First of all, with the topics they address, which are often taboo topics, with the ideas they express, which are often heretical ideas, but also with the way they address the topics and articulate the ideas, breaking down the wall of censorship and prejudice.
The famous Mexican writer, Octazio Paz, in one of his essays, says: “Politics is dialogue, and dialogue opens the doors of peace.” Like the Mexican Nobel laureate, I would say that literature is also dialogue – dialogue about the state and problems of society, about its past, present, and future, but a nobler dialogue, which opens the doors of the soul and mind. There must be understanding for this approach of the writer, as well as for the freedom of expression and the opinion of the Other, which is undoubtedly one of the fundamental values of any civilized society.
For me as a reader and scholar of literature, Ben Blushi is a critical, subversive writer, who creates, as he himself says on one occasion, the so-called “literature of vices” (“vices are the wheat, flour and bread of literature”, p. 173), while from the point of view of poetics his literature is a combination of autofiction, dystopia and thriller. He is a writer with a rich imagination and a master of narration, while frequent devices of his style are irony, grotesque, paradox and wordplay (jeux des mots). (It is enough to see the play with the word shariat, p. 24 and with Turko-Arabic names that begin with the letter “xh”, p. 105).
I am not using the word postmodern, because it is widely abused among us today. Where do I see Blushi's place in the constellation of stars of today's literature? Aware that any comparison is lame, I would say that this writer is somewhere between, say, Umberto Eco, Saramago, Dan Brown and the Frenchman Michel Houellebecq. I don't know how much you know the American David Foster Wallace, who dreamed of writing the capital work Infinite Jest as a literary history of humanity, but who ended his life by suicide? Or is Ben Blushi an Albanian Salman Rushdie, who I personally (and I believe you too) would not want to suffer his fate, not as a writer, but as a person, as a citizen? The leitmotif of the novel I Am a Muslim is the relationship of Albanians with Islamism, as a religion, as an ideology, as a philosophy and as a way of life.
Blushi distinguishes between Muslims and Islamists (p. 153), as well as between traditional Albanian Islam, mild and liberal, and today's radical Islam, which places religion above the Nation and the Fatherland, Islam above Albania (p. 152). Those who cover the beauty of women with burqas and who seek the expulsion of Skanderbeg from national memory and history are Islamists and as such pose a danger to Albanians as a nation. (In the novel before this one, 2 Komploti, Blushi shows what Albania will look like in twenty years, in the years 2043-2044, when Albanians may be a minority in their own country and when Albania's defense minister may be an Afghan. This is a typical dystopian work).
It is said that the first rule of any successful novel is not to be boring. Ben Blushi's novels may be liked or not, but they never leave the reader indifferent, making him, as Maupassant said in his time, laugh or cry, or both at the same time. Blushi is a writer who speaks about the spicy problems that Albanian society faces today.
Other writers of his generation, both in Albania and Kosovo, also address these problems, but not with such force and eloquence. Finally, using a word of Islamic origin, which is often found in the book in question, I would say that Ben Blushi is a “kafir writer”, in the heretical sense, who touches on taboo topics and who treats them freely.
(Speech given at the promotion of the book "I am Muslim" at the "Altera" bookstore in Prizren, on April 15, 2026)
t7 live
