There are three things that will never change in the contribution that Rexhep Qosja has to Kosovo and the history of Albanians.
Written by: Mero Baze
The first is part of the efforts to give Kosovo a state identity from the mid-70s onwards until its independence. His strong personality as a scholar of Albanian literature, as a writer, as a major contributor to the Albanian Language Orthography Congress and as an authoritative polemicist on the Albanian issue makes him the most influential representative of the intellectual elite of Kosovo, who unleashed so much national energy for the liberation of Kosovo and the awakening of Albanian society there.
In the absence of genuine cultural institutions for Albanians in Kosovo, the personalities of the Kosovo Writers' League filled all the gaps that Albanian society had in the former Yugoslavia in the last two decades. They offered Kosovo their cultural identity and national consciousness as its identity, identifying with it and representing it.
Anyone who had doubts about who Kosovo is and what Kosovars want, the only answer that would honor them was to mention or quote the names of Ibrahim Rugova, Rexhep Qose, Gazmend Zajmi, Azem Shkreli, Ali Podrimja and dozens of other intellectuals. They won the battle with the Serbian writers in the confrontation in Belgrade in April 1988.
Second is his contribution to Albanian culture. Rexhep Qosja is not the best writer of Albanian history, but he is undoubtedly the greatest historian of Albanian literature and an inspiring interpreter of it. You may never have read Naim Frashëri, but if you read Qosja’s “The Great Order,” you would be forced to browse our national poet.
The truth is that he has agreed to overcome the coldness of the historian to make our literature greater and more valuable, but this does not make him a deformer of the history of our literature, but rather an agitator of it in the conditions when Kosovo needed a cultural identity linked to Albania and its history.
Thirdly, Rexhep Qosja remained perhaps the only supporter of the national unification of Kosovo with Albania until the end of his physical life. And he did not remain only with rhetoric, but with attitudes. He was perhaps the rare, if not the only great intellectual of Kosovo, who wrote the Albanian language better than most of the intellectuals of Albania, the only polemicist who used Albanian as a deadly missile and perhaps the only political contributor whose only weapon was the Albanian language.
Just like the Albanian nation, which identifies itself as a nation because of its language and unites around language to be called Albanian and not around religion or history, he, by identifying with Albanian, managed to identify with the Albanian nation.
You can criticize or ignore everything else about Rexhep Qosa, as you can with any living person. You can mock his lack of political support, his endless quarrels with the Albanian political class, his epic clashes with Kadare over the Ottoman Empire and Europe, or his intellectual mannerisms, but for a great oak tree to stand, it needs roots, because the leaves change every year. And these three deep roots that Rexhep Qosa has planted in Albanian soil will keep it standing for a long time.
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