Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Pristina
At school I was too Muslim. At the mosque I was too Kosovo. I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly 2 Muslim families in Pristina when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted office building on Oak Street — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At school, I was the kid who didn't eat pork sausages at birthday parties. The one who disappeared during Ramadan lunch breaks. The one who had to explain, every single December, why there was no Christmas tree at home.
But the mosque wasn't refuge either. The aunties would whisper if my hijab wasn't perfect. Uncle Ismail once told my father I was 'too Westernised.' I was 12.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a boy in my geography class asked if my father was a terrorist. He said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. She said nothing..
I want to tell you there was a dramatic turning point. There wasn't. It was slow. It was reading Surah Ad-Duha during a panic attack in my car and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding 2 Muslim girls in my first year at uni who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Pristina aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I'm 55 now. I work in technology. I pray five times a day — not because anyone is watching, but because those five pauses are the only times my brain goes quiet.
I stopped asking for permission to exist as both Kosovo and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.