On the southern edge of Tirana, the Albanian capital, where the concrete blocks of the city give way to hills and scattered olive groves, there is a place that seems oddly suspended in time. A low, whitewashed building with arched colonnades and a modest green dome houses the world headquarters of the Bektashi Order—a Sufi tradition within Islam known for its open-mindedness and mystical spirit. Here, amid the drifting scent of incense and the murmur of prayers, one man quietly tends to the task of repairing the invisible threads that tie humanity together. He is Baba Mondi, born Edmond Brahimaj, and for the past decade, he has served as the eighth Dedebaba, the global spiritual leader of the Bektashi community.
At sixty-six, Baba Mondi carries himself with the stillness of someone who has made peace not only with the world but with its inevitable contradictions. His white beard, full but neatly trimmed, frames a face marked more by kindness than by the stern authority often associated with religious leadership. When he speaks, it is softly, deliberately, often punctuated by long silences that seem less like hesitations and more like invitations—to listen more carefully, to think more deeply.
He was not always a man of the spirit. Born in 1959 in Vlorë, a city where the Mediterranean light seems to bleach even the harshest memories, he grew up under Enver Hoxha’s atheistic dictatorship. Religion, in the Albania of his youth, was not merely frowned upon; it was outlawed. Crosses were torn down, mosques shuttered, imams and priests sent to labor camps. Edmond, like most of his generation, found a sanctioned path in the military. He graduated from the Albanian Military Academy, entered the People’s Army, and for a time lived the rigid, joyless life of a socialist officer.
But when communism collapsed in the early 1990s, the old faiths, buried but not broken, stirred to life again. The Bektashi Order, which had survived clandestinely in the countryside and in diaspora, resurfaced. It was during this great unburying that Edmond Brahimaj felt a different kind of calling. He entered the Bektashi path in 1992, was initiated as a dervish in 1996, and gradually, almost inevitably, rose to prominence within the order.
The Bektashis are an oddity within the Islamic world, and perhaps that is precisely why Baba Mondi has found a growing audience beyond it. Their tradition, born out of 13th-century Anatolia, embraces mysticism, metaphor, poetry. They venerate both the Prophet Muhammad and Ali, but also figures like Jesus and even non-Muslim saints. For them, faith is not about strict adherence to law but about the refinement of the soul. Wine, poetry, music—all forbidden in more puritanical interpretations of Islam—are considered doors to the divine.
Under Baba Mondi’s leadership, the Bektashi Order has leaned into this open-heartedness, offering a living counterpoint to the narrative that Islam must inevitably be austere or severe. His headquarters has become a quiet hub of interreligious dialogue, where imams, priests, rabbis, and secular scholars meet, talk, and, just as often, share a glass of homemade raki.
The core of his message is disarmingly simple: religions are many, but humanity is one. “We all worship the same God,” he often says, “even if we call Him by different names.”
This might sound platitudinous were it not for the urgency behind it. In a world increasingly defined by religious polarization, Baba Mondi’s voice is a reminder that coexistence is not a utopian dream but a lived reality—one that Albania itself, with its long tradition of Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic communities cohabiting peacefully, exemplifies.
Still, coexistence is not passivity. Baba Mondi’s tenure has seen the Bektashi Order more actively engaged in international religious diplomacy than ever before. He has met with Pope Francis in Rome, the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul, and Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. His travels are less about formalities than about building an informal, personal network of trust among the world’s faiths—a kind of invisible fraternity of those who still believe that dialogue matters.
At home, he has faced more tangible threats. In neighboring North Macedonia, where Bektashi shrines have been seized and vandalized by Wahhabi-influenced groups, the Order’s distinctive openness has made it a target. Yet even in the face of extremism, Baba Mondi’s response has been characteristically measured: he condemns violence not with outrage, but with sorrow, framing it as a tragic failure of understanding rather than an act of cosmic enmity.
In recent years, Baba Mondi has embarked on a project that, if successful, could cement his legacy far beyond Albania. With the support of Prime Minister Edi Rama, he has championed the idea of granting the Bektashi headquarters sovereign status—creating a “Muslim Vatican” at the heart of Tirana. The idea is ambitious, almost audacious: a microstate of 0.11 square kilometers dedicated not to a political cause, but to the preservation and promotion of a tolerant, mystical Islam.
To the skeptics who see in it an unnecessary complication, Baba Mondi offers a gentle but firm correction: this is not about power, but about sanctuary. “We must create a space where faith can breathe,” he says, “away from politics, away from violence, away from fear.”
The microstate would serve as a center for interfaith education, scholarship, and pilgrimage. It would be, in his words, “a light for those who seek God through love, not fear.”
Whether this vision will come to pass remains uncertain. The politics of the Balkans are notoriously labyrinthine, and the idea of creating a new sovereign entity, even a spiritual one, is fraught with logistical and diplomatic hurdles. But Baba Mondi seems unbothered by the obstacles. For him, the attempt itself is part of the work: to keep building, stone by stone, a house spacious enough for all faiths.
When he speaks to young people—many of whom, in Albania as elsewhere, are increasingly secular—his message is not one of scolding or recrimination. Instead, he urges them to rediscover a spirituality that is not about fear or obedience, but about the cultivation of wonder, humility, and gratitude. “The real tekke,” he tells them, “is the heart.”
It is a small but radical idea: that faith is not an institution, not a doctrine, but a quality of the soul, accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Late in the afternoon, as the call to prayer echoes softly across the compound, Baba Mondi can often be found sitting quietly in the courtyard, greeting visitors without ceremony. There is no retinue, no armored car, no air of untouchability. Instead, there is a kind of porousness about him, as if he were less a man than a medium—through whom old wisdoms and ancient hopes still try, against all odds, to make themselves heard.
In a century marked by religious revival and religious war, by the spectacular failures of both militant atheism and militant faith, Baba Mondi’s slow, stubborn vision feels almost revolutionary. It is a revolution conducted without slogans, without swords—only by the patient work of conversation, hospitality, and prayer.
He knows, of course, that he will not live to see the full fruits of what he is planting. But that has never been the point. In the Bektashi tradition, what matters is not the outcome, but the offering: a life made into a bridge, a door, a light.
And so, each day, in a small corner of Tirana, while the world rushes and clamors and fractures, Baba Mondi sits quietly, tending to the work of peace as one tends to a garden—not expecting it to bloom tomorrow, but knowing that someday, somewhere, it will.
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