A MEGA-MOSQUE is growing on George W. Bush Street in Tirana, the Albanian capital, near the country’s parliament. When finished, it will be the largest mosque in the Balkans—one in a long string of such projects bankrolled by Turkey. By its own estimate, Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs, known as the Diyanet, has helped build over 100 mosques and schools in 25 countries. In Bosnia, Kosovo, the Philippines, and Somalia, it has restored Islamic sites damaged by war and natural disaster. In Gaza it is rebuilding mosques destroyed by Israeli military operations in 2014. Current projects alone are expected to cost $ 200m. All of the money comes from private donations, insists Mazhar Bilgin, a senior Diyanet official.
Critics suspect Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of deploying mihrabs and minarets to revive his country’s imperial heritage in former Ottoman lands. Secular nationalists in Albania, which was strictly atheist under communism, bristle at seeing their parliament dwarfed by a mosque, and urban planners complain about the project’s bland, “McOttoman” design.
But most Albanians are sympathetic. While post-…