Albania

After the establishment of a Catholic university in the capital city of Tirana, Premier Fatos Nano offered political and financial support to help establish an Islamic university in Albania.

The primary purpose of the new Islamic university would be to produce home-grown leaders for Albania’s Muslim community. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Muslims have sought education in Islamic studies in such countries as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which tend to have a more fundamentalist approach to Islam than what traditionally existed in Albania.

The new Catholic university, Our Lady of Good Counsel, opened in November with nearly 300 students and degree programs in economics, medicine and dentistry, nursing and political science. A quarter of Albanians are Orthodox Christians, 10 percent to 15 percent are Catholic and the remaining are Muslim.

— The Times Higher Education Supplement
Feb. 11, 2005