PRISTINA: There’s a widespread tradition among many Muslims that it’s better for women to pray at home than in the mosque. But in Kosovo, an old Ottoman-era tradition is bucking that trend, with religious authorities seeking to establish the training of women as spiritual teachers in mosques.
Each day, scores of women gather around Agime Sogojeva, a spiritual teacher known as a mualime, in the Haxhi Veseli mosque in Kosovo’s northern town of Mitrovica. They discuss the Qur’an, their rights as women and daily practices, in a scene unthinkable as little as a decade ago.
Sogojeva is one of some 100 female theologians aiming to revive Muslim traditions in Europe’s newest country. They teach at three Muslim high schools, at Muslim centers, or they work voluntarily.
The move to establish the religious training of women in mosques — where women are allocated places in a separate room from the men — is seen by some as a way to make Kosovo’s approach to Islam more gender-balanced at a time when many in the West view Islam as oppressive toward women.
Although in much of the Muslim world women teach other women, it is more common for that to occur at home or in event halls rather than in the mosques themselves. In some very conservative Islamic societies, women are generally distanced from mosques for social rather than religious reasons.
In Kosovo, there has been a significant increase in the number of women attending mosques in the past 20 years, said Besa Ismaili, a 43-year-old professor of English at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Pristina.
“The women were not only denied access, but their contribution was not recognized sufficiently,” she said. “We try to break up those stereotypes, those misconceptions.”
Kosovo has a strongly patriarchal society but also a long secular tradition, with religious identity significantly weakened during decades of communist rule. Most of its ethnic Albanian majority population is Muslim, but religious expression was generally lax even after the fall of communism in the late 1980s. The country declared independence from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after a 1998-1999 war against Yugoslav forces by ethnic Albanian fighters.
Recently, however, it has seen a rise of religiously-inspired violent extremism, with more than 300 Kosovo citizens joining the Daesh group as foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria since 2012. A quarter of those were women and children, often forced to follow their husbands into the war zone. About 180 Kosovo citizens are still active with extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, and the women are held in camps.
But Kosovo authorities claim no citizen has joined a fundamentalist group over the past two years, a development partly attributed to the empowering of women through the creation of female Islamic teachers.
“Extreme nationalism becomes less present when Islam is explained to women,” Ismaili says.
Funding for about a dozen of the female theologians comes from Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, which assists the Islamic Community of Kosovo, or BIK, the country’s executive for Muslims.
These female preachers are active members in about 800 mosques countrywide, said Resul Rexhepi, BIK secretary general, modernizing women’s life and increasing their role in society.
“Mualime are good for the whole society,” he said.
BIK officials claim that the introduction of the female Muslim preachers in the mosques has reduced sexual violence at home, assisted women who were raped during the war, helped mothers with their children’s education and increased the participation of women in voting in elections. There are no official figures to support such claims.
During the past decade or so some 1,100 girls have graduated from three Muslim high schools and 300 women from the Faculty of Islamic Studies.
Enisa Bekteshi, a 21-year old student, says it is easier for a female teacher to explain “some delicate issues a woman is reluctant to ask an imam, a man.”
Muslim preachers help Kosovo women learn, win their rights
Muslim preachers help Kosovo women learn, win their rights
- In Kosovo, there has been a significant increase in the number of women attending mosques in the past 20 years
- But Kosovo authorities claim no citizen has joined a fundamentalist group over the past two years
Why this US cold snap feels bone-shattering when it’s not record-shattering
The brutally frigid weather that has gripped most of America for the past 11 days is not unprecedented. It just feels that way.
The first quarter of the 21st century was unusually warm by historical standards – mostly due to human-induced climate change – and so a prolonged cold spell this winter is unfamiliar to many people, especially younger Americans.
Because bone-shattering cold occurs less frequently, Americans are experiencing it more intensely now than they did in the past, several experts in weather and behavior said. But the longer the current icy blast lasts – sub-freezing temperatures are forecast to stick around in many places — the easier it should become to tolerate.
“We adapt, we get used to things. This is why your first bite of dessert is much more satisfying than your 20th bite,” Hannah Perfecto, who studies consumer behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in an email. “The same is true for unpleasant experiences: Day 1 of a cold snap is much more a shock to the system than Day 20 is.”
‘Out of practice’ because of recent mild winters
Charlie Steele, a 78-year-old retired federal worker in Saugerties, New York, considers himself a lover of cold weather. In the recent past, he has gone outside in winter wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and has even walked barefoot in the snow. But this January’s deep-freeze is “much, much colder than anything I can remember,” he said.
Steele’s sense of change is backed up data.
There have been four fewer days of subfreezing temperatures in the US per year, on average, between 2001 and 2025 than there were in the previous 25 years, according to data from Climate Central. The data from more than 240 weather stations also found that spells of subfreezing temperatures have become less widespread geographically and haven’t lasted as long — until this year.
In Albany, about 40 miles from Steele, the change has been more pronounced than the national average, with 11 fewer subfreezing days in the last 25 years than the previous quarter century.
“You’re out of practice,” Steele said. “You’re kind of lulled into complacency.”
Coldest week someone under 30 may have felt
Climate change has shifted what people are used to, said several climate scientists, including Daniel Swain of the University of California’s Water Resources Institute.
“It’s quite possible that for anybody under the age of 30, in some spots this may well be the coldest week of their life,” Swain said.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said, “humans get used to all kinds of things — city noise, stifling heat, lies from politicians, and winter cold. So when a ‘normal’ cold spell does come along, we feel it more acutely.”
We forget how cold it used to be
People forget how extreme cold feels after just two to eight years of milder winters, according to a 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans have gone through a much longer stretch than that.
Over the past 30 years, the average daily low in the continental US has dropped below 10 degrees 40 times, according to meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But in the preceding 30 years, that chilly threshold was reached 124 times.
“People have forgotten just how cold it was in the 20th century,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said.
Their wake-up call came late last month, when the country’s average daily low dipped below 10 degrees three times in one week.
Regardless of how it feels, extremely cold weather presents dangers. People and vehicles slip on ice, power can go down, leaving people freezing in homes, and storms limit visibility, making commuting to work or even doing basic errands, potentially perilous. More than 110 deaths have been connected to the winter storms and freezing temperatures since January.
Shaking off our cold ‘rustiness’
As this winter’s frigid days stretch on, people adapt. University of San Diego psychiatrist Thomas Rutledge said people shake off what he calls their “weather rustiness.”
Rutledge explained what he meant via email, recalling the period decades ago when he lived in Alaska. “I assumed that everyone was a good driver in winter conditions. How couldn’t they be with so much practice?” he wrote. “But what I annually observed was that there was always a large spike in car accidents in Alaska after first big snowfall hit. Rather than persistent skills, it seemed that the 4-6 months of spring and summer was enough for peoples’ winter driving skills to rust enough to cause accidents.”
That’s Alaska. This cold snap hit southern cities such as Dallas and Miami, where it’s not just the people unaccustomed to the cold. Utilities and other basic infrastructure are also ill-equipped to handle the extreme weather, said Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
While this ongoing cold snap may feel unusually long to many Americans, it isn’t, according to data from 400 weather stations across the continental US with at least a century of record-keeping, as tracked by the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
Only 33 of these weather stations have recorded enough subzero temperatures since the start of 2026 to be in the top 10 percent of the coldest first 32 days of any year over the past century.
When Steele moved to the Hudson Valley as a toddler in 1949, the average daily low temperature over the previous 10 winters was 14.6 degrees . In the past 10 years, the average daily low was 20.8 degrees .
As a younger man, Steele used to hunt in winter and sit for hours on cold rocks.
“I could never do that now,” he said. “I’m rusty. I’m out of practice.”
