Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paqarizi and Muslim Formation of Yugoslav Communist Party in Kosovo and Macedonia (1919-1921)
The long term research project focuses on the Muslim poppulation’s support to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in Kosovo and Macedonia. The special attention is given to the Sosyalist Fecri (Socialist Dawn), a newspaper of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) published in Skopje in 1920, in the Turkish language with Ottoman/Arabic script; The socialist poems of the Sheik of Melami Order in Prizren Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paqarizi; The internationalist political activism of two socialist figures from Skopje: Ferit Bayram and Nakiye Bayram.
Initially, Pykë-Presje published Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paçarizi’s revolutionary poems. Under this project, the poem of Haxhi Ymer Lutfi, first published in Sosyalist Fecri in 1920, is translated into Albanian.
Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paçarizi (1870-1928) was one of the most important poets living in Prizren. He studied in Istanbul, and in Alexandria, and was established as a mystical poet already by the end of XIX and at the beginning of XX centuries. He wrote in Turkish, Persian and Arabian. In Prizren, he was sheik of the mystical Melami Sufi Order. Because of his reputation as a poet within the Ottoman Empire and his position as a sheik of an Order, he was a respected public figure in Kosovo and Macedonia. In 1920, Ymer Lutfi Paçarizi wrote a long poem “To my Peasants' and Workers' Brothers”, urging Muslim population in Kosovo and Macedonia to vote for newly found Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). The poem was written in vernacular Turkish in Arabic orthography and read both in the public spaces in Prizren and Skopje, in the tekke (dervish lodge) of Melami Sufi Order, and was published in Sosyalist Fecri, the Turkish language newspaper of the CPY published in Skopje.
The research project is conjoined with the inquiry to understand the anti-colonial critique as a political response to the peculiarity of the economical 'backwardness' of Kosovo and Macedonia, the imperialist politics in the Balkans, and the agrarian question in the beginning of the 20th Century.