One of Albania's best teachers of footballing fundamentals, he had a spell at the club last term before being dismissed by president Besnik Sulaj.

Albania's close ties with Yugoslavia lasted only until the latter's rift with the Soviet Union in 1948.

When the war ended on 11 November 1918, Italy's army had occupied most of Albania ; Serbia held much of the country's northern mountains ; Greece occupied a sliver of land within Albania's 1913 borders ; and French forces occupied Korçë and Shkodër as well as other regions with sizable Albanian populations such as Kosovo.

The country lacked a single recognized government, and Albanians feared, with justification, that Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece would succeed in extinguishing Albania's independence and carve up the country.

Led by Abaz Kupi, it largely consisted of Geg guerrillas, supplied mainly with weapons from the allies, who withdrew their support for the NLM after the communists renounced Albania's claims on Kosovo.

The NLF's strong links with Yugoslavia's communists, who also enjoyed British military and diplomatic support, guaranteed that Belgrade would play a key role in Albania's postwar order.

Albania's leaders abhorred the People's Republic of China's contacts with the United States in the early 1970s, and its press and radio ignored President Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972.

* May 28 – Albania's general election of May 26 is declared unfair by international monitors, and the ruling Democratic Party under President Sali Berisha is charged by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe with rigging the elections.

The total length of Albania's roads more than doubled in the first three decades after World War II, and by the 1980s almost all of the country's remote mountain areas were connected, at least by dirt roads, with the capital city of Tirana and ports on the Adriatic and Ionian Sea.

The Italian commander, General Alfredo Guzzoni, lands in Tirana and shortly afterwards the Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, also arrives by air and tells an Albanian delegation that the Italian troops have come to ensure order, prosperity, and progress, without interfering with Albania's existence as a nation.

Despite Alia's efforts to proceed with change on a limited, cautious basis, reform from above threatened to turn into reform from below, largely because of the increasingly vocal demands of Albania's youth.

Faced with an illiterate, agrarian, and mostly Muslim society monitored by King Zog's security police, Albania's Communist movement attracted few adherents in the interwar period.

However, Albania had no working class on which the communists could rely for support, and Marxism appealed to only a minute number of quarrelsome, Western-educated, mostly Tosk intellectuals and to landless peasants, miners, and other persons discontented with Albania's obsolete social and economic structures.

The NLF's strong links with Yugoslavia's communists, who also enjoyed British military and diplomatic support, guaranteed that Belgrade would play a key role in Albania's postwar order.

The town of Ersekë is built at the foot of mount Gramos (), Albania's fourth-highest mountain with a peak at 2525 m above sea level.

Albania's leaders abhorred the PRC's rapprochement with the United States in the early 1970s.

Kuçova is one of Albania's cities known for its oil industry along with Patos and Ballsh.

Soon Italians began taking positions in Albania's civil service, and Italian settlers were allowed into the country.

Starting in 1928, but especially during the Great Depression, the government of King Zog, which brought law and order to the country, began to cede Albania's sovereignty to Italy.

They began to concentrate primarily on securing and maintaining their power base by killing all their political adversaries, and secondarily on preserving Albania's independence and reshaping the country according to the precepts of Stalinism so they could remain in power.

Shortly thereafter, Yugoslavia became the first country to recognize Albania's provisional government.

Albania's first monarchy ended definitively when the restored central government declared the country a republic in 1924.

Therefore, the nation emerged as a Muslim-majority country after Albania's independence in November 1912.

The Session concerned the problems that the new Albanian government would face following Albania's independence.

The first issue was that the Albanian lek became revalued in terms of the Yugoslav dinar as a customs union was formed and Albania's economic plan was decided more by Yugoslavia.

* 1991 – A gigantic statue of Albania's long-time leader, Enver Hoxha, is brought down in the Albanian capital Tirana, by mobs of angry protesters.

Albania's political confusion continued in the wake of World War I.

In February 1920, the government moved to Tirana, which became Albania's capital.

The United States underscored its support for Albania's independence by recognizing an official Albanian representative to Washington, and in December the League of Nations recognized Albania's sovereignty by admitting it as a full member.

Orthodox peasants in Albania's southern lowlands loathed Zogu because he supported the Muslim landowners ' efforts to block land reform ; Shkodër's citizens felt shortchanged because their city did not become Albania's capital, and nationalists were dissatisfied because Zogu's government did not press Albania's claims to Kosovo or speak up more energetically for the rights of the ethnic Albanian minorities in present-day Yugoslavia and Greece.

The king's loyalists disarmed all of Albania's tribes except for his own Mati tribesmen and their allies, the Dibra.

During the Italian occupation, Albania's population was subject to a policy of forced Italianization by the kingdom's Italian governors, in which the use of the Albanian language was discouraged in schools while the Italian language was promoted.

Italy began penetration of Albania's economy in 1925, when Albania agreed to allow it to exploit its mineral resources.

The parliament elected Albania's largest landowner, Shefqet Bej Verlaci, as Prime Minister.

The Germans did not exert heavy-handed control over Albania's administration.

In December 1943, a third resistance organization, an anticommunist, anti-German royalist group known as Legaliteti, took shape in Albania's northern mountains.

In May they called a congress of members of the National Liberation Front ( NLF ), as the movement was by then called ) at Përmet, which chose an Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation to act as Albania's administration and legislature.

No reliable statistics on Albania's wartime losses exist, but the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration reported about 30, 000 Albanian war dead, 200 destroyed villages, 18, 000 destroyed houses, and about 100, 000 people left homeless.

Alp Arslan's victories changed the balance in near Asia completely in favour of the Seljuq Turks and Sunni Muslims.

In 1866, these dissenters filed a suit in the Bombay High Court against Hasan Ali Shah, claiming that the Khojas had been Sunni Muslims from the very beginning.

They are largely Sunni Muslims, in contrast to the Hazara, who are mostly Shias.

Before Maimonides concluded this, Sunni Muslims officially prohibited mutah ( i. e. temporary marriage ) relationships ; some commentators ' suggest that Maimonides changed his view in response to this development, similar to Gershom ben Judah's ban on polygamy being made after Christians had prohibited it.

Sunni Muslims believe and confirm that Muhammad's father-in-law Abu Bakr was chosen by the community and that this was the proper procedure.

Sunni and Shi ' a Muslims differ on the legitimacy of the reigns of the Khulfa-e-Rashideen, the first four Caliphs.

In 1305, after the issuing of a fatwa by the scholar Ibn Taymiyyah calling for jihad against all non-Sunni Muslims like the Druze, Alawites, Ismaili, and twelver Shiites, al-Malik al-Nasir inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Druze at Keserwan and forced outward compliance on their part to orthodox Sunni Islam.

The four schools ( or Madh ' hab ) of Sunni Muslims are each named by students of the classical jurist who taught them.

For example, Sunni Muslims would favor a Sunni fatwā whereas Shiite would follow a Shi ' a one.

Shi ' a Muslims do not use the six major hadith collections followed by the Sunni.

In 2010, a survey of Muslims in Lebanon showed that 94 % of Lebanese Shia supported Hezbollah, while 84 % of the Sunni Muslims held an unfavorable opinion of the group.

In every day terms, the imam for Sunni Muslims is the one who leads Islamic formal ( Fard ) prayers, even in locations besides the mosque, whenever prayers are done in a group of two or more with one person leading ( imam ) and the others follow by copying his ritual actions of worship.

Those who are considered imams in the context of scholarly authority by Sunni Muslims.

According to Edward G. Browne, the three most prominent mystical Persian poets Rumi, Sana ' i and Attar were all Sunni Muslims and their poetry abounds with praise for the first two caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattāb.

The majority of the kingdom's inhabitants were native Christians, especially Greek and Syrian Orthodox, as well as Sunni and Shi ' a Muslims.

Drafted by a treaty and a bill of sale, and constituted between 1820 and 1858, the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu ( as it was first called ) combined disparate regions, religions, and ethnicities: to the east, Ladakh was ethnically and culturally Tibetan and its inhabitants practised Buddhism ; to the south, Jammu had a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs ; in the heavily populated central Kashmir valley, the population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, however, there was also a small but influential Hindu minority, the Kashmiri brahmins or pandits ; to the northeast, sparsely populated Baltistan had a population ethnically related to Ladakh, but which practised Shi ' a Islam ; to the north, also sparsely populated, Gilgit Agency, was an area of diverse, mostly Shi ' a groups ; and, to the west, Punch was Muslim, but of different ethnicity than the Kashmir valley.

Consequently, the demographics of Lebanon were profoundly altered, as the territory added contained people who were predominantly Muslim or Druze: Lebanese Christians, of which the Maronites were the largest subgrouping, now constituted barely more than 50 % of the population, while Sunni Muslims in Lebanon saw their numbers increase eightfold, Shi ' ite Muslims fourfold.

Syria's refusal to exit Lebanon following Israel's 2000 withdrawal from south Lebanon first raised criticism among the Lebanese Maronite Christians and Druze, who were later joined by many of Lebanon's Sunni Muslims.

Palestinian refugees, predominantly Sunni Muslims, whose numbers are estimated at between 160, 000-225, 000, are not active on the domestic political scene.

Most Moroccans are Sunni Muslims, mainly of Arab-Berber, Arabized Berber or Berber stock.

Both Sunni and Shia Muslims agree al-Mahdi will arrive first, and after him, Jesus.

Category: Egyptian Sunni Muslims