The Semiotics of “Clash”: Signs of Islam as a New Poetic Device and a Non-Cultural Surplus in Albanian Literature

The object of the work is the poetics of Islam, namely to represent a model of the poetics that Islamic signs incite in Albanian literature. The aim has been to confirm or revise some clichés about the identity of Albanians, about their relationship with Islam, through Albanian literature, its practical essence, as one of the most significant activities, if not the most significant of the Albanian world. We have taken as an example the structural situation of the novella “The Bringer of Misfortune”, the encounters, inclusions and possible interactions of the sign of the veil. So, the aim has been not, as is traditional, speculative documentation, but the genuine literary situation of Islamic elements in literature. Judging the latter, that is, the ontological aspect of Islam in meeting some relatively stable expectations of the Albanian world, we have placed the novel in the horizon of the already well-known debate on identity between Ismail Kadare and Rexhep Qosja, in order to produce an integral, relatively dominant reading, a mechanism on which the structural process of “The Bringer of Disaster” can be described. By researching the text that prompted the debate, on the nature of the “European Identity of Albanians” and on the bibliography that it produced, we think that an integral reading appears as a structural driver for the text, in practice expressed as displacement, fluctuation, and a stable semiotic clash on the “signification” of Islamic signs, between cultural and fictional objects, and where identity as the final meaning of the debate excluded the “cultural content of Islam”, since Albanian identity as such was produced in “contact”, or through the necessity of contact with the West. We have also tried to research the semiotic situation of the novella “The Bringer of Disaster” and we have once again been confirmed the fictional appropriation of the cultural signs of Islam, which, combined with the integral of reading, marks the poetics of the novella on the clash between Islamic cultural signs and fictional (secular) signs, which goes towards a semiosis of opposition, apostasy, exorcism of everything marked by Islam, towards their deconstruction. The implications are indeed numerous, but what interests us, at least up to this point of the work, the cultural significance of all this, leads us towards a situation where the poetics of Islam is equivalent to a relationship of clash, as the essence of the only stable identity of Albanians.   Received: 30 July 2025 / Accepted: 27 August 2025 / Published: 12 September 2025