Mulla Idriz Gjilani

He was born in 1901 in the village of Velekinca in Gjilan, at the time part of the Ottoman Empire. He graduated from the Mullah Halim Cernica's mejtep, and completed his studies in Gjilan for administrative work in 1911. He attended his education at the Atar Medrese in Gjilan. After military service in 1924-25, he graduated in 1926 with Ixhezetnamé, becoming an imam and receiving the title of mullah.^[2] He was in contact with the "National Defense of Kosovo" Committee and supported the Democratic Party of Ferhat Bey Drago, where he worked against the expulsion of the Albanian population in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was the head of the imam at the Padić mosque in Karadak in 1927-32 and later in Hogosht of the Lower Moravian until 1938 when he went to the post of member of Mexhlis Ulema in Skopje, who administered the religious life of Albanian lands under the state administration of Yugoslavia.^[2]

During the Second World War, as the first of the faithful of the Islamic religion in the Gjilan / Gnjilane Prefecture, Mufti and Sub-Mufti, and as a military imam of the IV Regiment of the Albanian Kingdom Army in Pristina. He commanded a paramilitary force under the flag of the Albanian Kingdom, fighting for ethnic Albania against the Yugoslavs and the Bulgarians, which he handed over by the fall of 1944. After that he lived hiding from the Yugoslav Partisan regime,^[3] until the night of 25-26 November 1949, when Mulla Idriz was burned alive by the Partisans. Months before his death, he professed that Islam and Albanianism do harmonize.^[2]