Surviving regime change: minority institutional resilience and Islamic education in North Macedonia

Why do minority educational institutions exposed to the same regime changes display different patterns of persistence, closure, and reconstruction? This article addresses this question through an asymmetric comparison of the Meddah and Isa Beg madrasa lineages in North Macedonia across the late Ottoman, monarchical Yugoslav, socialist, and post-1991 periods. Institutional resilience means preserving core organisational functions across political shocks, while closure, legacy persistence, reactivation, and legal conversion are treated as distinct outcomes. Drawing on Ottoman waqf and educational records, archival files, legal acts, institutional materials, specialised scholarship, and a semi-structured interview with Isa Beg Madrasa Secretary Avni Neziri, the analysis traces the interaction of communal legitimacy, organisational infrastructure, brokerage, and legal opportunity. Meddah persisted operationally under inter-war Yugoslavia through community finance, scholarly authority, and personnel reproduction, but closure constituted a failure of resilience, despite its enduring educational legacy. Isa Beg experienced discontinuity, reactivated in 1984–1985, and underwent curricular and legal conversion after 1991. The contested 2024–2025 recognition process demonstrates that political opening alone was insufficient: judicial blockage of administrative recognition made a new statutory route necessary. The comparison offers a falsifiable explanation of how minority institutions persist, fail, or are reconstructed after regime change.