Read: Why Germany’s new Muslims go to mosque less

Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, aspire for Turkey “to be more than a normal country, to be something greater,” Selim Koru, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, told me. “And they express that very often.” Religion, he added, can prove a more potent tool than conventional cultural outreach or force projection .

Turkey’s mosques are controlled by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, a state body that employs imams, writes sermons, and issues fatwas. It was founded in 1924, but grew rapidly under the AKP to become a more overtly political organ with an ambitious global remit. With well over 100,000 people now on its payroll, its budget has expanded more than fourfold since 2006, during Erdoğan’s first term as prime minister, to 12.5 billion lira ($2 billion) this year. That figure is orders of magnitude larger than many government ministries, and even the national intelligence agency. Diyanet spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The Diyanet often fills funding gaps in recipient countries, as it has done in Albania. In 1967, when Albania’s then-dictator, Enver Hoxha, mandated state atheism, the public practice of religion was outlawed, and places of worship were demolished or repurposed. After his downfall, the population, which identified as 57 percent Muslim, 10 percent Catholic, and 7 percent Orthodox, found itself without mosques or churches and lacked the means to build them. Foreign money began pouring in: Pope John Paul II laid the cornerstone for a Roman Catholic cathedral in 1993; a few years later, the Greek Orthodox Church began work on its own, one of the largest of its kind in Europe.

For a while, Tirana’s Muslim majority lost out. In the center of the capital, only Et’hem Bey Mosque had survived the Hoxha era, and it has room for just a few dozen at prayer time. Come festivals and holy days, worshippers had to gather outside, in Skanderbeg Square. So in 2010, the city’s mayor, Edi Rama, approved the construction of a new mosque, funded by the Diyanet. Erdoğan attended the groundbreaking ceremony five years later and thanked Rama, who by then was prime minister.

There have been gripes about Turkish involvement, and about the architectural style of the building, which will be called the Great Mosque of Tirana, but its construction is seen by many as only the latest foreign power to take an interest in their country, the Albanian historian Auron Tare told me. “There’s a religious competitiveness,” he said. “You have these different countries, these different sorts of religious bodies who are all converging here.”