In the 1990s, Muslim Albanians placed their focus on restoring institutions, religious buildings and Islam as a faith in Albania that had overall been decimated by the communists.[1][85] Hafiz Sabri Koçi, (1921–2004) an imam imprisoned by the communist regime and who led the first prayer service in Shkodër 1990 became the grand mufti of the Muslim Community of Albania.[76] During this time the restoration of Islam in Albania appealed to older generations of Muslim Albanian adherents, those families with traditional clerical heredity and limited numbers of young school age people who wished to qualify and study abroad in Muslim countries.[85][86] Most mosques and some madrassas destroyed and damaged during the communist era had by 1996 been either reconstructed or restored in former locations where they once stood before 1967 and in contemporary times there are 555 mosques.[85][5] Muslim religious teachers and prayer leaders were also retrained abroad in Muslim states or in Albania.[85] The Muslim Community of Albania is the main organisation overseeing Sunni Islam in Albania and during the 1990s it received funding and technical support from abroad to reconstitute its influence within the country.[85] Due to interwar and communist era legacies of weakening Islam within Albania and secularisation of the population, the revival of the faith has been somewhat difficult due to people in Albania knowing little about Islam and other religions.[6][7][8][9] Emigration in a post-communist environment of Albanians, many Muslim, has also hindered the recovery of religion, its socio-religious structures and organisation in Albania.[88] In contemporary times the Muslim community has found itself being a majority population that is within a socio-political and intellectual minority position with often being on the defensive.[77] Political links also emerged in the 1990s from parts of the Sunni Albanian community with the then new Albanian political establishment of whom some themselves were Muslim Albanians.[77] The Sunni community is recognised by the Albanian state and it administers most of the mosques while also viewed as the main representative of Muslims in the country.[10] As such it interprets its position as safeguarding an Albanian specific version of Islam which follows on institutional and ideological models established during the post-Ottoman state-building period and have gradually gained the status of an Albanian tradition.[90] There are a few prayer houses located throughout Albania and one mosque run by the Sufi Rifai order.[87]