Governing Islam in Austria and Germany, with Farid Hafez

Saeed Khan (0:01)

Welcome to The New Books Network.

SPEAKER_2 (0:37)

This is Radio Reorient, exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post-Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism?

Saeed Khan (0:45)

As-salamu alaykum, listeners, and welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts today are myself, Saeed Khan, Amina Easat-Daas, Claudia Radiven, and His Amir.

Amina Easat-Daas (0:55)

Today's episode is an engaging conversation with Farid Hafez. Farid has written extensively on Islamophobia in Europe and beyond.

Claudia Radiven (1:02)

This conversation explored the way in which Islam is governed in Austria and Germany, and how this is shaped by the Austrian and German colonial past.

SPEAKER_2 (1:11)

Without further ado, let's listen in.

Amina Easat-Daas (1:13)

As-salamu alaykum, listeners, and welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. Today, we're joined by Farid Hafez. Welcome, Farid, and thank you for joining us.

I wanted to kick off the conversation perhaps talking about your most recently published book around Governing Islam in Austria and Germany. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the work and some perhaps the nuances in the context you're examining.

Farid Hafez (1:37)

Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. It's really a pleasure and very delightful. I've been a fan of your podcasts, so it's great to be here in person this time, not as a listener but a participant.

My latest book is Governing Islam in Austria and Germany from Colonial Times to the Present.

Initially, this project started in 2019 when I was drafting a research proposal basically for the European Research Council, the ERC. As you know, it's quite a competitive grant. It was a 1.2 million, working for five years with a bunch of people, pre-docs, post-docs. Initially, the idea was actually to be much more expansive, like it was not Austria and Germany only, but rather a couple of other European empires that were included as well. Now, as the history goes, one of the things that happened in the first round of reviews, basically four out of five were saying, thumbs up, great project, and one was saying, well, Austria never had a colony, so I was out of the game.

That determined basically the outcome of the potential ERC research grant. Then I sat down and I was thinking, okay, what to do with all of that? It's a lot of work that you put into such a research proposal. So I said, okay, as somebody who grew up in Austria, he's familiar with the German language. That's my first language basically. I said, okay, let's just do Austria and Germany and do a book project. So this is kind of like the origin of the story in terms of practically speaking.

And the idea goes a little bit even further back in 2015 when I was sitting, drinking a coffee with a friend of mine who is of Bosnian origin. And around that time, the Austrian government had implemented a new, came with a new legislation, the so-called Islam Act of 2015, which was largely viewed as being highly discriminatory against the Muslim population. And one of the things that sparked my interest back then was a comment that he made when he said like, a lot of what is going on here, I know from the times when the Austro-Hungarians went into Bosnia and basically colonized it or occupied it, that were his words. So I said like, okay, I already did a kind of like a post-colonial analysis a couple of years earlier than that, but that was in a way very superficial. It was like, you know, talking about what a lot of other scholars have done as well, ideas about Islam in Europe, but very abstract. So I said, okay, let's really look into that in terms of what is the colonial legacy of the way that European nation states today govern their Muslims in terms of drawing back to what they learned and experienced during the times of high imperialism, basically the 1880s until the beginning of World War I. And that kind of was like the origin of the story. So basically what I did was looking into how the German Kaiserreich and how the Austro-Hungarian Empire respectively governed their Muslim subjects, the Germans in Tanzania, Togo, and Cameroon, and the Austro-Hungarians in Bosnia. And I looked into basically two policy fields. I looked at one was religious bureaucracy or the institutionalization of Muslim religious authorities, and the other one was religious education.

And trying to understand the logic that governed the way these empires were structuring these two policy fields in the times of high imperialism, I then looked at how did that lasting legacy continue in the times of the Nazi era, when basically Austria and Germany became one in 1938, the Germans obviously in 1933, and then how that also continued throughout the post-war, post-colonial era, basically up until today. And that's kind of like the story. And the reason why I did that, there is a couple of different reasons why I felt the necessity also.