Farid Hafez

Political Scientist, Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College, Senior Fellow at Bridge Initiative/Georgetown University

Institutionalizing Islam in Contemporary Austria

At the beginning of October 2014, a social democratic–conservative coalition government in Austria presented a draft for a new Islam Act. The unanimous voice of Muslims and the government declared that the existing Islam Act, which dated back to 1912, was now outdated. The government thus aimed to amend the existing act based on the […]

Starting in minute 7:30, my interview on the Austrian government’s attempt to close mosques. Listen here

Austria’s Ban of the Hijab

How can we contextualize the initiative for banning the hijab? What is this ban’s main function? Is this law just another step of introducing discriminatory laws that treat Muslims differently than other religious groups? What can the Islamic Religious Community do about these plans? Read my analysis here

The French Initiative to Change the Qur’an

On April 21, a manifesto was published in the French daily Le Parisien. It was signed by some 300 prominent people, intellectuals and politicians including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls. The manifesto “contre le nouvel antisémitisme (lit. against the new anti-Semitism)” basically stresses an older topic that is regularly popping […]

The Change of Austria’s Islam Politics

The paper “Breaking with Austrian Consociationalism: How the Rise of Rightwing Populism and Party Competition Have Changed Austria’s Islam Politics”, which was published in the journal Politics and Religion seeks to explain Austria’s Islam-related politics by first suggesting that it can be best understood in terms of neo-institutionalist path-dependency and consociationalist policy-making. This is due […]