What Exactly Should Be Banned?
Austria already has a state-backed definition. The Documentation Center Political Islam describes the phenomenon as an “ideology of domination” that seeks to reshape society, culture, the state or politics according to norms understood as Islamic when those norms conflict with democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
That definition, however, raises another problem. Those who seek to abolish democracy, support terrorism or establish an unconstitutional state can already be dealt with under criminal law, laws governing associations and existing state security legislation. Peter Bussjager, a prominent Austrian constitutional lawyer, therefore questions what an additional ban would achieve.
Islamic rules do not concern prayer and worship alone. They also address family life, inheritance, clothing, gender roles and the organization of society. Once believers derive political demands from those rules, Islam has already entered the political sphere. The decisive question is therefore no longer whether religion influences politics, but how far that influence may go.
Yet if the state, especially at constitutional level, were to reject any religious influence on cultural and social norms, it would have to apply the same principle to the country’s Christian churches. Otherwise, the state would risk treating religions unequally.
A Line Islamists Themselves Do Not Draw
The term “political Islam” itself largely comes from modern academic and Western political categorization. Its literal Arabic equivalent, “al-Islam al-siyasi”, also exists. But there is no distinct branch of the faith called “political Islam” that can be neatly separated from a purely private Islam. Even academic literature uses the term in markedly different ways.
Islamist movements in particular reject the very distinction on which Stocker’s proposal depends. For them, Islam is not merely a personal faith but a comprehensive order for the individual, society and the state. A central Islamist objective is precisely to overcome the separation of religion and politics and to subordinate the state order to rules legitimized by Islam.
A Western state is therefore attempting to draw a boundary within Islam that the very movements targeted by the law do not themselves recognize. The clear separation of religion and state, familiar to modern European societies, is simply absent from Islamist thought.
For Austria, that leaves only one genuinely workable boundary: concrete objectives and actions. Seeking to replace democratic government with religious rule, subordinate state law to Sharia or grant different rights on the basis of sex or faith are objectives that can be clearly defined and addressed by law.
That is the paradox at the heart of the proposal. The more precisely Vienna defines what it wants to ban, the less it ends up banning “political Islam” as such and the more it targets specific unconstitutional activities. But if it retains the sweeping term, the secular state itself would have to decide which Islam still counts as religion and which has already become political.
