Enduring Legacy of the Habsburg Islam Policy

When Otto Habsburg, son of the last emperor of the Austria-Hungarian Empire Karl I, died in 2011, among those who prayed at the funeral in Vienna's Stephansdom was Mustafa Efendi Ceri?, the Reis ul-ulema of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was to honour the long-lasting relationship between the bygone empire of the Catholic Habsburgs with European Muslims. The cornerstone of this association was the 1912 Islam Act (Islamgesetz) of the Habsburgs, which made Austria-Hungary the first Catholic European state to confer official status to Islam. This book explores the legacy of this act and the ways in which it continues to impact the legal frameworks and political structures governing Islam and Muslim communities in the successor states of Austria-Hungary. It discusses the unique coexistence in Central Europe of centuries-old, 'indigenous' European Muslims with recently settled Muslim immigrants, and the trajectory of their interactions with the state. This volume is therefore not only crucial to the debate about European Islam but also to the question of the legal and political framework of Islamic religious communities in a secular Europe.

Dr. Sevgi Adak is Associate Professor and Head of Research at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC), London. Prior to joining AKU-ISMC in 2016, she was a research fellow at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. She is the author of Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic (I.B. Tauris, 2022), and co-editor of Tek Parti Dönemini Yeniden Düşünmek: Devlet, Toplum, Siyaset (Tarih Vakfı, 2022). She is co-editor of the book series In Translation: Contemporary Thought in Muslim Contexts at Edinburgh University Press and is on the editorial board of Contemporary Turkey joint book series of the British Institute at Ankara and I.B. Tauris. Dr. Thomas Schmidinger is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr and Lecturer at the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Sciences Oberösterreich in Linz. He has published several books on Muslim minorities in Europe and politics in the Middle East. He is the co-editor of the Vienna Kurdish Studies Yearbook and was the contributor for Austria and Liechtenstein for the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe (Brill, 2011–14). Recent publications include: The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria: Between A Rock and A Hard Place (Transnational Press London, 2020) and The World Has Forgotten Us. Sinjar and the Islamic State’s Genocide of the Yezidis (Pluto Press, 2022).