On November 2nd, a supporter of the "Islamic State" shot four people in downtown Vienna before he himself was shot by the police. 23 people were injured, some of them seriously. The first statements by Prime Minister Kurz and various other government representatives were very inclusive and emphasised that this was not a fight against Muslims. However, when the Ministry of the Interior came under increasing pressure - as it was later revealed that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism apparently could have prevented the attack if corresponding indications from Slovak and German colleagues had been heeded - the statements from the Federal Government changed. The coalition government of the conservative ÖVP and the Greens took a harder line. Two mosques were closed, including one that had previously belonged to the official Islamic Religious Community.
Finally, on November 9th, 930 police officers in four provinces entered 60 flats, business premises, and offices in order to investigate the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria. This was done in the framework of operation "Luxor," conducted by the public prosecutor's office in Graz. The Council of Ministers decided to introduce preventive electronic surveillance of dangerous individuals and preventive detention for alleged dangerous former Terrorists they have served their sentence. This means that de facto unlimited detention beyond a prison sentence would be possible. Prime Minister Kurz even announced his intention to ban and prosecute "political Islam" a project that is unlikely to be legally feasible and implementable under the rule of law.
In the meantime, those affected have reported rather rough treatment. A number of elderly gentleman woke up looking into a gun barrel. Living quarters are said to have been vandalised, and there are even allegations of bodily injuries. The allegations made by the public prosecutor's office in Graz are correspondingly dramatic. The Muslim Brothers are accused of membership in an anti-state association, a terrorist organisation, and a criminal organisation as well as financing terrorism. Apart from the Liga Kultur, the Anas Schakfeh Private Foundation, and some other associations, others were also affected. This includes the founding members of the Muslim Youth of Austria (MJÖ) and a political scientist who had in recent years primarily conducted research into Islamophobia and was partly financed by Turkey.
Even though we do not yet know exactly what was found in the house searches and the Ministry of the Interior itself clarified that there was no connection with the jihadist terrorist attack in Vienna one week before, the accusation of membership in a terrorist organisation (§ 278b) is still surprising.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the elementary school teacher Hassan al-Banna and spread throughout the Arab world and Europe as a result of many members fleeing persecution under Gamal Abdel Nasser. It has never been considered a terrorist organisation in Europe. It is undisputed that this organisation supports a diffuse demand for unity of state and religion, an extremely antiquated image of women, and anti-Semitism, and it is not exactly made up of model democrats. However, very different national developments within the movement have taken place in the course of the second half of the 20th century, ranging from the emergence of legal parties within a multi-party system, as in Tunisia, to the establishment of armed civil war militias in Syria or Hamas in Palestine. Somewhere in between are the Egyptian, Algerian, and Iraqi Muslim Brotherhoods.
In the past, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has also given rise to groups that can justifiably be considered as terrorist. Sayyid Qutb, who became more and more radical as a result of state persecution under Nasser before he was hanged by the regime in 1966 is still considered a martyr of the movement by many Muslim Brotherhoods today. At the same time, however, his writings laid an important ideological foundation for modern jihadism. As much as jihadist groups later referred to Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood did not draw similar conclusions from his works as his jihadist successors did. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood remained in a diffuse interplay between the longed-for participation in a multi-party democracy and the desire for an authoritarian unity of state and religion.
In the European diaspora, the Muslim Brothers did not strive for an entirely unrealistic assumption of power but tried to create their own Islamic institutions, influence Muslim communities, and support their organisations at home. As a result, there was never a joint-acting Muslim Brotherhood in Austria, but rather various Syrian, Egyptian, and Tunisian Muslim Brothers, some of which were severely divided. In addition, there are individuals who try to work politically in German-speaking Muslim communities and are at least somewhat influenced by the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood. All these activities are certainly aimed at achieving hegemony within Muslim communities and influencing political debates in the country but are not aimed at establishing a terrorist underground organisation.
It is, of course, problematic if Turkey or Arab states finance Islamophobia research at Universities; but this is not Terrorism! After all, the universities themselves have opened their doors to political influence under pressure to obtain as much third-party funding as possible.
As long as none of the parties involved has demonstrated financial support for the armed struggle of Hamas or one of the Syrian militias, it will be difficult to link the suspects to terrorism. We can therefore wonder what was actually found during the house searches. The questions asked during the interrogation of several suspects seem to be more a test of opinion than a suspicion of terrorism. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for example, was interested in how many friendships with native non-Muslim Austrians were cultivated, what people thought about dialogue with Israel, how they felt about the marriage of underage girls, or what they understood under the term "Islamophobia". These are all very interesting political questions, but they have nothing to do with terrorism.
In the house search warrant issued by the public prosecutor's office in Graz, the suspicion of terrorism is primarily based on declaring the entire Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, much like Egypt did after the military coup in 2013.
In Europe, it is not a single organisation but rather a milieu with real members and a specific environment influenced by ideology. However, its real members are also members of the Tunisian, Syrian, or Egyptian Muslim Brotherhoods, and some of them are at odds with each other.
It is therefore no easy undertaking to obtain a precise definition required for criminal law - not even for authorities who want to investigate this area, as the "order for search, seizure and immediate interrogation" issued by the public prosecutor's office in Graz shows. Last Monday, in the early hours of the morning, it led to dozens of suspects being dragged from their beds, some of them by armed units. The Public Prosecutor's Office confiscated mobile phones, data carriers, and written records and is now evaluating them in order to clarify whether the suspicion of terrorism is justified.
In addition to wire-tapping protocols, which cannot be quoted here for legal reasons, there are also many entries from social media platforms demonstrating hostility towards the Egyptian regime or the use of the R4bia salute, which commemorates the massacre of the square at Rābiʿa Square on 14 August 2013 and is also - but not exclusively - used by Muslim Brotherhoods. It is not only money flows from Qatar to the League of Culture that are worth reading but also the quoted wiretapping protocols of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter Terrorism.
For example, we learned that a prime suspect is not only "a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood" but also supported the candidacy of the AKP-related migrants list SÖZ for the local parliament in Vienna, whose founder apparently does not have much respect for his top candidate. But one can also listen to conflicts within the community or when a political scientist says on the phone about another suspect that he would mention him in an Islamophobia report because of his "kissing ass without any dignity”. So at least we now know how to make it as a Muslim imam in the Islamophobia report financed by the Turkish SETA foundation, which is close to the Turkish AKP-government.
The same political scientist published a blog post after the house search in which he compared it to the "Kristallnacht" and the repression against the Uighurs in the People's Republic of China. However, this case also shows how difficult it has become to deal with these issues. It was not the scientific community's criticism of these comparisons that was taken up by the media but rather Interior Minister Nehammer and Integration Minister Raab, who effectively rebuked the political scientist in public, thus creating the impression of political influence, which makes critical debate with such far-fetched comparisons more difficult rather than easier. What is being ignored here is the truly scandalous misuse of science for the publication of Islamophobia reports, which seemingly tend to be lists of enemies rather than scientifically-based works.
As curious as such passages sound, it remains unclear exactly why this seemingly divided community should constitute a common terrorist group. In the search warrant, the Muslim Brotherhood is not only accused of anti-Semitism, but in the same sentence it is accused of seeking to establish an Islamic state called "Caliphate" and "United States of Arabia" "with Jerusalem as its capital". The house search warrant further claims that writings of the Muslim Brotherhood provided "the basis for the modern Jihad ideology".
Entire paragraphs of the statements about the Muslim Brotherhood are copies of Wikipedia articles, without any reference but with some exaggerations. Others are based on an expert opinion by a historian and a political scientist who in recent years repeatedly made a name for themselves with publications that were emphatically critical of Islam but at least controversial on the academic scene. Their expert report claims, for example, that "the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the founding of the Islamic Religious Community (IGGÖ)” and that "Muslim Brotherhoods or persons ideologically close to them" founded associations or institutions such as the Islamic Religious Education Academy (IRPA).
Although the suspects are accused of membership in an anti-state association, a terrorist organisation, and a criminal organization as well as financing terrorism, the house search warrant does not provide many clues. The most serious accusation of being a member of a terrorist organisation is essentially based on the assumption that not only Hamas, whose attacks against Israel are described in detail, but also the Muslim Brotherhood as a whole is an anti-state alliance, criminal organisation, and terrorist group. As such, however, it does not appear on the European Union's "terrorist list" nor is it considered a terrorist organisation in any other democratic state.
So far, no one in Austria has ever been charged for their membership in the Muslim Brotherhood under § 278b (membership in a terrorist organisation), and apart from Hamas and some militias founded by Muslim Brotherhoods in Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood can hardly be seriously accused of terrorist activities. In order to make this case, however, not only must a number of historical splits within the Muslim Brotherhood be attributed to it, but also the Harakat Sawāʿid Misr, also known as the HASM movement, which has carried out several attacks in Egypt since 2016 and is most likely the youngest of these splinter groups that have radicalised themselves under the regime's repression.
However, the argument that this is, as claimed in the document of the public prosecutor's office, "the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood" is, however, just as unproven as the statement that the Muslim Brotherhood "to this day uses terrorist groups that are partly locally active", such as "Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, who most recently joined the terrorist group Islamic State".
However, there is indeed one state that classifies and persecutes the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists: its country of origin, Egypt, which declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation after the military coup in 2013. Additional the other main supporters of the Egyptian military regime – Saudi-Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates – consider the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The interpretation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation reads in the order of the search as if it had come directly from Cairo, and no one knows who the "anonymous informant" to whom the text repeatedly refers to and who massively incriminates some of the accused was. Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that the Egyptian and perhaps also the Israeli secret service might have had a hand in this. After all, the strictly censored Egyptian media landscape was already rejoicing that "honourable Egyptians" had helped to make the raid possible.
And here we come back full circle to the terrorist attack of November 2 and the question of why the terrorist was not stopped, although the Austrian authorities had been warned that the convicted terrorist wanted to buy ammunition in Slovakia and had met relevant persons from Germany and Switzerland in Vienna. Could it be that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism was so busy chasing the Muslim Brotherhood out of Cairo on the call that it simply had no capacity left to keep an eye on a real jihadist terrorist threat? After all, the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria had been under investigation for more than a year. For more than 21,000 hours, the suspects were monitored by constitutional protectors. More than 1.2 million photos and videos were taken of meetings and gatherings. For one year the Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter -Terrorism concentrated everything on this operation. The poorly staffed service may simply not have had time for the jihadists.
Thomas Schmidinger is political scientist at the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Sciences Oberösterreich working on the Middle East, the Kurds, migration and Political Islam.