BERLIN (MNTV) — In his latest work, Farid Hafez — a senior researcher at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative — presents a sweeping historical argument that connects the governance of Muslim populations across nearly a century and a half of Central European history, from the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 1870s to the Islam policy debates playing out in Vienna and Berlin today.
The book’s central claim is that contemporary approaches to managing Islam in Austria and Germany — what Hafez calls Islampolitik — are not products of post-9/11 security anxieties or recent migration waves alone.
They are, he argues, continuations of a colonial logic that originated when both empires first encountered the question of how to incorporate Muslim subjects into their political systems.
Colonial foundations
Hafez traces two parallel genealogies. The first runs through the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Habsburg administrators faced the practical challenge of governing a large Muslim population within a Christian imperial framework. The institutions they built — officially recognised Muslim representative bodies, state-supervised religious education, approved forms of worship — established a template for managing Islam that positioned the state as the arbiter of which forms of Muslim religious life were acceptable and which were not.
The second runs through Imperial Germany’s colonial possessions in East and West Africa — Tanzania, Togo, and Cameroon — where the Kaiserreich developed its own approaches to administering Muslim subjects, shaped by a mixture of strategic pragmatism and racial categorisation.
Both empires, Hafez argues, treated Islam not as a faith to be left to its adherents but as a political phenomenon requiring active state management — a framework in which the state determined the boundaries of legitimate Muslim religious expression.
Through Nazi period and beyond
Rather than treating the colonial and contemporary periods as separate chapters, Hafez traces continuities through the Nazi Reich, which incorporated Muslims into its wartime polity for strategic purposes — recruiting Bosnian Muslim units into the SS, cultivating relationships with Muslim leaders in occupied territories — while maintaining the same underlying assumption: that Muslim religious and political life was something to be shaped and deployed by the state according to its own interests.
The postwar period in both Austria and Germany, Hafez argues, did not produce a clean break from this logic.
Instead, it was adapted to new circumstances. Austria’s Islam Law, originally enacted in 1912 to govern Bosnian Muslims within the Habsburg framework and later updated, became the basis for a distinctive model of state-Islam relations that continues to this day. Germany developed its own parallel structures through ongoing negotiations over Islamic education, representative bodies, and the question of which Muslim organisations the state would treat as legitimate interlocutors.
Coloniality of Islampolitik
Hafez introduces the concept of the “coloniality of Islampolitik” to describe what he sees as the persistent racial logic underlying these governance structures.
The argument is that even when contemporary Islam policy is framed in the language of integration, security, or liberal values, it operates through a fundamentally racialised framework — one that treats Islam and Muslims as objects to be regulated rather than as autonomous participants in democratic life.
This framework, he contends, determines which Muslim voices are empowered and which are marginalized, which forms of Islamic practice are deemed compatible with the state and which are treated as threats, and how the boundaries of acceptable Muslim political participation are drawn.
The institutions may look modern and democratic, but the underlying logic — the state as gatekeeper of legitimate Muslim life — has remained remarkably consistent across 150 years and multiple political systems.
The book’s scope is ambitious, spanning from the late 1870s to the early 2020s and drawing connections across imperial, fascist, and democratic governance.
For scholars and policymakers accustomed to treating contemporary Islam policy as a response to recent developments, Hafez’s historical framing offers a challenge: that the structures through which European states manage their Muslim populations are not innovations born of necessity but inheritances from an era when governing Muslims meant governing colonial subjects — and that the assumptions embedded in those structures have proven far more durable than the empires that created them.