A study commissioned by the Viennese government has found that young Muslims display stricter adherence to Islamic principles and are often more authoritarian than other groups.
According to a report commissioned by the Vienna City Council Office for Education and Integration, carried out by sociologist and integration expert Kenan Güngör, and surveying over 1,200 people aged 14 to 24 in the Austrian capital city, found that one in three young Muslims believe that everyone should follow the requirements of Islam.
A further 41 per cent of Vienna Muslims said that they believed their religion should take precedence over the local laws of Austria, while 46 per cent of Muslim respondents said that they would be prepared to “fight and die” to defend their religion, Die Presse reported. In contrast, just 16 per cent of Christians polled said the same.
Meanwhile, respondents from Islamic-majority lands such as Chechnya and Syria were also the most likely to oppose democracy.
The General Secretary of the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Nico Marchetti, said, per the Heute newspaper, that the study painted a “devastating picture” about Islamic immigration into the country.
Calling the findings a “clear warning signal”, he said, adding: “If 41 per cent of young Muslims place Islamic commandments above our laws, then that is a situation that we do not accept.”
“Anyone who comes to us must adapt and become part of our society… in which the law applies and certainly not the word of Sharia law,” Marchetti declared.
The author of the study, integration expert Kenan Güngör, said that it demonstrated that the government’s assimilation polices have failed. He argued that more should be done to promote democratic values and Western ethics in schools.
However, Güngör noted that schools cannot handle the task by themselves, and that more should be done to “reach out more to parents” by other institutions, as religious practices are influenced far more at home than at school.
The integration expert also noted that Vienna takes in more than half of all immigrants to the country, while some schools in particular face higher “concentrations” of Muslim students.
Austria, like other European nations, has seen its demographics significantly altered by mass migration. This has been particularly noticeable in Vienna, where Muslims now make up the largest faith group in both elementary and middle schools in the city at 41.2 per cent, compared to Christians at 34.5 per cent.
The increasing radicalisation of second or third generation Muslim migrants has been seen elsewhere across Europe. For example, a recent poll in France from Ifop found that Muslims aged between 15 and 24 were significantly more strict in their faith than their parents or grandparents’ generations, with 42 per cent having sympathy towards a radical Islamist group and 57 per cent saying they prefer Sharia over French law.
An internal French government report released last year found that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood have focused on embedding agents in Muslim migrant communities with the aim of enforcing strict adherence to traditional practices, such as fasting, observance of Ramadan, and wearing of headscarves by women.
Last year, the Austrian government began to push back on the issue of veiling girls in Islam, banning headscarves for girls under the age of 14 in Austrian public schools.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on X: Follow @KurtZindulka or e-mail to: [email protected]
Read the full article here