Turkish-Austrian Mosque Organization Denies Connection to Islamist Movement

In response to an Aus­tri­an gov­ern­ment research center’s report, a Turk­ish-Aus­tri­an mosque orga­ni­za­tion is deny­ing that they are part of an Islamist move­ment with con­nec­tions to the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment. Accord­ing to the ORF report:

Novem­ber 17, 2021: One of the major mosque oper­a­tors in Aus­tria, the Islam­ic Fed­er­a­tion (AIF), is defend­ing itself against the accu­sa­tion of being an arm of the Turk­ish nation­al­ist Mil­li Görus raised in a dossier by the state-run Doc­u­men­ta­tion Cen­ter for Polit­i­cal Islam. Chair­man Abdi Tas­dö­gen now wants to fight against this image dam­age and seeks the dis­cus­sion with the respon­si­ble per­sons, as he said in the dis­cus­sion with the APA. Accord­ing to Tas­dö­gen, the dossier is unse­ri­ous and a waste of tax mon­ey. At the end of May this year, the doc­u­men­ta­tion cen­ter set up by the gov­ern­ment pre­sent­ed three dossiers on the largest umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tions of Islam­ic asso­ci­a­tions in addi­tion to the high­ly con­tro­ver­sial “Islam Map”. [Trans­lat­ed by DeepL with edits]

Read the rest here.

The Doc­u­men­ta­tion Cen­ter for Polit­i­cal Islam report on Mil­lî Görüş can be found here.

The Aus­tri­an Islam­ic Fed­er­a­tion (AIF) pub­lished a state­ment (see page 6) say­ing that there is no con­nec­tion between the Mil­lî Görüş move­ment in Turkey or its orga­ni­za­tions in Aus­tria and the AIF.

The AIF web­site how­ev­er lists the Islamis­che Gemein­schaft Mil­lî Görüş (IGMG) as one of its part­ners. The IGMG is the Ger­man Mil­lî Görüş orga­ni­za­tion, and a Ger­man think tank states that while IGMG dis­tanced itself from anti-semit­ic state­ments of Mil­lî Görüş founder Necmet­tin Erbakan, IGMG still has ide­o­log­i­cal affini­ties and sub­stan­tial con­nec­tions with the Turk­ish move­ment. The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) has report­ed on Ger­man gov­ern­ment asser­tions that Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s AKP par­ty has inten­si­fied its rela­tions with Mil­lî Görüş in Ger­many. Two of three of AIF’s oth­er part­ners are also IGMG orga­ni­za­tions: Hasene, which has the same address as and shares two board mem­bers with IGMG, and UKBA, IGMG’s funer­al fund.

Mil­lî Görüş is a Turk­ish polit­i­cal move­ment whose aim is to trans­form Turkey into an Islam­ic state. The move­ment was found­ed in 1969 by for­mer Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Necmet­tin Erbakan, who, until his death, head­ed the Islamist Felic­i­ty Par­ty in Turkey. The ide­ol­o­gy and polit­i­cal agen­da of Mil­lî Görüş has called for an end to the sec­u­lar regime in Turkey through edu­ca­tion and preaching.

The “Polit­i­cal Islam Doc­u­men­ta­tion Cen­ter” (Doku­men­ta­tion­sstelle Poli­tis­ch­er Islam) was launched in 2020 by the Aus­tri­an gov­ern­ment and research­es reli­gious­ly moti­vat­ed polit­i­cal extremism.