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Radical forces deliberately use polarising methods to legitimise moral claims and deepen social divisions.

In its new analysis, the Documentation Centre Political Islam (DPI) shows how Islamist actors use populist methods to promote their ideology as an alternative to the democratic and liberal majority society. These radicalisation tendencies are not a special case, but can also be observed in other parts of society in a structurally similar way. Populism can encourage different forms of extremism in different directions. Typical features include moral outrage and highly simplified attributions of blame to ‘elites’, the media or those with different political views. This publication contributes to a better understanding of the challenges associated with the phenomenon of political Islam in Europe.

Diversity within Islam is rejected

The DPI report illustrates how a strict interpretation of Islam as a political ideology leaves no room for intra-religious diversity and exerts pressure on the Muslim community. At the same time, it propagates an ‘Islamic renaissance’ that is directed against individual religious practice or secular lifestyles. Complex social challenges are simplified and public debates are replaced by moral exaggerations. Actual experiences of discrimination are distorted in order to exploit them for an idealised representation of their own worldview. Islamist actors thus pick up on real grievances and existing moods in order to mobilise target groups for their own interests in the most effective way possible. In the image they convey, Islamist actors insinuate that the state, the media, and other ‘elites’ are structurally hostile toward the Muslim segment of the population.

The liberal democratic constitutional state and secularism are being delegitimised by subtle means and denigrated as ‘Westernised’ or ‘Islamophobic’. The narrative propagated by religious extremist forces is based on the juxtaposition of a West that is discredited as “decadent” and a supposedly morally superior ‘Islamic order’. In Austria, Islamist activists use symbols, clothing, rituals and rules of conduct as a means of deliberately staging their radical worldview. One goal is to gain discursive authority over an exclusively defined ‘Muslim identity’. Religion serves here as a pretext to deny the legitimacy of criticism levelled at their own political ideology. In this way, social segregation and polarisation are deliberately promoted in many European countries. Islamist populism is also an instrument for influencing people, used to exploit existing tensions and deepen social divisions.

Was ist populistisch am politischen Islam?