Austria will close seven mosques and expel dozens of imams and their families in a crackdown on “political Islam” and foreign funding of religious groups, AFP reported. The government said on Friday it will shut a hardline Turkish mosque in Vienna and dissolve the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques.
The imams are said to be connected to the Turkish-Islamic Cultural Associations, or ATIB, which is a branch of Turkey government’s religious affairs agency.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said “parallel societies, political Islam and radicalisation have no place” in the country. He said the government’s powers to intervene “were not sufficiently used” in the past.
Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said the measures were “a first significant and necessary step in the right direction”. “If these measures aren’t enough, we will if necessary evaluate the legal situation here or there,” he said.
“The circle of people possibly affected by these measures – the pool that we’re talking about – comprises around 60 imams,” Interior Minister Herbert Kickl said. The government invoked a 2015 law that prevents religious communities from getting funding from abroad.
The decision to close the mosques was also influenced by pictures which emerged in April of children in a Turkish-backed mosque playing dead, after reenacting a scene from World War I.
Kickl and Strache belong to the far-right Freedom Party, a coalition partner in Kurz’s government that came into power in December on the anti-immigrants plank.
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