Gates Of Vienna Research Articles

Quran Desecration Rallies in Scandinavia and the Netherlands: The Formation and Transnational Diffusion of an Anti-Muslim Protest Tactic

ABSTRACT Since 2019, Quran desecration rallies have proliferated across Northern Europe, leading to geopolitical tensions with Muslim-majority countries and domestic debates about freedom of speech. This article traces the diffusion trajectories of Quran desecration acts from their initiation in 2019 until November 2023 across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Combining protest event analysis and process tracing based on mainstream media reporting and far-right social media, it shows how the desecration tactic spread from Denmark to remnants of the transnational Counter-Jihad Movement through a within-movement diffusion process involving both indirect and direct channels. Following Rasmus Paludan’s Quran-burning outside Turkey’s Embassy in Stockholm in January 2023, the tactic attracted massive international media attention. In Denmark and Sweden, the tactics’ repurposing toward geopolitical issues led to a spillover to actors unaffiliated with the far right, while in Norway and the Netherlands, the tactic hardly diffused beyond the anti-Islam activists. Drawing on far-right transnational diffusion literature, the article provides an empirically grounded and theoretically informed mapping of the recent wave of Quran desecration rallies, showing the various ways the same tactic spread throughout and into different domestic settings.

The Emigration of the Turks from Yugoslavia in Türkiye: 70th year of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement”

This (2023) year marks the 70th anniversary of the achievement of the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement”, for the emigration of Turks from FPR of Yugoslavia to the Republic of Turkey. According to some indications and documents, this agreement was reached between the President of FPR of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito and the Minister of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the Republic of Turkey, Fuad Köprülü, in Brioni, on January 22nd or 23rd, 1953. In order to operationalize this agreement, about three months later an “Agreement between the State Secretariat for Foreign Affairs of the FPR of Yugoslavia and the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey in Belgrade, for the emigration of Turks”, was signed. After reaching the two aforementioned agreements the process of emigration of the Muslim population of Yugoslavia to Turkey gained dramatic proportions. Beside the Turks, especially between 1953 and 1968, a large number of Albanians, Bosniaks and Pomacs immigrated to Turkey. In other words it was the largest exodus that took place in Europe in the period after the Second World War. As it is already known, the emigration of Turks and other Muslim populations of Yugoslavia to Turkey in the 50’s and 60’s of the 20th century was not new, because the emigration of the aforementioned population began in the second half of the 17th century - after the second defeat of the Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna in 1683, and continued in the period after the Second World War. In a period of more than 300 years, the most massive emigrations of the Muslim population from the territory of former Yugoslavia took place especially after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and the First World War (1914-1918). The emigrations which took place after the Second World War, that I am writing about, are characteristic in that they took place in a peacetime period, as a result of the insidious abuse/ disrespect by the Yugoslav side of the agreement from 1953, which was signed between representatives of Yugoslavia and Turkey. Among the researchers of this issue, there are different views about the total number of emigrants who emigrated from Yugoslavia to Turkey in the 50s and 60s of the 20th century, and especially about their nationality. Albanian historians and other authors from Albania and Kosovo go so far as to treat almost all emigrants from Kosovo and Macedonia as Albanians. Unlike them, Albanian historians and other authors from Macedonia admit that there were Turks among the emigrants from Macedonia, but that the dominant part of the emigrants were allegedly Albanians. Unlike them, I and several other authors from the Republic of Northern Macedonia (V. Achkovska, B. Ilievski, G. Todorovski, and others) claim that the majority of emigrants from the Republic of Macedonia were Turks.

How the Russo-Turkish War over Ukraine (1677–81) Changed the Course of Hungarian History

How the Russo-Turkish War over Ukraine (1677–81) Changed the Course of Hungarian History

The Football Lads Alliance and Democratic Football Lad’s Alliance: an insight into the dynamism and diversification of Britain’s counter-jihad movement

ABSTRACTIn response to 2017’s terror attacks in Britain, the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) and latterly, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) were formed. Self-described as street-protest movements that encourage rival ‘football firms’ to reject acrimonious hostilities to unite against the Islamist extremism and extremists it believes are threatening Britain, its culture, values and way of life. As new incarnations of the British counter-jihad movement, this article affords new insights into how the movement and constituent parts are dynamically identifying and mobilising behind an increasingly diverse range of identities and socio-political issues. Contributing new knowledge about the FLA and DFLA, neither of which have been subjected to scholarly inquiry, this article makes a timely contribution to an embryonic scholarly canon. Contextualising the counter-jihad movement, this article explores how ‘football’ afforded the FLA and DFLA with a shared identity around which to mobilise. Highlighting how this is different to other far-right and counter-jihadi groups, their ideologies and activities are explored in relation to their establishment, support base and function. In conclusion, this article positions both groups within an ‘identity-oriented’ paradigm of new social movements as a means of offering new understanding and explanation.

Making Sense of the United States' Twenty-First-Century Wars and Their Consequences

Making Sense of the United States' Twenty-First-Century Wars and Their Consequences David Kieran (bio) Fawaz A. Gerges. ISIS: A History Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. xix +368pp. Notes and index. $27.95 Brian Glyn Williams. Counter Jihad: The American Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. xvi + 367pp. Maps, notes, and index. $65.00 On December 18, 2017, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. Although early media coverage focused on its attention to Russia, China, and North Korea, the document was also notable for its discussion of the ongoing war in Afghanistan—at seventeen years, the nation's longest—and the legacy of the United States war in Iraq. "We crushed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorists on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq," the document proclaimed, "and will continue pursuing them until they are destroyed," before explaining that "Even after the territorial defeat of ISIS and al-Qa'ida in Syria and Iraq, the threat from jihadist terrorists will persist."1 The document also announced that "[w]e will continue to partner with Afghanistan to promote peace and security in the region" and that "engagement in Afghanistan seeks to prevent the reemergence of terrorist safe havens."2 While the accuracy of the first set of claims and the wisdom of the second deserve debate, these statements reveal how deeply the United States remains engaged in the Middle East and Central Asia. Although there has been no shortage of reportage and scholarship on this nearly two-decade-long entanglement, it nonetheless presents two significant problems for historians. One problem is archival: documents have not been accessioned and made available for research, and so historians must build arguments by mining published sources and publicly available government documents, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and conducting oral histories. This challenge may be more pernicious than the other problem: the lack of historical perspective and the provisional nature of any conclusions inherent in writing about the present. Any history of ISIS or the Afghanistan War must reckon with the [End Page 465] reality that the outcome of these conflicts lies in the future. Nonetheless, the project of telling their stories remains crucial, as both resolving these conflicts and contemplating potential new ones demands that the consideration of why the United States' twenty-first-century interventions occurred and why they have had such disastrous consequences. Recent works by Brian Glyn Williams and Fawaz A. Gerges, both scholars with impressive resumes of work on these conflicts, mark two of the latest attempts to explain these conflicts and their consequences. In Counter Jihad: America's Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Williams provides a sweeping overview, arguing that the rush to war that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks allowed neo-conservative policymakers to begin a disastrous war in Iraq that contributed to the rise of the Islamic State while diverting resources away from the conflict in Afghanistan, resulting, a decade and a half later, in two conflicts that seem disappointingly intractable. Where Williams aims for breadth, Gerges aims for depth, providing a detailed account of the emergence, ideology, and appeal of ISIS. Like Williams, he views ISIS as a outgrowth of the disastrous US intervention in Iraq, but places that organization's rise in a larger context that recognizes the failures of democracy in the Middle East, a problem that demands a political—rather than purely military—solution to the continuing threat of ISIS and similar jihadist groups. Though both books are imperfect, they mark important and accessible contributions to this debate. Reading them, scholars, students, and interested generalists will be forced to confront both the failures of the past two decades of U.S. foreign policy and the challenges of the coming years. Williams's goal is to "shine a retrospective light on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria in order" and create "one accessible narrative that tells us how we got to the point where ISIS conquered" such a significant swath of territory (p. xii). "Accessible" is the key word in his description of his project. That Williams is writing for a non-specialist, and indeed non-academic, audience...

Islamophobia, “Clash of Civilizations”, and Forging a Post-Cold War Order!

Islamophobia, as a problem, is often argued to be a rational choice by the stereotypical media coverage of Islam and Muslims, even though it points to the symptom rather than the root cause. Islamophobia reemerges in public discourses and part of state policies in the post-Cold War period and builds upon latent Islamophobia that is sustained in the long history of Orientalist and stereotypical representation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam itself. The book What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State, edited by Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills, and David Miller offers a unique contribution to how best to define and locate the problem of demonizing Islam and Muslims in the contemporary period. The three scholars provide a more critical and structural approach to the subject by offering what they call the “five pillars of Islamophobia”, which are the following: (1) the institutions and machinery of the state; (2) the far-right, incorporating the counter-jihad movement; (3) the neoconservative movement; (4) the transnational Zionist movement; and (5) the assorted liberal groupings including the pro-war left and the new atheist movement. The UK-based research group correctly situates Islamophobia within existing power structures and examines the forces that consciously produce anti-Muslim discourses, the Islamophobia industry, within a broad political agenda rather than the singular focus on the media. Islamophobia emerges from the “Clash of Civilizations” ideological warriors and not merely as a problem of media stereotyping, representation, and over-emphasis on the Muslim subject. In this article, I maintain that Islamophobia is an ideological construct that emerges in the post-Cold War era with the intent to rally the Western world and the American society at a moment of perceived fragmentation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in a vastly and rapidly changing world system. Islamophobia, or the threat of Islam, is the ingredient, as postulated in Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis that is needed to affirm the Western self-identify after the end of the Cold War and a lack of a singular threat or purpose through which to define, unify, and claim the future for the West. Thus, Islamophobia is the post-Cold War ideology to bring about a renewed purpose and crafting of the Western and American self.

Between Breivik and PEGIDA: the absence of ideologues and leaders on the contemporary European far right

ABSTRACTIn the aftermath of the Norwegian terror attacks of 22 July 2011, the question of agency with regard to the convicted perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, has frequently been discussed. Did he really act on his own? Were his actions self-directed? Was he, as a typical ‘lone wolf’, inspired by the prevalent far-right concept of ‘leaderless resistance’ or, simply, a blind tool, a string puppet pushed and pulled by dark forces, as some commentators have claimed? His cut-and-paste manifesto points to inspiration from ideas circulating in the European Counter Jihad Movement (ECJM), in itself a contradictory mix of ideological positions. A number of these ideas were given new life when the so-called ‘populist right-wing movement of indignation’, the Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (PEGIDA) took to the streets of Dresden in the autumn of 2014. The driving force behind PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, with a past as petty criminal and doorman, is an unlikely front man for one of the most successful political initiatives in post-unification Germany. Comparing Breivik and PEGIDA, Önnerfors argues that the ECJM is part of the ‘third generation’ of right-wing discourse that is without a consistent world view, dominant leaders and prolific ideologues. Instead, in a new atmosphere of ‘politics of passion’ and ‘post-politics’, fuzzy ECJM ideology turns into a screen upon which diffuse uneasiness with current political affairs can be projected and channelled. Outside the scope of Önnerfors's article but worth noting is the considerable impact these developments have had on electoral support for right-wing populist parties such as the Front National in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden.

‘It’s not paranoia when they are really out to get you’: the role of conspiracy theories in the context of heightened security

ABSTRACTConspiracy theories have been seen as important supporting components in extreme political beliefs. This paper considers conspiracy theories in the counter jihad movement, an international network combining cultural nationalism with xenophobia towards Muslims. This paper evaluates the nature of conspiracy belief through the analysis of several key texts published by counter jihad activists, and of content published on a daily basis by three core websites. The findings show the Islamisation conspiracy theory to be highly modular, with authors able to mix and match villains. The analysis of daily published content demonstrates that, at the routine level, conspiracy theory is rarely used openly as a call to action. This is in keeping with other examples of conspiracy theory in extreme right wing movements in which conspiracy is seen as justification for existing prejudices. However, the political and security context the counter jihad operates in also affords the movement opportunities to support some of their claims, often by reproducing or reinterpreting mainstream or quasi-mainstream reporting, without reverting openly to conspiracy tropes. In the case of the counter jihad movement, as well as potentially other far-right movements, conspiracy theory may be taking a back seat to a more sophisticated public relations approach.

Alexander’s Gate and the Unclean Nations: Translation, Textual Appropriation, and the Construction of Barriers

The Alexander Romance and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius deserve a place in any discussion of the impact of the translator’s work on the construction of memory in multicultural societies. Both works are remarkable as the products and the objects of translation throughout the middle ages. Successive recensions of the Alexander Romance were translated, either from the original Greek or from Latin translations, into numerous vernacular languages until there were popular versions of the Romance in circulation from Iceland to Indonesia. The Apocalypse was first written in Syriac at the isolated monastery of Singara, but under the impulse of the initial Arab conquests it was translated into Greek and then Latin for a readership that stretched from one end of the Mediterranean to the other; translations into various vernaculars were made throughout the middle ages in places as far apart as England and Russia. The remarkable extent to which translation made both the Romance and the Apocalypse available to ever wider audiences has long been recognized. What has not necessarily been appreciated to the same extent is the cultural impact of these translations, especially in regard to the contact and conflict of cultures. I would like to redress this neglect by drawing attention to the implications of a single episode, one borrowed from the Apocalypse into a later recension of the Romance and perhaps the most famous incident in either work: Alexander walling up the Unclean Nations, the agents of the End Times, beyond the Mountains of the North. Up to the appearance of this incident Alexander had been seen, as he perhaps still is, as a conqueror who extended not only his own realm, but the cultural sphere of the Greeks as well, drawing barbarian peoples into the civilized world of the oikoumene. Under the impact of the Arab conquests, I will argue, Alexander was given the very different, but just as formidable, task of excluding foreign and exotic peoples from a world which was ideally homogeneous, represented by his confining of the Unclean Nations. This act symbolizes the reaction which characterized the next several centuries of Byzantine strategy, of retrenchment, defense of the frontiers, and assimilation of all deviant groups (pagans, heretics, and Jews) within the borders. The memory of Alexander inspired by repeated translations of the Romance and Apocalypse spawned this xenophobic response not only in Byzantium, but throughout Europe, until the Turks were at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Perhaps its legacy can still be discerned today in the inclination toward eschatological hysteria provoked by the perceived aggression of the Muslim world.

Jihad and Counter-Jihad in Europe: Islamic Radicals, Right-Wing Extremists, and Counter-Terrorism Responses

Aage Borchgrevink. A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utoya. Trans. Guy Puzey. Malden, MA: Polity, 2013. 300 pp., $25.00 hardcover. ISBN: 0745672205.Raffaello Pantucci....

Economic Losers, Protestors, Islamophobes or Xenophobes? Predicting Public Support for a Counter-Jihad Movement

Economic Losers, Protestors, Islamophobes or Xenophobes? Predicting Public Support for a Counter-Jihad Movement

Economic Losers, Protestors, Islamophobes or Xenophobes? Predicting Public Support for a Counter-Jihad Movement

In recent years several European states have seen the emergence of ‘counter-Jihad’ movements, which in contrast to the established populist radical right eschew electoral politics and put stronger emphasis on mobilising opposition to Islam and Muslims. Despite attracting attention, counter-Jihad movements and the predictors of their support are under-researched. Drawing on a new survey and sample of self-identified supporters, this article investigates the predictors of public support for the English Defence League (EDL), the inaugural ‘defence league’ in Europe. Contrary to accounts that stress unemployment, apathy or single issues, it is found that support is concentrated among male workers, citizens with school-level education, who read tabloid newspapers and vote for right-wing parties, but who are not more likely to be unemployed, in social housing, have no qualifications or be politically apathetic. Foremost, regression analysis confirms that the strongest predictor of their support is xenophobic hostility toward Muslims, and ethnic minorities more generally.

The English Defence League and the counter jihad

Since the murderous shooting spree of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011, there has been a growing concern with what has been termed the counter jihad movement. This comprises a useful reconf...

Anders Breivik and the Death of Free Speech in Norway

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik detonated a bomb in Oslo and massacred dozens of teenagers at a Labour Party Youth camp on the island of Utoya. Nearly all the media coverage of Breivik focused on the conservative political views outlined in his Manifesto. The week of the massacre, The New York Times ran a series of editorials which identified Breivik as a part of the counterjihad movement represented by Pete King, Bruce Bawer, Geert Wilders, Newt Gingrich, and Robert Spencer. In Norway, the Norwegian media was quick to blame Siv Jensen of the conservative Progress Party for creating the “climate of hate” which produced Breivik. In the wake of the murders, prominent Norwegian intellectuals began calling for a rejection of American “free speech absolutism” in favor of vigorously enforcing an “anti-racism” clause in Norway’s penal code which criminalizes threatening or insulting speech, or speech that incites contempt for anyone because of his or her skin color, religion, or sexual orientation. However, this would contribute little to public safety in Norway; instead it would stifle the kind of vigorous debate about social issues that one would expect to find in an open society. It would also demoralize moderate Muslims who are working to promote free speech and democratic pluralism in Muslim-majority countries.

The New Xenologies of Europe: Civil Tensions and Mythic Pasts

This article explores transformations in the ideologies and political languages of two main European far-right tendencies: the ‘counterjihad movement’ and the European New Right (ENR). The ‘counterjihad movement’ emerged as a widespread, concerted series of anti-Muslim campaigns and activities across many European countries from the mid-2000s, and its ideas and activities are critically explored. The ideas of the ENR, a much older and mainly intellectual tendency, have re-emerged in significant ways in the activities and policies of several European far-right and populist parties. The two tendencies are very different in origin and ideology. However, considering them together can help understand the broader themes and shapes of the ‘new xenologies’ recently emergent in Europe, ones that have complicated associations with ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’. These areas are discussed within the broader context of an enduring political narrative of ‘European decline’ and an assertion of regional ‘ethnic’ identities against the project of European Union.

The Third Wave

First Wave was begun by Muhammed and went on for over half a millennium. It created an Islamic Empire that extended from Arabia through a large part of Africa, much of Central Asia, east into Iran. Second Wave, begun in the 14th century by a warlord, Osman Bey, known as the Ottoman, threatened to overwhelm all of Europe. Muslims were halted in the 17th Century at the gates of Vienna. Ottoman Empire was still vast and it continued to own all of the Middle East until the first World War, when the area was divided up -- 99% going to the Muslims, 1% to the Jews. In this essay, we discuss the Third Wave of Islamic aggression, which is still in its early stages. Efraim Karsh, Professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London tells us that The 9/11 attacks have inspired two diametrically opposed interpretations regarding their 'root causes'. These can be referred to as the 'What is past is prologue' camp and the 'Blame America First' camp, sometimes also referred to as the 'chickens coming home to roost' camp by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former mentor of President Obama. By and large the right has accepted the 'past is prologue' explanation and the left, the 'chickens coming home to roost.

The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft

This article has two purposes: in the first section, the socio-political place of Islam as topos in the stories of Lovecraft - the various Daemon-sultans, Oriental figures and Arab sages we encounter in his work - is examined, given the already ex-tant research available on Lovecraft’s own reactionary, racist views. The article exam-ines the possibility that Lovecraft’s dark Cthulhu gods, with their secret, subversive plan to invade our human reality, is actually a resurrection of a familiar Christian Urangst of the Terrible Turk at the gates of Vienna; this time, however, re-enacted against a background of New England, rather than Tours or Lepanto. In the second section, we consider a single tale of Lovecraft’s, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” from a Sufi perspective, seeing how the various references to the Guide Love-craft calls the Umr at-tawil can be placed and re-interpreted in the context of Islamic Mysticism.

Efraim and Inari Karsh,Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923

POFESSOR KARSH, THE DIRECTOR OF the Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, made his name following the publication of his book, Fabricating Israel; History: The New Historians (London, 1997).1 In that work, Karsh distinguished himself as a competent Middle East scholar who wields a scalpel-like pen, which serves him well as an engaging writer with a rather combative style. Now Karsh, jointly with his wife, Inari, a scholar of Middle East history and politics in her own right, present a new book Empires of the Sand. The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-I923 One is immediately struck by their vigorous style, richness of vocabulary, and idiomatic nuances. They argue intelligently and lucidly. The narrative is smooth and reads like a novel, which is yet another example that history books must not be necessarily dull. Indeed, one is at times gripped by a sense of drama interspersed by a touch of irony. They make no secrets of their likes or dislikes and relish any given opportunity to criticize events and people. In spite of massive documentation, they do not lose sight of the broad historical focus. Their characterization of the chief dramatis personae is admirable. Most important is their bold attempt to reinterpret the modern history of the Middle East. It is provocative and is bound to foster debate. At the center stage of the story is the fate of the Ottoman Empire-the largest empire on Earth in its time-which stretched practically from the gates ofVienna to the Caspian Sea, down to the Persian Gulf and the Hedjaz and along the northern shores of Africa. What, therefore, precipitated the

Christian Memory and National Consciousness

My original title for this paper asked a question: The Church—Focus for European Integration? Of course there is a great deal that the Church, whether we mean those of us in communion with Rome or include Christians of the Reformed and Orthodox Churches, is able and likely to do to focus integration in Europe. But as I come now to write it I find that the emphasis in what I want to say suggests a fairly modest proposal for some work at national level which would necessarily be ecumenical in character.Christians, in Europe at least, are perhaps more of an obstacle in the way rather than any kind of focus of integration. True, not all the ancient and venomous conflicts that you see almost wherever you look in ‘Europe’ have religious or if you like ecclesiastical origins or dimensions. The problem of Basque separatism in Spain doesn’t have any religious dimension. But whether it is Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Croatian Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, or Christians and Muslims in Cyprus, to mention only the three bitterest conflicts (and religion is not the only factor in any of these cases), it is tempting to suggest that if there were a lot less religion around it would be easier to see how Europeans might be united in peace and prosperity. There are ancient Christian countries in Europe where anti-semitism isn’t totally absent and it may be wondered whether Christians in Europe are any better placed to cope with Islam than our ancestors were at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

Transformations of the Sikh Diaspora

Today, many people in the West believe they see in migration an external threat to their cultures and societies no less significant than the Islamic invasions that were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The British have sought to protelct themselves from the contemporary challenge by legislating an enld to the “open house” ideal of their imperial heyday; with its concentration of alien dress, smells, language, and norms of behavior, an area like South-all has become a symbol of danger to national tradition. In France, the presence of a Muslim North African minority has stimulated a more extreme than usual defense of a presumably endangered French civilization, reflected in increasing votes for right-wing candidates wielding racist rhetoric. The easy inclusion of Algeria, Indochina, and Tunisia into “un terre Français” is the distant memory of an idealistic and apparently naive past. In Germany, the euphoria over unification has been succeeded by fears of population movements from the east that might create an intolerable economic, social, and cultural burden.