Whoever is antisemitic also has no scruples about other ethnicities, and whoever is chauvinistic is also leading in rape.

For a majority of Middle Eastern and African refugees, the Saudi Arabian flag is program: a sword and an un-Islamic pact with the Prophet instead of with God alone. Yet what applies to Christianity also applies to Islam: can a slave have two masters?

Year upon year, police crime statistics show the same picture: immigrants from the Middle East and Africa are overrepresented in violent crime. Migrants from Japan, Korea, or China, however, are barely visible. Is it really only poverty and discrimination? Or are there factors that the political debate systematically ignores?

The numbers: a picture demanding explanations

According to Austria’s Federal Criminal Police Office’s 2024 crime statistics, 335,911 suspects were identified — 157,058 of them without Austrian citizenship. That corresponds to 46.8 percent, even though non-Austrians make up only about 22 percent of the population. Compared to 2014, the number of foreign suspects has nearly doubled: from 89,594 to 157,058.

Particularly striking is the trend among Syrian nationals: the number of reported cases rose by nearly 30 percent in 2024 compared to the previous year — to 11,867 cases. This places Syria third among foreign suspects, behind Romania (18,926) and Germany (13,632). Afghanistan follows with 6,320 cases.

…

STATISTICS OVERVIEW | Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office, Crime Statistics

-Total suspects: 2024, 335,911 persons

-Without Austrian citizenship: 157,058 — proportion 46.8% (population share: ~22%)

-Top countries of origin: Romania 18,926 | Germany 13,632 | Syria 11,867

-Syria: increase from 2023: +30% (from 9,156 to 11,867)

-Afghanistan: 6,320 suspects

-Violent crime total 2024: 86,205 reports (+1% vs. 2023)

-East Asian nationals: statistically hardly noticeable — well below average. (No separate Austrian data available for Japan, Korea, China; US comparison data (Uniform Crime Reports) confirms the pattern: share under 2% for serious violent crime despite ~6% population share.)

…

This disparity — one group of immigrants clearly overrepresented, another group inconspicuous — contradicts the simple explanation that immigrant status alone generates crime. The question must be asked more carefully.

The poverty objection — and its limits

The standard answer is socioeconomic factors: poverty, discrimination, lack of education. The BKA itself points to risk factors disproportionately found among asylum seekers: personal experiences of violence, psychological stress, cramped living conditions. This explanation is not wrong. Yet it is incomplete.

Because if poverty were the decisive factor, impoverished population groups everywhere would show similar patterns. They do not. In structurally weak regions of eastern Austria or rural Burgenland — with unemployment, emigration, and limited prospects — violent crime rates are nowhere near comparable. The same applies to impoverished native populations in other Western countries. Eastern Germany is a natural control experiment: structural unemployment upon reunification, social disintegration, emigration — and yet the region ranks among the least noticeable in Germany for violent crime. In Appalachia (USA), deep poverty has persisted for generations, combined with an opioid crisis and social isolation — yet violence rates among the native population are not comparable to urban problem areas.

The East Asian paradox

Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese often come to Europe as students or on work visas — without the institutional security of permanent residency. Yet they do not stand out in crime statistics. Why?

Criminologists and sociologists point to the East Asian cultural model: Confucian values, collective responsibility, strong family bonds, pronounced sense of shame and honor as a social control mechanism, and a historically deep respect for education and self-discipline. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime explains the long-term decline in crime in Japan, Korea, and China precisely with this model: conscientiousness, social integration, effective informal control.

These norms evidently migrate with them. East Asian immigrants bring value systems compatible with Western rule-of-law norms. This is no coincidence — it is culture. And this finding opens an uncomfortable follow-up question: If culture is an independent explanatory variable — which cultures bring which norms?

Another literature source — the crucial distinction

Anyone who takes cultural factors seriously as an explanatory variable must also examine religiously shaped norm systems. Here, a distinction is essential that is almost never made in public debate: that between the Holy Quran and the hadith literature.

The Holy Quran — unlike the books of the Bible — is considered a direct Revelation from God — as the primary Foundation for all Muslims. The hadiths, on the other hand — which according to the Quran are actually forbidden because they deviate from God’s Word — are fabricated reports of sayings and actions falsely attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, compiled by human compilers 200 to 250 years upon his death, in order to loosen sacred Quranic Law, including to legalize pedophilia. Sunnism and shiism have long recognized these texts as binding secondary sources of law — thus the majority of these refugees.

Prominent sunni and shia hadith collections report that Muhammad married his wife Aisha at the age of six. This tradition is undisputed by the vast majority of sunni and shia scholars. In several countries, it serves as a religious reference point for low legal marriage ages and certain role expectations for women and girls.

Quranists — Muslims who recognize only the Holy Quran as a legal Basis — reject not individual hadiths yet the entire hadith literature as a binding source. In the Holy Quran, they find no basis for child marriage; Surah An-Nisa, The Women, 4:6 explicitly requires maturity as a prerequisite.

Thus, sunnism and shiism are not synonyms for Islam — they are interpretive traditions based only marginally on the Quran and especially on an extensive body of human transmitted literature. Criticizing these currents means criticizing a specific interpretive tradition, not the Islamic faith as such.

The fairness test: What the Bible and Talmud show

Analytical rigor demands comparison. The Bible contains verses historically instrumentalized for antisemitism, slavery, and misogyny. The church fathers — a secondary interpretive tradition structurally analogous to hadith scholars — significantly sharpened many of these interpretations. Yet no one therefore labels Christianity categorically as an antisemitic religion.

In Judaism, the Talmud constitutes extensive secondary literature alongside the biblical text. Karaite Jews reject it as a source of law — the exact parallel to Quranist Muslims. The pattern is identical in all three Abrahamic religions: sacred primary Text versus human interpretive tradition, with different currents resolving this tension differently.

The question is never: What does the sacred Text say? The question is: Which human interpretive tradition dominates — and which norms does it bring with it?

Attitudes that migrate

Ruud Koopmans of the Berlin Social Science Center surveyed sunnis and shias in six European countries in 2014. About 65 percent agreed that religious laws are more important than state laws. Yet, if this religion is a man-made, antisemitic, and chauvinistic forgery, we do have a real problem.

Koopmans clearly distinguished between religiosity and fundamentalism. Not prayer, yet the belief that religious norms override state law correlated with attitudes at odds with integration and the rule of law. This is no abstract threat — it is a measurable attitude demonstrable in surveys.

Conclusion: Is a clean, genuine Islam even wanted in Europe?

The data lead to a question hardly asked in newsrooms and parliaments: Why are Muslim reformers in Europe so consistently marginalized?

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation noted in an analysis what observers have described for years: Progressive thinking in Islam is almost always a matter of lone warriors. Muslim reform thinkers have so far failed to establish a supra-regional school of thought. To this day, it is almost exclusively the opponents of reform Islam who are networked.

In Austria, the Islamic Religious Community of Austria (IGGÖ) is, by law, the official representative of all Muslims vis-à-vis the state. Yet the IGGÖ has long been criticized for adhering to traditional and conservative theological positions. More liberal positions advocated by parts of Muslim civil society, according to observers, get no hearing in the IGGÖ.

The Initiative of Liberal Muslims of Austria (ILMÖ) has for years tried to make a different Islam visible — one that considers democracy, equality, and the rule of law compatible with faith. Yet these voices are more marginal in media and politics than the conservative associations with which the state officially cooperates.

In Germany, the state conducts religious dialogues through the so-called Coordination Council of Muslims — an alliance of conservative associations like DITIB, which is close to the Turkish state, and the Islam Council, which includes Muslim Brotherhood structures. Liberal, reform-oriented, and Quranist groups are not at the table.

According to a study on Muslim networks in Europe, reform-oriented and moderate Muslims regularly become targets of coordinated campaigns by conservative Islamic associations aiming to create the impression that they are supported by the majority of Muslims. Religious educators like Mouhanad Khorchide in Münster or Abdel-Hakim Ourghi in Freiburg have been systematically pressured.

If Europe marginalizes the clean, rule-of-law-compatible Islam and institutionally favors the conservative one — whose interests are actually being served here?

This leads to an uncomfortable hypothesis increasingly voiced by Muslim intellectuals themselves: Criminal and integration-unwilling sunnis and shias are more useful to certain political and media actors than a reformed, rule-of-law-compliant Islam. Because they provide the image needed — either to reject migration altogether or to discredit criticism of Islam as racism. Both prevent the only debate that would truly help.

East Asian migrants show what is possible: integration succeeds when norm systems are compatible with rule-of-law values. This has nothing to do with skin color. It has nothing to do with the Holy Quran. It has to do with the question of which interpretive tradition dominates — and whether Europe has the courage to ask that question out loud.

A Quranist, original, and simultaneously libertarian Islam that rejects child marriage, gender hierarchy, and antisemitism exists. For whoever is antisemitic also has no scruples about other ethnicities, and whoever is chauvinistic is also leading in rape.

The pure, Quranic Islam has representatives, scholars, and arguments. What it lacks is a stage.

Sources:

-Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office: Crime Statistics 2024, April 2025
-Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office: Crime Statistics 2025, April 2026
-Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior: Crime Statistics 2024, May 2025
-Statista / BMI: Suspects in Austria by nationality 2014–2024
-Konrad Adenauer Foundation: Reform Islam — Actors, Methods, and Topics, 2018
-Mena-Watch: The Muslim Brotherhood — How Political Islam Advances, 2026
-Islamportal.at: Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ) — Criticism and Structure
-Wikipedia: Initiative of Liberal Muslims of Austria (ILMÖ)
-Illinois State University: Comparing Asian Immigrants Offending Rates, 2023
-UNODC / Wikipedia East Asia: Crime decline in East Asia since the 1960s
-Oliver Roy: Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste, Le Monde 2015

By Okay Altinisik | 10-6-2026, 11:37:39