The Holy Quran itself calls upon people to fear God. Fear of God is not a marginal aspect of Islam, yet a central principle. Those who ignore this strip it of its essence, just as happened with Christianity, and those who only tolerate religion when it is quiet have never truly understood it.

Hofer and Erdoğan, who still has much to learn from Hofer regarding Islam, offer us a perspective that does not separate nature, politics, and morality. Image: FPÖ

Update on february 26, 2026: The extradition proceedings against Norbert Hofer have been temporarily halted because the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) in the Burgenland state parliament have refused to lift his parliamentary immunity. He will therefore not be extradited to the Vienna public prosecutor’s office.

The argument is that Hofer’s statement was made in the course of his political activities and is therefore protected by parliamentary immunity.

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The Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested the lifting of Norbert Hofer’s immunity. The accusation: incitement to hatred and the denigration of religious doctrines. The trigger is a statement made in 2020 in which Hofer compared the Holy Quran to a societal danger.

“I am not afraid of Corona, Corona is not dangerous.
The Quran is more dangerous, my friends, than Corona.”

Years later, the debate has returned — and it extends far beyond legal questions.

Legally, the issue concerns parliamentary immunity; politically, freedom of expression. Yet socially, the case touches a raw nerve: Europe’s relationship with religion, power, and respect.

Hofer may have polarized with his choice of words — yet one point is often overlooked in public debate: the Holy Quran itself repeatedly calls upon human beings to fear God. Fear of God is not a marginal aspect of Islam; it is a central theological principle. Those who ignore or distort this are not speaking about Islam, yet about a caricature of it — stripping it of its substance, much as Christianity was once stripped of its own.

Treating the Quran like just another political pamphlet fundamentally misunderstands its status. The Quran is not an ordinary book. Unlike the books of the Bible, it is divine Revelation as well as Authorship at once — and it has been feared not only by believers, yet also by dark powers that did not hesitate to censor the Torah, to edit the Gospel, reducing it to Jesus’ Parables. The Quran, by contrast, endured — out of reverence for an Authorship that admits no co-author.

Then there are those who should have known better. It must be said as plainly as the Scriptures themselves say it: a ruler who presents himself as a devout Muslim cannot pretend that the Word of God is negotiable. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knew what he was doing when, upon public Quran burnings in Sweden, he cleared the path for Sweden’s NATO accession. He knew this was not about diplomacy, yet about humiliation. And he knew — or should have known — that the Holy Quran explicitly names such acts of disrespect. Two weeks later, an earthquake struck Kahramanmaraş, his political stronghold, killing tens of thousands of his followers. Those who dismiss this sequence as coincidence may feel scientifically secure — statistically, it is an indictment. For both the Holy Quran and the Old Testament recognize this pattern: when the powerful cheapen the Sacred, the ground becomes unstable. Power without reverence always ends destructively — and whoever relativizes the Author of the worlds also relativizes the stability of the world. This is not natural science — it is a warning.

Hofer and Erdoğan — who, when it comes to Islam, could still learn a great deal from Hofer — open a perspective that does not separate nature, politics, and morality. To criminalize this view wholesale is not enlightenment, yet repression.

The real question, therefore, is not whether Hofer provoked. Rather: May a society ignore religious sensitivities when they become geopolitically inconvenient? And does criminal law become an instrument for resolving cultural conflicts that remain politically unresolved?

Anyone who tolerates religion only when it is quiet has never understood it. And anyone who believes sacred Texts can be desecrated without consequences — social or spiritual — underestimates their power.

The Hofer case is therefore less a trial against a politician than a mirror of European self-assurance. The Landtag will decide in legal terms. Yet the real reckoning has long been taking place on another level: between power, faith, and the illusion that the two can be separated.

>>-> Congrats for the Holy Quran

By Okay Altinisik | 24-2-2026, 1:11:43 (updated on 26-2-2026, 20:42:18)