Austria hijab school ban law is deja vu for marginalised Muslims

This article was written by Bridge Initiative Senior Researcher Farid Hafez and first appeared in The Middle East Eye on September 8th, 2025

This month, Austria’s new centrist coalition government is preparing legislation to ban the hijab for girls under 14 in all schools, with harsher penalties and a requirement for teachers to report violations.

It feels like deja vu.

In 2018, shortly after the conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP) formed a coalition government with the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), the leadership introduced a ban on the hijab for girls aged six to 10 in public schools. That law was implemented in 2019 and later struck down by Austria’s constitutional court in December 2020.

Now, the government is once again reviving the measure, expanding it with harsher penalties and a wider scope that will include both state and private schools – even Islamic schools.

Supporters of the ban insist it is not an act of discrimination, but is “necessary to free girls from subjugation”. Echoing the first ban, the government is again justifying the measure as a way to prevent “gender segregation” and “early sexualisation”, portraying the hijab as a political symbol and marker of “political Islam” rather than a religious choice.