Personnel | An understander of Islam in the AfD

Photo: Thomas K. Gugler What drives an Islamic scholar to join the Islamophobic AfD, a party that has an unmistakable belief in its basic program: "Islam does not belong to Germany"? Thomas K. Gugler probably has to ask himself this question first. The South Asia expert, who was trained at the universities of Munich (master's degree) and Erfurt (doctoral degree), was "unmasked" as an AfD member through the analysis of leaked internal emails from AfD representatives. The weekly newspaper “Jungle World” was slightly surprised to find out recently that Gugler was one of its authors and that since 2019 he has published over 20 articles for the paper, which sees itself as left-wing, primarily about Pakistan.

At the beginning of his collaboration with "Jungle World", Gugler had already been an AfD member for almost two years; his application for membership in the party was accepted in November 2017 according to the leaked internal documents. The “Jungle World” responded with a formal statement: “The basic rule is: If it turns out that an author is an AfD member or is close to the party, we will end the collaboration.”

Gugler, who was born in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1981, was more than just a card file figure and presumably harbored political ambitions within the party, which is classified as a suspected right-wing extremist case. The leaked emails revealed that Gugler applied for a speaker position with the AfD twice: in 2018 and 2022. »I identify with the political goals of the AfD; I have been a party member for more than five years,” it says in an application letter.

In his considerable academic career, which has taken Kugler through the Berlin Leibniz Center for the Modern Orient and the universities of Vienna, Münster and Frankfurt, he has dealt extensively with Islamist currents and groups, especially in South Asia, i.e. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. On his career path he also meets Hamed Abdel-Samad, an Egyptian-German political scientist who is extremely controversial because of his sharp and polemical criticism of Islam, which he wrote down in several books and who has also appeared at AfD events. He belongs to the group of academically trained alarm voices who constantly warn about the supposedly threatening Islamization of the West and are courted by the AfD. In 2006, Gugler worked for Abdel-Samad as a research assistant on the “Radicalization of Muslims in the Diaspora” project at the University of Erfurt.

Another professional milestone in Gugler's career was a postdoc position at the Frankfurt Research Center for Global Islam at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, which closed on October 1, 2025. Its founder and director Susanne Schröter, like Hamed Abdel-Samad, saw and sees herself as a warning voice about the dangers of political Islam, organized a highly controversial conference on the headscarf and was exposed to accusations of racism. Schröter set up his own private institute in September; the name “Institute for Democracy and Islam” already indicates its direction. Maybe Gugler will be drawn there too.

When asked by the "nd" about his AfD membership, Thomas Gugler did not want to make a statement because it referred to "illegally obtained data sets." “I won’t comment on that,” was his succinct response. However, there are now various indications as to the authenticity of the leaked data: both the “Taz” and the “Spiegel” tend to assume that the leaks are genuine emails from the AfD. This is also supported by the fact that an employee of the »nd« can be found in the data set with an official press query to the AfD Bochum.

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