Islamophobia, a European problem

On 24 October, the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) published a report on Islamophobia in 13 EU countries. According to the data in the report, 50% of Muslims in the EU experience discrimination in their daily lives, rising from 39% in 2016. In contrast, 21% of the general population experience discrimination (Eurobarometer data, 2023).

What this means is that, according to these two surveys, Muslims in Europe in 2024 are exposed to almost double the risk of discrimination.

“The issue of Islamophobia is a global problem, which has been amplified everywhere since 11 September 2001,” says Julien Talpin, a French sociologist at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), who specialises in questions related to integration and discrimination.

The FRA report is based on a sample of 9,604 people in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

The highest figures appear in Austria (74% over the last five years) Germany (71%), Finland and Denmark (64%). The lowest are in Sweden (23%), Spain (31%) and Italy (34%).

A “socially acceptable” racism?

Austria stands out in the FRA survey. In May 2024, the Austrian Documentation Centre for Islamophobia reported 1,522 reports of anti-Muslim racism in 2023: a record number, and an increase of about 200 cases compared to 2022. More than a third of these cases were reported since October 2023, i.e. after the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military escalation. According to 2022 data from the Federal Statistical Office, Muslims in Austria represent 8.3% of the total population.

In an interview with the Austrian daily Der Standard, Désirée Sandanasamy, legal advisor for the anti-racist organisation Zara, explains that anti-Muslim racism has increased in the country and, more significantly, that it has become “socially acceptable”, even beyond the political spectrum occupied by the FPÖ (far right, the country’s leading party). According to Sandanasamy, the organisation reports of young people being insulted for merely speaking Arabic in the street, for example, and for this, the media bear great responsibility.

Another key issue here is structural racism. According to the 2024 Zara report, slightly more than one in ten cases of racism involved state authorities or institutions. For example, there were 58 recorded cases of racist violence by the police.

Beyond the far-right

“On a European level, the far-right is considered one of the biggest risk factors for terrorism, yet when we think of terrorism we think of Arabs. There is a practice of institutionalised Islamophobia. There is a neo-fascist and fascist far-right movement. We see it in France with Marine Le Pen, whose discourse is fundamentally anti-immigration and anti-Muslim, as well as in Spain with Vox, or in Hungary with Viktor Orbán and in Italy with Giorgia Meloni,” says  Youssef M. Ouled in conversation with Ana Somavilla of El Confidencial. Ouled is a researcher at Rights International Spain (Ris), an NGO founded by lawyers and jurists specialised in international law working on civil rights violations.

Ouled insists on something that would seem obvious, but which is part of the semantic confusion with which public, media and political discourse often plays: “You don’t have to be a migrant to be a Muslim. And what the ultra-right is doing with the issue of Islamophobia is normalising it, normalising the rejection of the Muslim population, the criminalisation and unequal treatment by institutions. Consequently, the fact that migrants do not have the same rights as us because they are not fully integrated means that they can be figured as ‘potential terrorists’”.

According to Ouled, the “increase in Islamophobia is due to this growth in the normalisation of Islamophobia”.

A “Muslim person”?

After Christianity in its various forms, Islam is the second largest religion in Europe, although it is difficult to quantify exactly how many people practice Muslim religion or culture.

One commonly cited study was conducted by the Pew Research Center, which dates back to 2017 and estimated the number of European Muslims at 25.8 million. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights still cites these figures in its report. Numbers are important, and fundamental to any understanding of reality. But on their own they are not enough.

Unlike Catholicism for example,  and in a “western” context, being a Muslim can mean, like Judaism, a cultural or family tradition, completely unrelated to the practice of a faith.

It can also refer – and very often does – to the gaze that society imposes: skin colour, style of dress, geographical origin, profession, postal code, name or surname: what, in short, is called “racialisation”, the social attribution of ethno-racial characteristics. In other words, we become “something” in the eyes of others, and within a society’s specific power relations.

In the case of the FRA data cited above, the people interviewed declared themselves to be practicing Muslims. But, as the report specifies, the data show “that a person’s skin colour or religion can be the trigger for discrimination”.

“In some ways, the difficulty lies in what is counted. What does it mean to be a Muslim today? Is it practising the faith? And practising in a specific way? Does it mean to be culturally Muslim?” asks Julien Talpin. With Olivier Esteves and Alice Picard, Talpin is the author of a book based on sociological research that is especially interesting in the French and European context: La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes (“France, you love it, but you leave it”, Seuil, 2024).

France’s very peculiar brain drain

The book brings together the results of a survey of 1,070 French citizens, including 139 in-depth interviews. All the people who took part in the survey define themselves as having a Muslim religion or culture, and all of them have decided to leave France.

The peculiarity of this statistical sample is that the majority, about three quarters, come from a working-class background in the working-class neighbourhoods of large cities and have achieved a rapid social ascension thanks to their studies. Most were born to first-generation immigrants to France. All the people interviewed left the country to work abroad in positions of often great responsibility: finance, research, the health sector… Thus, a very peculiar brain drain. Most declare that they want to leave behind the “atmospheric Islamophobia” present in France in the media, institutions and the workplace. This is a climate that worsened  after the 2015 Paris attacks. The book is full of voices that testify to the suffering specific to a whole segment of French society: the discrimination, the insults, the jokes, the gaze, the exclusion from work and housing.

Some of these people practice the faith, but some do not, or not regularly. As Talpin explains, “In the interviews we were able to conduct, sometimes people say ‘I am Muslim, or at least a little bit, culturally’, because of ‘family heritage’, etc. ‘But I don’t feel that Muslim’, they say”.

Among the countries chosen by these French citizens are the United Kingdom and Canada, followed by the Gulf countries, and Dubai in particular, as well as North Africa and Turkey, which are in some cases where the parents of the people interviewed originally came from. Here, the people interviewed say, they can “breathe”.

Something that Talpin, Esteves and Picard’s research brings into the light of day is the extent to which identity is a social construct: some of the interviewees who emigrated to the UK, for example, say that they are now perceived first and foremost as French, not as Muslim. “The fact that these French citizens do not suffer Islamophobic discrimination does not mean that such discrimination does not exist in the UK, of course, but that it is mainly directed at different people.” The main victims of islamophobic discrimination in the UK are the descendants of the British colonies, i.e. people of Pakistani or Indian origin, with whom Islam is associated, explains Talpin.

“In France, Islam is linked to the Maghreb and Algeria especially. Algerian citizens were referred to as ‘français musulmans d’Algérie’ (French Muslims of Algeria) during the colonial period. and this leaves traces in cultural, social and semantic habits. As the authors of the book explain, the question then becomes how the discourse weaves together a mix of Arabic, Muslim, Maghrebi and Islam.

For several reasons, the case of France is interesting on a European level: theoretically, it is the country with the largest Muslim community in Europe. Theoretically, because ethnic statistics are in most cases banned in order to avoid, in the view of legislators, discrimination. “There is a ban, in principle, of ethnic statistics, but with exceptions for public research,” explains Pierre Tanneau, head of the statistics and immigration section of INSEE (the national statistics institute). This is why, for some studies, it is still possible to examine religion or country of origin.

While this may help with interpretation of the data, it certainly does not correspond to what, in the Anglo-Saxon world, are called “Ethnicity facts and figures”, which are used to gauge the feeling and belonging of an individual to a given social and cultural group.

The most up-to-date official statistics are those of a study by INSEE and INED, the institute for demographic research: Trajectoires et origines (TeO, “Trajectories and Origins”), which is based on a statistical sample of 27,200 people in metropolitan France aged between 18 and 49. This study estimates the proportion of French people of Muslim religion at 10%. According to this data, 19% of the respondents claim to have suffered discrimination (rising from 14 percent in 2008-2009, in the first survey of this kind), compared to 43% in the aforementioned FRA study.

In the European context, France is also interesting because it is the country with the highest proportional population of immigrant origin: 32% of the population under 60 years of age has a history of migration, beginning at the end of the 19th century.

Germany after Hanau

In Germany, too, attacks have given a boost to the expression of racism, as Petra Dvořáková of Denik Référendum explains. Here, the situation changed in 2020, when there was a shooting in Hanau in which nine people were killed and five were injured. After the attack, the Ministry of the Interior appointed a group of independent experts who produced a report on Islamophobia (Islamophobia- A German Balance Sheet) published in 2023. According to the data, about half of the German population agrees with anti-Muslim statements. Between 700 and 1,000 racist anti-Muslim acts (insults, threats, damage to property, physical injuries) have been reported in recent years.

According to the NGO CLAIM, 1,926 acts of anti-Muslim racism were reported in 2023, 60% of which occurred after the Hamas attack on 7 October. Elisabeth Walser of CLAIM points out that anti-Muslim racism occurs in all areas and institutions: housing searches, the education system, public spaces, etc.

Muslim men, particularly black men, are the ones who experience racial profiling and police violence the most, Walser explains to Dvořáková: “Gender stereotypes are racialised; Muslim men are portrayed as aggressive, while women are portrayed as submissive, docile, backward”. She recalls an incident in the health sector: a Muslim woman wearing a veil asked for a test for sexually transmitted diseases and the doctor replied: “I don’t think you need it”.

The (veiled) body of women

Among the FRA reports, religious dress is an important question. Women whose clothing is recognisably Muslim suffer more discrimination than those who do not wear them, especially when they are looking for a job (45% versus 31%). This figure rises to 58% for young women (16-24 years) who wear religious clothing.

This trend exists in different countries, in different contexts. The historical reasons are not always the same, but the consequences are often similar: discrimination, aggression, social and personal suffering.

“Muslim women who wear the veil are the ones who suffer the most discrimination. We see the intersection of racism, sexism and the visibility of religiosity, which excludes them from public participation,” Walser continues.

France specifically is marked by a battle that it defines as “secular”, but which is seen as discriminatory abroad, especially in the English-speaking world. Since 2004 (with the prohibition of religious symbols in schools, the law on separatism, the controversy over the burkini or the hijab in sports… the list is long) Muslim clothing and symbols have been at the centre of neurotic media battles. “On the one hand, there is a kind of contradiction in France, between an extremely advanced secularisation, which means that a part of society finds the expression of religious feelings uncomfortable, whatever those feelings may be, and a return of religion that we are witnessing in recent decades all over the world, and not only of Islam,” explains Talpin.

The issue, according to Talpin, is “linked to the history of French republicanism, the Enlightenment and the idea that we can emancipate people in spite of themselves […]. This was a very present and powerful model at the time of the Third Republic and the colonial period. The French Republic intended to emancipate, liberate and enlighten the ‘savages’. […] This form of republican [democratic] paternalism is being revived today, particularly in relation to the situation of Muslim women and the wearing of the veil”.

This is despite the fact that, Talpin adds, research shows that in the vast majority of cases women who wear the veil freely choose to do so.

As Polish philosopher Monika Bobako tells Denik Référendum, “Islamophobia is manifested in various forms. There is nationalist-conservative Islamophobia, whereby people try to protect their Christian national identity from Islam. Then there is progressive Islamophobia, present in liberal circles or even on the left. Liberals are not concerned that Islam threatens traditional national and cultural identity. Instead, they see it as an anti-civil religion that opposes liberal values and human rights, including LGBT and women’s rights”.

‘We are witnessing a worrying increase in racism and discrimination against Muslims in Europe. This phenomenon is fuelled by the conflicts in the Middle East and aggravated by the dehumanising anti-Muslim rhetoric we see across the continent,” concludes Sirpa Rautio, FRA’s director.

This article is part of the PULSE project and was realised thanks to the valuable contribution of Petra Dvořáková (Denik Référendum), Ana Somavilla (Spain, El Confidencial), Kim Son Hoang, Muzayen Al-Youssef, Noura Maan (Austria, Der Standard) and Filippo Sconza (Italy, OBCT).