Anti-Muslim attacks in France surged 88% in 2025, with pig carcasses dumped outside mosques up 317%, government’s own data reveals

PARIS (MNTV) — Attacks targeting Muslims in France rose by 88 per cent in a single year, according to a comprehensive new report published by the French Interior Ministry this week — the government’s own data confirming what Muslim communities and monitoring organisations have been warning about for years: that anti-Muslim hatred in France is not only persistent but accelerating.

The report, which covers anti-religious incidents across all three major monotheistic faiths from 2010 to 2025, recorded 326 anti-Muslim acts in 2025 — up from 173 the previous year and exceeding the 2023 figure by 35 per cent. The increase was driven overwhelmingly by a surge in direct attacks on people rather than property, with assaults, threats, and intimidation against Muslim individuals rising by 151 per cent over the course of the year.

Nature of attacks

The most alarming trend documented in the report is the explosion in threatening remarks and hostile gestures directed at Muslims, which more than tripled — rising 210 per cent from the previous year to 158 recorded incidents. These ranged from verbal abuse and intimidation to acts of calculated provocation designed to humiliate and degrade.

Among the most disturbing findings is a dramatic increase in incidents where pig carcasses or pork products were deliberately left outside mosques, prayer rooms, and spaces frequented by Muslims. The ministry recorded 25 such incidents in 2025, representing a 317 per cent increase from the year before. The practice, which specifically targets Islamic dietary and religious sensibilities, reflects a level of premeditation and targeted hostility that goes well beyond spontaneous prejudice.

The report identified clear seasonal patterns, with spikes in anti-Muslim incidents clustering around periods of heightened religious observance such as Ramadan, and around politically charged debates — most notably the recurring controversy over whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear headscarves while participating in sport.

Fraction of full picture

Anti-Muslim acts accounted for roughly 13 per cent of all recorded anti-religious incidents in 2025 — a figure that the ministry itself cautions is almost certainly an undercount. The report acknowledges that many victims of religious hatred do not file formal complaints, and that the true scale of the problem is likely significantly larger than what official statistics capture.

The ministry attributes part of the increase to improved monitoring and reporting mechanisms rather than solely to a worsening environment. In particular, it points to the creation of the Association for the Defence against Discrimination and Anti-Muslim Acts (ADDAM), which launched a dedicated reporting platform in 2025 and established a formal partnership with France’s National Territorial Intelligence Directorate. The implication is that anti-Muslim incidents were previously going unrecorded at an even higher rate — meaning the baseline from which the 88 per cent increase was measured was itself artificially low.

Long arc of hostility

The broader trajectory documented in the report is sobering. Anti-Muslim acts have been rising overall since 2010, with the highest previous peak occurring in 2015 following the terrorist attacks in Paris. There was a brief dip during the pandemic years, when lockdowns and movement restrictions reduced both the occasions for incidents and the ability to report them. But since then the numbers have climbed steadily, with 2025 representing the sharpest single-year increase outside the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack.

The data also shows a shift in the nature of the attacks. While vandalism of mosques and Islamic cultural centres continues, the dominant trend in 2025 was violence and intimidation directed at individuals — people targeted on the street, in workplaces, or near places of worship because they were visibly Muslim or perceived to be so. The tripling of threatening behaviour and the doubling of direct personal confrontations point to a climate in which hostility toward Muslims is becoming less furtive and more brazen.

Government response — and contradictions

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described the fight against anti-religious acts as a priority and announced cross-ministerial coordination involving the justice, education, culture, and equality ministries. The government has allocated more than €47.8 million since 2015 to protect places of worship — funding that has gone toward CCTV systems, reinforced doors, intercoms, and secure rooms inside religious buildings. A half-day security awareness programme launched in March 2025 had reached nearly 1,700 community leaders by the end of the year.

Yet the report arrives in a political context that Muslim communities find difficult to reconcile with expressions of concern about their safety. This is the same government that has passed a headscarf ban for schoolgirls, attempted to ban a major Muslim gathering, and whose political class has spent much of the past year debating the Muslim Brotherhood, neutrality clauses in the workplace, and the boundaries of Muslim religious expression in public life. The question Muslim advocacy groups have raised repeatedly — and which the ministry’s own data now underscores — is whether a state that spends significant political energy restricting Muslim visibility can simultaneously claim to be protecting Muslim safety.

France is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim population. That its government has now documented an 88 per cent annual increase in attacks on that community — driven by intimidation, pig carcasses at mosque doors, and a tripling of threatening behaviour — while simultaneously legislating against what Muslim women wear, represents a contradiction the report itself does not attempt to resolve.