Far-right nationalists protest outside Kraków Islamic centre in escalating campaign against Poland’s growing Muslim community

KRAKÓW (MNTV) — Roughly 200 far-right nationalists gathered outside an Islamic cultural centre in Poland’s second-largest city on Monday evening, the latest escalation in a mounting campaign against a facility that serves Kraków’s small but growing Muslim community — a campaign built, according to local officials, on fear and misinformation. 

The events were reported by Notes From Poland.

The protest was organised by the National Movement, a component of the far-right Confederation bloc that holds seats in Poland’s parliament. Demonstrators held signs declaring “We don’t want mosques here. It is not our culture” and “Defend Europe,” and some wore jackets bearing the logo of a nationalist anti-immigration movement led by a prominent far-right figure.

The National Movement’s local leader framed the demonstration in explicitly religious and civilisational terms, writing that the group would not consent to the spread of Islam in what he described as a European and Christian country. 

A Confederation MP and deputy leader of the movement went further, calling the centre an example of the deliberate “Islamisation” of Poland and declaring it was time to say enough.

Centre is not a mosque

At the heart of the controversy is a claim that appears to be factually false. The facility, run by the Al-Fajr Foundation, describes itself as an Islamic and cultural foundation established to serve and support the Muslim community in Kraków and across Poland. 

It came to wider public attention earlier this year when it began fundraising for a new cultural centre — a space it said would be used for prayer, education, and community support — warning that the two locations currently used by the city’s Muslims were stretched to their limits.

But as the newspaper Gazeta Krakowska has noted, the foundation’s premises are not a mosque. 

The building has no minarets and issues no public calls to prayer five times a day, contrary to claims circulated by some residents, media outlets, and nationalist groups.

Despite this, nationalist activists have spent recent weeks arguing that the foundation is secretly operating a mosque, sharing videos on social media showing prayers taking place inside. 

The National Movement claimed on Facebook that an “illegal mosque” was still operating and that residents of the local estate had been deceived — asserting that they had been told it was a cultural centre but had discovered otherwise.

Foundation and city officials respond

The Al-Fajr Foundation pushed back forcefully. In a statement issued ahead of the protest, it condemned what it called false information and escalating hostility directed at its activities. 

The foundation said it had always been transparent that its facilities would serve religious functions and that it complied fully with the law — in contrast, it noted pointedly, to those who were unlawfully recording visitors to its premises without consent and directing unlawful threats at the community.

Kraków’s municipal official responsible for equality policy, Ewelina Pytel, was equally direct in criticising the campaign. She accused those behind it of attempting to artificially fuel fears and instigate conflict, emphasising that Kraków is home to people of many faiths whose right to practise their religion is guaranteed by the constitution. 

In an effort to defuse tensions, Pytel pledged to organise an open meeting between local residents and representatives of the Muslim community.

Small community, outsized reaction

The scale of the backlash stands in stark contrast to the size of the community at its centre. According to Karol Wilczyński, a migration scholar at the Jagiellonian University, between 3,000 and 5,000 Muslims live in Kraków, of whom only around 300 to 400 regularly practise their faith. 

Nationally, estimates from University of Warsaw scholar Agata Nalborczyk put the total Muslim population of Poland at between 40,000 and 76,000 — just 0.1 to 0.2 per cent of the country.

That a community so small could become the target of organised far-right mobilisation reflects a broader dynamic visible across Europe, where the mere visibility of Muslim religious life — even in the form of a modest cultural centre without a single minaret — can be transformed into a symbol of civilisational threat by political movements seeking to build support on anti-immigrant sentiment.

Poland’s changing landscape

The episode comes as Poland experiences unprecedented levels of immigration, though the overwhelming majority of recent arrivals have come from neighbouring Ukraine and Belarus rather than from Muslim-majority countries. 

Numbers from Asia and the Middle East have grown, but remain small in absolute terms.

Poland also has one of the oldest continuously present Muslim communities in Europe — the Tatars, who have lived in the region since the 14th century and whose relationship with the Polish state has historically been one of mutual respect and loyalty. 

That long history of coexistence stands in sharp contrast to the rhetoric deployed outside the Al-Fajr centre this week, where a movement insisting that Islam has no place in a “Christian country” targeted a community whose presence in Polish lands predates much of modern European nationalism itself.

For now, the campaign against the Kraków centre continues. But with city officials publicly defending the Muslim community’s constitutional rights and the foundation standing firm against what it calls provocation and intimidation, the confrontation has become a test of how Poland — a country reshaped by migration yet largely spared the Muslim-focused culture wars of Western Europe — will navigate the politics of religious diversity in the years ahead.