Report: Islamophobic attacks in Germany rose 33% last year

BERLIN (MNTV) — Germany recorded more anti-Muslim incidents in 2025 than in any year since monitoring began, according to a new report from the civil society organization CLAIM, which documented 4,096 cases — an average of more than 11 incidents every single day.

The figure represents a 33 percentage-point increase over 2024, when 3,080 incidents were recorded. 

It marks the fourth consecutive annual rise since CLAIM began its “Community-based Monitoring” project in 2022, when just 898 cases were documented. 

The organization’s Zivilgesellschaftliches Lagebild antimuslimischer Rassismus (“Civil Society Report on Anti-Muslim Racism”), now in its fourth edition, draws on data from 38 partner counseling and reporting centers across 15 German states, alongside police crime statistics, parliamentary inquiries, media monitoring, and — new this year — an AI-assisted tool for identifying anti-Muslim hate speech online.

Sobering picture

In her foreword, CLAIM co-director Rima Hanano wrote that trust in democratic institutions among Muslims in Germany is collapsing, noting that in 2025 nearly two-thirds of surveyed Muslims report having no trust in the federal government, while only 14% say they trust politicians.

Federal Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Ferda Ataman, who wrote the report’s introduction, said the rise in reported cases should be read alongside representative surveys that show discrimination remains a persistent feature of daily life for Muslims. 

She noted that victims describe experiences ranging from insults to property damage, physical assault, and even attempted or completed killings.

By the numbers

The report breaks the 4,096 documented cases down by severity and type:

• Verbal attacks made up the largest share at 61.1% (2,379 cases), including 747 instances of incitement to hatred (Volksverhetzung) and 1,250 insults or defamatory insults.
• Discrimination accounted for 21.5% (840 cases) — mostly harassment (40.7%) and unequal treatment (38.9%).
• “Injurious behavior” — the report’s category for violent or property crimes — made up 17.4% (680 cases), including 2 killings, 214 cases of bodily harm (4 of them severe or attempted killings), 320 instances of property damage, and 5 arson attacks.

By comparison, 2024 saw 198 bodily-harm cases and 122 property-damage cases — meaning both categories worsened in 2025, which CLAIM’s authors describe as evidence of “increasing disinhibition and brutality” in anti-Muslim violence.

Most incidents — 57.8% — occurred offline; 42.2% took place online, though CLAIM cautions that limited staffing meant only a small fraction of flagged online content could be manually verified and included. 

Of nearly 75,000 posts flagged by the organization’s new AI monitoring tool, only 552 were confirmed as anti-Muslim hate speech and folded into the final count.

Who is targeted

Individuals were the most common target, accounting for 907 of the cases where victim data was available, followed by groups (115) and religious institutions or sites (64) — including 61 attacks on mosques, down slightly from 67 in 2024. 

Two Muslim cemeteries were vandalized during the year, along with a university prayer room.

Among cases where gender was recorded, 64.5% of victims were women, a pattern the report links to the intersection of racism and sexism experienced by visibly Muslim women, particularly those who wear headscarves. Roughly 20% of documented victims were minors.

By setting, the internet was the most frequently cited environment (53.9% of cases with a known setting), followed by public spaces (16.7%), educational institutions (8.9%), the workplace (4.7%), and housing (3.5%).

Violence and the “dark figure”

The report catalogs a series of violent incidents from 2025, including an arson attack on an Arab-owned supermarket and apartment building in Saarland; a shooting with plastic ammunition that injured eight people, including five Muslims, on a university campus in Ilmenau, Thuringia; the fatal stabbing of a 26-year-old woman in Niedersachsen by a neighbor she said had repeatedly harassed her over her headscarf; and a hammer attack on two Muslim students at a school in Friedberg, Bavaria, that prosecutors say was intended to kill.

CLAIM stresses that its figures capture only a fraction of actual incidents. 

Citing EU Fundamental Rights Agency research, the report notes that just 4% of Muslims in Germany who experienced discrimination in the previous year reported it — below the already-low European average of 6%. 

Reasons cited include fear of not being believed, distrust of police and courts, and concern about consequences for residency status or schooling.

Institutional and political context

A contribution from Leipzig University sociologist Gert Pickel, drawing on the government-commissioned “Institutions & Racism” (InRa) study, found that 80% of surveyed Muslims reported experiencing discrimination in dealings with public authorities, with figures ranging from 44% in job centers to 50% in immigration offices. 

Pickel’s essay argues that discriminatory treatment in German bureaucracies is often not the fault of individual “bad apples” but reflects structural and cultural patterns embedded within institutions themselves.

The report also situates the rise in incidents against a backdrop of German political developments in 2025, including the February federal election campaign, an October debate over immigration dubbed the “Stadtbild” (cityscape) controversy, and the aftermath of the December 2024 Magdeburg Christmas market attack — which, despite the perpetrator not being Muslim, triggered a wave of anti-Muslim harassment that researchers say continued into 2025, particularly in the Magdeburg area.

Separately, official crime statistics from Germany’s interior ministry recorded 1,753 “Islamophobic” criminal offenses in 2025 — a slight decline from 1,848 in 2024 but still far above the 610 recorded in 2022.

Recommendations

CLAIM’s report closes with an 11-point policy agenda directed at the federal government, including a renewed National Action Plan Against Racism, reform of the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) to close what it calls persistent legal gaps, permanent (rather than project-based) funding for civil society monitoring and counseling infrastructure, mandatory anti-racism training for public officials, and a proposal to formally designate July 1 — the anniversary of the 2009 murder of Marwa El-Sherbini in a Dresden courtroom — as a national day of remembrance against anti-Muslim racism.

“Antimuslimischer Rassismus verschwindet nicht von allein,” the report states — anti-Muslim racism will not disappear on its own.

The full report can be accessed here.