Scholars behind European Islamophobia Report reflect on a decade of a crisis that keeps getting worse

GENEVA (MNTV) — When political scientist Enes Bayraklı and researcher Farid Hafez decided in 2014 to build a systematic, continent-wide evidence base on anti-Muslim racism in Europe, the project was born from a simple and repeated frustration. Wherever they spoke, Muslim civil society organisations told them the same thing: they raised the alarm about discrimination, and institutions responded with the same question — where is the evidence?

So they set out to produce it. A decade and more than 25 country reports later, the European Islamophobia Report has become one of the most comprehensive monitoring projects of its kind, drawing on more than 30 researchers across the continent. Writing on the occasion of the UN International Day to Combat Islamophobia on March 15, for The Bridge Initiative, the two authors reflected on what has changed, what has not, and why the trajectory remains deeply concerning.

What they found

The project launched before the 2015 refugee crisis transformed the politics of Islam across Europe. The authors say they could not have anticipated the scale of what followed — the weaponisation of Muslim presence as a political issue not just in Western Europe, where larger Muslim populations have long been the focus of academic attention, but across Eastern Europe as well. Countries with negligible Muslim populations, particularly the Visegrad Four — Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia — turned hostility toward Islam into a central feature of governance regardless of which party held power.

Over the decade, the report has documented a pattern that the authors describe as the institutionalisation of Islamophobia: the embedding of anti-Muslim discrimination not just in public attitudes but in law, policy, and state practice. France and Austria, they argue, have become pioneers in a particularly troubling development — using counter-terrorism legislation to shut down organisations that monitor Islamophobia itself, reframing the crackdown as a fight against political Islam. Denmark’s so-called “ghetto laws,” which apply different rules to residents of predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods, are cited as another example of racialised policy that effectively creates a two-tier citizenship.

Incremental gains, structural resistance

The picture is not entirely bleak. The authors document a series of institutional milestones over the past decade: Germany began recording anti-Muslim hate crimes as a separate category, increasing their visibility within state data. The EU appointed a coordinator on combating anti-Muslim hatred, though they note the position has been chronically under-resourced. The Council of Europe created a special representative for antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2020. And in 2022, the United Nations declared March 15 the International Day to Combat Islamophobia — a recognition the authors consider a landmark, even if largely symbolic.

At the civil society level, they describe a significant expansion of monitoring organisations, advocacy groups, and intersectional alliances that did not exist a decade ago. The landscape of resistance, they write, has shifted considerably since 2015.

But these gains exist alongside a relentless worsening of conditions on the ground. The authors point to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s 2024 survey of Muslim experiences across 13 European countries, which found that 47 per cent of respondents reported racial discrimination in the preceding five years — up from 39 per cent in 2016. Discrimination was particularly acute in employment, where 39 per cent encountered bias when seeking work, compared to 31 per cent eight years earlier. Young Muslim women who wear religious clothing face the sharpest disadvantage: among those aged 16 to 24, 58 per cent of those who wore visible religious dress reported discrimination in the job market.

Levels of racist harassment and physical violence have not improved since 2016. Nearly half of Muslims stopped by police believed they were profiled on the basis of their ethnicity or immigration background. And despite all this, the vast majority of incidents still go unreported.

The denial machine

Perhaps the most persistent obstacle the authors identify is not hostility itself but the refusal to acknowledge it exists. After ten years, they write, denial of Islamophobia at the highest levels of power remains a central barrier to progress. The strategies of denial are varied: outright rejection of the concept, attempts to minimise its scale, conspiracy theories claiming the term was invented by Islamists to silence criticism, and the substitution of softer language like “anti-Muslim sentiment” or “prejudice” that strips the phenomenon of its structural and institutional dimensions.

They note that despite every European country supporting the UN resolution establishing March 15 as a day of recognition, the overwhelming majority of governments simply ignore it domestically. Norway remains the only country with a dedicated national strategy against Islamophobia. Most EU member states have not included anti-Muslim racism in their broader national strategies against racism.

The argument that keeps proving itself

The authors return to an argument they have made since the project’s inception: that anti-Muslim racism does not remain confined to Muslim communities. It erodes religious freedom, civil liberties, freedom of association, and free speech in ways that eventually affect everyone. What happens to Muslims today, they write, can happen to anyone tomorrow.

A decade of evidence, they conclude, has made the problem undeniable — even if many of those in power continue to deny it. The European Islamophobia Report, they say, will continue.