In light of the recent mosque fire bomb attacks, David Karlsson explains the rise of Islamophobia and the far-right in Sweden.
In regards to the recent escalation of attacks on mosques in Sweden, this article will provide an overview on the rise of Sweden’s Islamophobic tendencies from a political perspective as well as producing a background of the far-right party.
Just like the rest of Europe, attacks on mosques in Sweden are not a recent phenomenon. In 2011, 40 percent of the mosques in Sweden were subjugated to vandalism, arson, and bomb threats. In 2014 the figure had risen to 66 percent, according to a survey by the Islamic Cooperation Council. Despite this, the number of attacks is much higher in reality due to the fact that Islamic congregations often avoid reporting incidents to the police. A majority of these incidents include vandalism such as: racist graffiti, sprayed swastikas, shattered windows, doors and other damages to the building. As well as Gothenburg mosque receiving a bomb threat on the 9th of January, two days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
John Cato, PhD student in Islamology at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University, focuses in his thesis on how Islam and Muslims have been portrayed in political debates in Sweden between 1973 and 2010. In it, he tells that between the year 1975 and around the beginning of the 1990s, the questions concerning Muslims were mostly about education and slaughter, basically questions of a practical nature. But entering the nineties, the political debates now started to focus on the values. Islamic schools and immigration became extremely controversial topics. Especially immigration which was discussed based on the issue that it brought problems affiliated with Islam and Muslims. During the 21st century it has become even more common to discuss questions of values, for example Islamophobia, Islamism (Swedish term that describes political Islam) and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Sweden.
Through his studies, Cato confirms that the image of Islam as something “different” was in Swedish politics even in the 1980s and 1990s, but it has intensified in recent years. After 2001, the limits of what is considered acceptable for instance for a MP to say about Islam, expanded in a way that is not comparable to what the same person could express themselves about other religions. Cato shows that the generalization of what it means to be a Muslim, for example, that all Muslims would have patriarchal views or be likely to behave in a particular way, has become more accepted.
Cato concludes that the political debates during the last couple of decades are signs of unsuccessful integration policies. He also claims that it has become a simplified debate where the state and the political parties have used different strategies in order present Islam as a religion interconnected with modern values, secularism and liberalism, i.e. forcing their ideological concepts by stealth of what Islam and Muslims role in society should be.
When the political debates in Sweden shifted to focus on the values of Muslims, xenophobic movements and parties started to spring up. The infamous far-right party, the Swedish Democrats, was founded within this context, specifically in 1988. By 1999 the party became the largest party outside of parliament. And in 2006 they received 2.93 percent of the parliamentary votes, which allowed them state funding. When the elections in 2010 ended, the Swedish Democrats found a place in parliament as the sixth-largest party among eight others. Now, after the 2014 September elections, they are the third-largest party in Sweden.
Subscribe to our newsletter and stay updated on the latest news and updates from around the Muslim world!
Several of their MPs have openly expressed xenophobic and Islamophobic statements both within and outside of parliament. In November 2014 for example, Richard Jomshof was heavily criticized and labelled as an Islamophobe by other MPs for claiming that violent and oppressive Islam is advancing in the world and entering the EU and Sweden by irresponsible immigration policies. Jomshof responded afterwards to the criticism, saying that he only wanted to describe reality as it is and to highlight a problem: “When you have large immigration from that part of the world, it creates problems in Europe. Muslims in general are not evil, but Islam and Islamism is a problem when it takes hold in people’s minds and affects their actions.”
But people like Richard Jomshof are not alone. Carlos Díaz, expert on racism, made a quantitative study conducted on behalf of the Swedish Integration Board in 2007, which focused on anti-Muslim attitudes in Sweden. The results of the study indicated that there is a clear aversion to Muslims in Sweden. It showed in particular that a clear majority of the 2418 respondents had a negative view of what the survey called Islamic culture and values. In another study by Diaz from 2005, 30 percent of the respondents agreed that a large number of Muslims constituted a threat to Sweden’s national identity, and as many as 80 percent said that Islamic culture is not compatible with Western values. In the 2007 study, 40 percent also expressed distrust for Muslims and 55 percent said that they would refrain from moving to an area with a Muslim majority. Numbers that are likely to have increased within the recent eight years.
After the 2014/2015 attacks and arson on mosques in Sweden, several demonstrations took place in major Swedish cities on the 2nd of January. In Stockholm, Minister for Democracy, Alice Bah Kuhnke, was one of the speakers at the demonstration, promising that on the 2nd of February she will meet with representatives from the Muslim community and begin Sweden’s first national strategy against Islamophobia. She said that: “the strategy will be built upon spreading knowledge about what Islam really is and what Muslims really are”.
A strategy that brings hope for some and raises suspicion among others, wondering if this will be another opportunity for the government to force its secular concepts of a more “moderate Islam” by stealth unto Muslims in Sweden. At this stage, many Muslims in Sweden unfortunately feel like reaching out to the government in order to prevent the very Islamophobic opinions and movements/parties the state itself helped to create, something that will be elaborated in a later article.
David Karlsson is a Muslim convert and a political activist from Stockholm.
Comments are closed.