Polish Muslims, Polish Fears: A reflection on politics and the fear of the Other

The mosque in Kruszyniany – a village with a population of 160, located near the Belarusian border. Photo: Maxim Edwards

Some commentators in right-wing media have labelled these attacks as “resistance to Islamicisation,” while several politicians in the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) seem to agree: the former foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski once publicly proclaimed himself an Islamophobe, and PiS chairman  Jarosław Kaczyński has castigated Muslim migrants as carrying “parasites and protozoa.”

Such views may have mainstreamed. One survey from last year found that 71 per cent of Poles stressed that “all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped,” while in a Pew Survey of the same year two-thirds took a negative view of Muslims living in Poland. Like most Europeans, Poles also overestimate the number of Muslims living in their country: they believe there are 2.6 million in Poland. In fact, they number just 35,000, or 0.09 per cent of the country’s population. With so few Muslims to encounter (just 12 per cent of Poles admit to having knowingly met one), the strength of the convictions about them demands some reflection.

Vocal minority

Poland’s public debate on migration has become a discussion about how to “prevent the danger” of Islam from entering the country. And amid it all, one group of voices is absent: those of Muslims themselves. Just a week before the act of vandalism in Ochota, a group of protesters unfurled a banner off the side of Warsaw’s Poniatowski Bridge. It depicted a Trojan horse labelled “Islam,” with a caricatured Arab man wearing a suicide vest crouching inside, waiting to be let into a fortress named “Europe”.

This rally, held on Poland’s Independence Day in 2017, drew a crowd of around 60,000 – some from ultra-nationalist groups. And while marchers later attacked the international media and their apparent uncharitable reporting of the rally, it would be fair to say there was a very loud and very visible minority present. Their messages could not have been clearer: “Islam equals terrorism” read one banner beneath Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Sciences. Government statistics show a sharp rise in attacks against Muslims: between January and October 2017, 664 hate crimes were committed against Muslims in Poland. In an emailed statement, the Polish ombudsman’s office said the number of hate crimes directed towards Muslims (or people perceived to be Muslim) in the country has almost doubled between 2015 and 2017.

I meet Nezar Cherif at Warsaw’s first mosque in the city’s southern Ursynów district. The Moroccan-born imam explains that before 1991 Warsaw had no permanent mosque; Muslims used to pray at the Egyptian embassy. As we sit in his office, he is eager to share his experiences working with Muslim Chechen and Tajik refugees in asylum seekers’ camps across eastern Poland, as well as their children’s drawings – drawings of the lives they left behind and the new lives their parents have promised. Cherif says that while public attitudes do not always make Polish Muslims’ lives easy, they largely continue as normal. “If you want to be popular, just criticise Islam,” he says. “We hold press conferences here, but few people come. The problem isn’t journalists, but editorial slants; people want a story about Islam.”

“As a minority, and when I say a minority I really mean a minority, none of us can raise the issue [of media portrayal] in the courts: nobody wants to draw attention to themselves,” explains Mahmud (a pseudonym), a student from the Middle East who regularly attends the mosque. “There are mechanisms to deal with hate speech, but newspapers know they won’t be challenged when it comes to Muslims.”

Yet some have stuck their neck out, such as fellow Moroccan-born imam Youssef Chadid, director of the Muslim Cultural-Religious Centre in Poznań and a frequent prayer leader at the Islamic Centre in Ochota. Since 2017 Chadid has received death threats after a video purportedly showing him making extremist statements were released online. Chadid insists the film was fabricated by nationalists as punishment for his outspoken public attempts to counter Islamophobic attitudes (his fellow Poznań citizens then held a rally in solidarity with the imam).

“At first they started to debate about refugees with no refugees present… and politicians and the media soon changed it into a discussion about Islam,” Chadid told me in a written exchange. He feels the media has played a negative role: “It has marginalised Muslims and those with knowledge of Islam, leaving no field for their opinions. National[ist] movements have become more active, attacking Muslims and Islam at every event without being deterred.”

Co-existence

But what Muslims do the Polish media talk about? A survey of portrayals of Muslims in the Polish press between 2015 and 2016, commissioned by the Ombudsman’s Office, revealed that articles focusing on the country’s Muslim community were actually very rare. Instead, Muslims were presented as synonymous with migrants attempting to reach the European Union – an anonymous and dehumanised crowd. Far from having a voice, the report concluded that Muslims had become a “polemic device” instrumentalised in a diverse range of political debates to smear political opponents.

In the summer of 2017 the leaders of various Polish Muslim organisations sent an open letter to the government expressing concerns about rising levels of intolerance and hate speech. There was no immediate response. The Polish Ombudsman’s office concluded that the obstacle in tackling these issues was not just the inaction of the authorities, but also moves that could be seen as openly obstructive: not least the government’s abolition of Poland’s Council for Preventing Racial Discrimination and Intolerance in May 2016.

In October 2017 thousands of Poles joined arms to encircle the country in a 3,500 kilometre “rosary of the borders”, marking the Feast of the Rosary – a festival celebrating the Christian victory over the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. As the organisers put it, this was faith on the frontline; they aimed to “defend the Christian identity of Poland”, and by extension combat the “Islamicisation of Europe.” One wonders what the residents of Kruszyniany, a village with a population of 160 located near the Belarusian border, made of this spectacle. Here stands one of Poland’s oldest mosques, in one of the cultural centres of Poland’s tiny Lipka Tatar community – Muslims whose ancestors arrived here in the early 14th century. Legend has it that in the late 17th century, Polish King Jan III Sobieski was so pleased with a Tatar cavalry commander’s service that he granted the community as much land as he could ride across in a day – and his descendants settled here, in the forests of the rural Podlasie province. They came to play important roles in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even entering the szlachta, the class of nobles eligible to elect the monarch.

Apart from their Islamic faith, little now distinguishes Poland’s Tatars from their Christian neighbours, with whom they have co-existed for centuries. Their language faded away and their ancestors’ mossy gravestones in Kruszyniany’s cemetery bear almost stereotypical Polish surnames. Poland’s Tatars are, as the scholar Katarzyna Warmińska calls them, a “familiarised other” – closer than a “migrant” yet not quite “indigenous”.

Ever since conflict erupted between Warsaw and Brussels over resettling Syrian refugees across the European Union, the Lipka Tatar villages have attracted the attention of western journalists. Their reports tend to strike the same chord: Poland’s Tatars are a “gotcha” against Polish xenophobes. But things may not be so simple. If there is one thing Poles know about the country’s tiny Tatar community, it is the role they played in 1683, fighting alongside the Polish army to defeat the Ottoman Turks in the siege of Vienna. Thus Poland’s Tatars have earned their martial valour and, accordingly, were largely treated with tolerance. They formed the backbone of the Muzułmański Związek Religijny (MZR), or Muslim Religious Union, founded in 1925. Tomas Miśkiewicz, a Tatar imam from the MZR, currently serves as the country’s Chief Mufti (Miśkiewicz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“Until fairly recently, to be Muslim in Poland was to be Tatar,” begins Artur Konopacki, a Polish academic of Tatar origin and the author of Muslims on Polish Soil. Muslims of other backgrounds, he adds, began to arrive from “fraternal socialist states” of the Arab world during the socialist period, and more recent Muslim immigrants founded the Liga Muzułmańska (LM) in 2001. Relations between the two organisations are complex and sometimes fraught; some argue that the Polish state privileges the MZR in official events.

“Some governmental departments present the Islamic Tatar model as the only one in Poland, which is not true,” says Youssef Chadid, the Moroccan-born imam from the LM. “The government must take into account that the rest of [Poland’s] Muslims actually are the majority of Muslims, and they follow other organisations than the Tatars.” Nevertheless, “our relations with the Tatars are friendly: we have a shared religion and homeland,” he adds.

Good example?

Konopacki adds that the Tatars’ form of Islam is widely perceived in Polish society as a “moderating influence”, which could be corroded by fundamentalist newcomers. And while one might think Poland’s Tatars could have a common cause with their fellow Muslims, Konopacki adds that Tatars largely do not associate themselves with the immigrants depicted by the Polish press. While some Polish Tatars initially voted for PiS, like most of their neighbours in Podlasie, the party’s xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric soon made them think twice.

Konopacki sees the Polish Tatar story as one of peaceful co-existence, but contrasts the assimilated Polish Tatar with the common image of the migrant who disrespects the majority by “taking social security”. And that sentiment cuts both ways: Konopacki adds that Tatars are as sceptical about immigration as most in Poland, fearing that “bad behaviour” on the part of the new arrivals will make Catholic Poles see them differently. But while others often invoke them as an example of Polish tolerance, Konopacki believes Tatars still do not get an adequate social platform to talk about their faith. “The Polish press always get a Polish scholar of Islam or a political scientist to comment on the issue,” he sighs, “but never a Polish Tatar who actually lives the religion.”

And while there are few other Muslim minorities in Europe today who can insert themselves into nationalist historiographies with such ease, Poland’s Tatars have found themselves on the receiving end of some unwelcome attention, too. In February 2015 for instance, an article was published in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita titled “Dokąd deportować Tatarów?” (“Where could the Tatars be deported?”). It was a follow-up to a piece by geopolitical analyst George Friedman who earlier published in Rzeczpospolita stating that Europe should consider deporting Muslims out of security interests. The obvious question was asked: Does this include the Polish Tatars? The previous June, the cemetery and mosque in Kruszyniany were vandalised just after the village’s Muslims started to fast for Ramadan; a pig was spray-painted on the side of the mosque and offensive graffiti was scrawled on many of the gravestones. Given the tiny village’s isolation, the vandalism was probably an organised excursion.

The mosque in Kruszyniany is understated. A small 18th-century wooden building at the edge of a forest, its minarets are reminiscent of the Orthodox Church towers which also stud the landscape of this mixed region. I find the mosque’s caretaker Dżemil Gembicki inside, entertaining a tour group of Polish pensioners. They are smitten; it seems he has done this many times before. Gembicki is eager to stress that Islam has a place in Poland, and the Islam of the Polish Tatars is a special one. He dismisses what the papers and the “patriots” say with a wave of his hand, but as our discussion continues, his good humour gives way to an ashen sulk. Before I manage to, he notes the abovementioned Rzeczpospolita article. “Some Poles see the fact that we’ve kept our faith as a sign of extremism … but why have the Copts in Egypt not become Muslims?” he asks. “Are they fundamentalist for not assimilating? When some Poles argue that they’re fighting Islamism, not Islam, we know what they mean. It’s like others fight social democracy when they mean communism.”

A group of female tourists arrives, and Gembicki stands up to greet them. He does not offer them headscarves. “You see, people like to come here to the ‘Polish Orient’ for a bit of exoticism,” he laughs. If Poland’s Tatars are anything, says Gembicki, they are a “Dobry Przykład” – a good example. It is his favourite phrase.

Fear of the unknown?

This Islamophobia without Muslims is not just a Polish phenomenon. Some of the most resolutely anti-immigrant Brits live in areas with the lowest levels of immigration, as do many Germans who support Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Nor on closer reflection is it a phenomenon, something which eludes explanation. After all, Poles’ problems with Muslims, or the impulses which nourish them, were not conjured up recently by right-wing populists or disinformation in the “patriotic” press.

“We had the disappearance of the Jewish other, the disappearance of the communist other, and now the appearance of the Islamic other. Poland has seen antisemitism without Jews for over 60 years; why should Islam be any different?” asks Konrad Pędziwiatr, a professor at Kraków’s University of Economics, who has written extensively about Poland’s Muslims. Pędziwiatr believes one reason why Islamophobia has taken deep root is because Polish society has yet to fully reckon with antisemitism: “Nobody wants to discuss Jedwabne or Kielce [massacres of Jews in 1941 and 1946], people only want to discuss the righteous among nations [Poles who saved Jews.] And this silence has been politicised,” he explains. “Polish society has never really critically reflected on its relationship with the Jewish and now Muslim other.”

Or at least, its others in the east. Monika Bobako, an assistant professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and author of Islamophobia as a Technology of Power, believes that Poland’s “semi-peripheral” place within the European Union helps explain the potency of Islamophobia in Polish society. While Poles may still be denigrated as “easterners” in post-Brexit Britain, they become stalwart Europeans when they defend the continent against mass migration from the global South. Demonising Muslims and emphasising their civilisational “otherness,” Bobako explains, allows Poland to symbolically “re-enter” Europe.

Bobako links this dynamic to the uncertainties many Poles faced about their country and its place in the world during its transition from socialism. During the 2000s the average Pole’s wage skyrocketed, and while the economy weathered the storm of 2008, the gap between rich and poor grew wider. Poland’s economic success during these years complicates the more conventional left-wing explanations for xenophobia. As two Polish essayists (Adam Chmielski and Michal Kozlowski) point out, for the first time ever Poles have everything; so when foreigners came, they felt they had something to lose. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of young Poles sought their future elsewhere in the EU, mainly working in the UK or Germany. And while abroad, they encountered those strangers, but exposure to more multicultural societies has not been enough to change some opinions.

Securitisation

These days ideas and fears cross borders as regularly as young Polish migrants. Sociologist Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska argues that Poland’s “Islamophobia without Muslims” is an import of the digital age, as xenophobic images of the “global Muslim” travel across the world and become even more potent in countries where people have next to no experience with Muslims (let alone positive ones) on which to base their views. While PiS has clearly pandered to such sentiments, Pędziwiatr warns against laying all the blame at their door. “This is not just about one party, but about structural matters and how Poles are conditioned to see super-diversity,” he explains.

Bobako adds that such views are hardly the preserve of Poland’s resurgent nativist right: liberals can denounce Muslim refugees as inherently illiberal and therefore a threat to the rights of LGBT people or Jews in Poland. This “liberal Islamophobia”, according to Bobako, also reaffirms Poland’s position in Europe, but appeals to a Europe of liberal values rather than the Europe of traditional cultures and nation-states. After all, when it comes to the securitisation of Muslim populations as inherently suspect or criminal (a trait shared by both liberal and nationalist Islamophobes), Polish attitudes and policies alike may not be outliers in Europe. In one chilling example, Iraqi doctoral student Ameer Alkhawlany was arrested in October 2016 under unclear circumstances, allegedly because he had refused to report on Muslim communities in Kraków for the Polish security services (Alkhawlany was eventually deported from Poland last April). In a letter written during his detention and published by Political Critique, Alkhawlany claims he told officers that he was an atheist and would not know how to conduct himself as a regular worshipper in a mosque, but they refused to believe him.

Perhaps a fixation on the miniscule number of Poland’s Muslims – from the Pakistani businessman in Warsaw to the Polish Tatar in Kruszyniany – only reinforces the logic at the heart of society’s fearful attitude towards them. “Why worry about your Muslims,” one could ask, “when you have so few of them to fear?”

“The smaller a minority is in a given country, the easier it is to politicise them and portray them as a threat, especially if they have little recourse,” concludes Pędziwiatr. “Islamophobic rhetoric has always been here, but what we’re witnessing now is its banalisation – it’s no longer just the slogans of backbenchers, it’s now also coming from cabinet ministers.”

Maxim Edwards is a journalist writing on Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space, and a former editor at openDemocracy Russia (oDR). He is currently assistant editor at OCCRP in Sarajevo. He writes here in a personal capacity.