‘How can you be Muslim? You look like you’re Greek!’: Investigating Muslim Women’s Experiences of Islamophobia in Greece

• In Event: Hate crimes

Abstract

Existing studies indicate that Muslim women are at a heightened risk of Islamophobic victimisation, their religious attire further enhancing their visibility. Correspondingly, their vulnerability is amplified by virtue of their gender and perceived gendered identity, both in the Islamic world and in the West. The same is true in the context of Greece, a predominately Christian Orthodox country, where research into Islamophobia has been scant. Drawing on in-depth, qualitative interviews with Muslim women in Athens and Western Thrace, this paper sets out new findings that both build on existing knowledge about gendered Islamophobia, while offering original insights into its unique dimensions in a vastly under-researched setting.
More specifically, this paper examines the nature of Islamophobic victimisation in Greece, documenting the regularity in which Muslim women and their families become targets of Islamophobic abuse, hostility, and exclusion - challenging prevailing assumptions about the prevalence and severity of Islamophobia in the country. Positioned within the broader literature on the gendered dimensions of Islamophobia and the symbolic interpretation of religious attire, this paper puts forward new knowledge that gives credence to that same literature, which has uniformly claimed that the veil, as a visible marker of Muslim identity, makes Muslim women more vulnerable to discrimination and violence. This paper, however, goes further, highlighting how various markers of Muslimness, not just the veil, are targeted in Greece. Accordingly, it sheds light on the unique problematisations of Islamic attire in the Greek context - shaped by the country’s history, culture, religion, and geography - that are not commonly discussed in broader European debates. Being the first research of its kind in the context of Greece, this paper makes a timely and significant contribution to what is currently an embryonic body of work.

Author

• Christina Verousi, Northumbria University