Abstract
This chapter identifies ten key dominant Islamophobic narratives and the ten key dominant counter-narratives to Islamophobia operating in the Czech Republic. Islamophobic narratives were found to fix Muslims collectively as, in descending order of prevalence, a threat to security, unassimilable, a demographic threat, an Islamisation threat, a threat to local, national and European identity, responsible for excessive women’s oppression, essentially different and violent, incomplete citizens and a risk to the majority, and essentially homophobic.
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Notes
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“Arabs” are associated with both newcomers and people with a migrant background living in the Czech Republic and serve as synonyms for Muslims.
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In the biggest anti-Muslim and anti-refugee demonstration convened in 2016, up to 5000 people participated.
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By “narrative” we understand the representation of numerous randomly sequenced events in a coherent story (Hájek et al. 2012: 202), that is, spoken or written succession of events. Narratives describe a certain version of the past defining the causes of contemporary problems, the character of the current problem and a future image towards which current situation is leading. Following Greimas’s logic (see Cooren 2000), we describe narratives with respect to six categories of roles: (1) subject—main character of the plot, (2) object of value, (3) sender who starts mission of the subject, (4) receiver who accomplishes the mission, (5) helper—different actors who help the subject, (6) opponents—different actors who constitute obstacles for the subject.
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In the political field, Schneider (2007) identified several specific resources of Czech anti-Islamic scene: (1) Euro-sceptics; (2) Evangelic Christian fundamentalists; (3) secular liberal feminists; (4) Roman Catholic traditionalists; (5) opponents of the Turkish membership in the EU or (6) proponents of the church-state separation. Mareš (2015) proposed a categorisation of anti-Islamic political scene into monothematic, right-extremist, right-populist, conservative, left-patriotic and other (religiously/atheistic) motivated movements and showed their mutual relations. Elaborating on the ideological roots of Islamophobia, Štampach (2015) distinguishes (1) attitudes based on the Christian churchmanship that do not accept Islam, because it is a “different religion”; (2) non-acceptance of Islam from the nationalist-radical positions, where anti-Islamism goes hand in hand with anti-Semitism or racism, and (3) non-acceptance of Islam from the liberal positions (focusing on human/women’s rights).
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In this sense, a pig is a very symbolic animal. The pig which is considered as haram animal in Islam is a cornerstone of Czech national cuisine.
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We have conducted 25 semi-standardised expert interviews (with politicians/policymakers, experts, NGOs and volunteer representatives, government initiatives representatives and representatives of Muslims). The average length of interviews was one hour. We initially selected respondents that continually try to influence public debate through the lens of an open view of Islam, and thus have the experience of communicating topics connected with Muslims and Islam with the lay public. Secondly, we employed a snowball sampling approach via contact with our respondents. We have also conducted participant observations on two debates on migration and Islam and analysed Facebook pages run by the Czech Governmental Hate Free Culture Campaign in which news on minorities, including Islam and Muslims, are posted to foster non-racist culture and prevent hate- or dangerous speech.
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The exceptions are, for example, Vojtěch Berger’s project “Destination: Germany” aimed at the integration of refugees in Bavarian Hof (https://interaktivni.rozhlas.cz/cil-nemecko/); the project of Magdalena Sodomková and Brit Jensen “Yusra swims for life”, which deals with the eighteen-year-old refugee Yusra and her journey from unknown refugee to her participation in the Olympic Games (https://interaktivni.rozhlas.cz/yusra/); or the non-stereotypical informing on Islam and Muslims by the periodicals Respekt or A2.
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Čada, K., Frantová, V. (2019). Countering Islamophobia in the Czech Republic. In: Law, I., Easat-Daas, A., Merali, A., Sayyid, S. (eds) Countering Islamophobia in Europe. Mapping Global Racisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16260-3_6
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