Rising Concerns: Brazilian Muslims Confront Growing Islamophobia Amid Outrage Over Gaza War, – Sao Paulo, Brazil Sao Paulo, Brazil It was not unusual for patients to show up with a temper issue in the emergency room of a hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the physician Batull Sleiman worked.
Every morning brought fresh medical emergencies or requests for urgent treatment. Sleiman had seen it all. However, she didn’t anticipate the rage she experienced a couple of weeks ago.
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A patient was in her exam room, unhappy with the time it took to see a doctor. Sleiman remembered that the issue was “not urgent”; however, when she dealt with him, it was as if she had a rude attitude.
“You’re being rude to me because you’re not from Brazil,” Sleiman recalls the man telling him. “If you were from your country, you’d be rude to me. …”
Sleiman stated that she walked away from the other side of the story. She is the mother of Lebanese immigrants. She believes that the man’s behaviour was the way he did for one thing: her hijab.
“I was surprised and outraged,” Sleiman said to Al Jazeera. She added that the mood in Brazil has become more intense after the conflict in Gaza began to rage. “I’ve noticed that people have been staring more at me on the street since October.”
However, Sleiman isn’t alone in being singled out. As the conflict in Gaza continues to drag into the next phase, Brazil is one of several countries with increased concerns about discrimination based on religion, specifically toward its Muslim community.
A study published last month by the Anthropology Group on Islamic and Arab Contexts — a group that is based at the University of Sao Paulo -discovered that stories of violence against Brazilian Muslims have been commonplace since the beginning of the war.
A majority of those polled said they knew someone subject to religious intolerance after October 7, the day that it was reported that the Palestinian Hamas group Hamas began an attack on the southern part of Israel, which killed 1,140 people.
Israel has since conducted an offensive of its own against Gaza, the Palestinian community, killing over 21,000 Palestinians. This has triggered concerns about human rights and has United Nations experts warning of the ” grave risk of genocide“.
Although Palestinians represent an ethnic group and not a religious group, The University of Sao Paulo’s professor Francirosy Barbosa, found that the events of October 7 culminated in religious intolerance incidents in Brazil in the sense that Palestinian identity was confused with Muslim identity.
She was the leader of November’s survey of 310 Brazilian Muslims. Respondents, she said, were subjected to insults, which were a reflection of tensions in the Gaza conflict.
“Many Muslim women told us they are now called things like ‘Hamas daughter’ or ‘Hamas terrorist’,” she explained to Al Jazeera.
The online survey found that a lot of those who took part had personal experiences of religious intolerance.
“About 60 per cent of the respondents affirmed that they suffered some kind of offence, either on social media or in their daily lives at work, at home or in public spaces,” Barbosa claimed.
Particularly, women, the study found, had significantly higher rates of religious intolerance.
The subject of Islamophobia was thrust into the spotlight of the nation in March when a video was shared via social media that appeared to show a person from Mogi das Cruzes, a suburb of Sao Paulo, rushing towards a Muslim woman, and then grabbing her headdress. The video was shown on news channels such as CNN Brasil.
A woman in the incident, Karen Gimenez Oubidi, who is known as Khadija, was married to a Moroccan man before converting to Islam in the past eighteen years. She explained to Al Jazeera that the altercation occurred between her neighbours, who were upset because their children had been fighting.
“She went in with her older brother and was extremely violent. I was called a “clothe-wrapped bitch’. It was then that I realized it wasn’t only about fighting between kids,” Gimenez Oubidi said.
Neighborhoods tried to divide them. One of the men in the video was able to grab Gimenez Oubidi from behind and wrap her in a wrap to keep her in place. Gimenez Oubidi identified him to Al Jazeera as her neighbour’s brother.
“He repeatedly said to me, “What are you doing today, terrorist? He didn’t utter it loudly. It was just for me to listen. He knew exactly what was happening,” Gimenez Oubidi said. She also said that the argument her son was having with the neighbour’s child was also about her hijab.
The woman who slammed Oubidi Fernanda, Who claimed she was unwilling to reveal her full name for fear of backlash from the public, has denied this claim.
Fernanda stated that Oubidi’s son hit her son on the playground. While she physically attacked Fernanda, she never mentioned her religion. “I never insulted her for her religion. This was not the case. I’d never attempt something similar to that,” she said.
A report by the government from July highlighted the fact that intolerance to religion “occurs most intensely against those of African origin, but it also affects Indigenous, Roma, immigrant and converted individuals, including Muslims and Jews, as well as atheist, agnostic and non-religious people.”
Brazil is primarily Christian and home to approximately 123 million Catholics – higher than every other nation globally.
However, it has a long-standing but smaller Muslim population. The academics say Islam came to the country as a result of the transatlantic slave trade when kidnapped African Muslims continued to practice their faith in their new home.
One group of enslaved people, Muslim Brazilians, also launched an insurrection against the Brazilian government in 1835. It was known as the Male uprising, a term originating in the Yoruba word meaning Muslim.
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Brazil’s Muslim population increased with waves of immigrants in the latter part of the 19th and 20th centuries, notably after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Arab immigrants, especially those from Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, could recognize Brazil as their homeland.
The precise number of Muslims in Brazil at present isn’t known. In 2010, the census recorded 35,167 individuals identified as Muslim. However, since then, various estimates have been released, reaching 1.5 million.
However, some advocates insist on other political and demographic trends as a catalyst for tensions in the future between Muslim and non-Muslim populations.
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Evangelical Christians constitute Brazil’s fastest-growing section of religious people, making up around 1/3 of the population. Their number has turned them into a significant political power.
Evangelicals are credited with aiding in the election of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in 2016, with surveys showing 70% backing Bolsonaro.
In his 2022 reelection campaign, Bolsonaro repeatedly invoked Christian images in his appeals to voters, describing the election as a “fight of good against evil”.
Mahmoud Ibrahim, who runs the congregation in Porto Alegre, believes that the ” us-versus-them ” mentality has morphed into hatred towards his people.
In recent protests against the violence in Gaza, the protester said that people who saw him were calling him”a “terrorist” and “child rapist”.
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“Evangelicals and Bolsonarists attack us constantly. They even chased down a person who was planning to attend our rally the previous morning,” He said.
Ibrahim stated that he’d heard of a woman who had to be sucked dry when attackers tried to cut her hijab by causing the pins of the scarf to poke holes into the skin of the victim.
Girrad Sammour is the president of Girrad Sammour, the president of the National Association of Muslim Jurists (ANAJI), a group that provides legal advice for victims of Islamophobia. The number of complaints for ANAJI was always significant; however, it has increased dramatically since the beginning of the war on October 7.
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“There was a rise of 1,000 per cent in the denunciations that we received,” said the man to Al Jazeera, crediting some to inflammatory remarks made by extremist evangelical pastors.
However, Barbosa, the head of the survey, believes that there are solutions to reduce the hate and suspicion that is directed towards Brazilian Muslims. She highlighted the absence of representation in the media as an instance.
“Few Palestinian leaders and experts in the Middle East with a pro-Palestine view have been invited by TV shows, for instance, to comment on the conflict in Gaza,” Barbosa declared.
She also urged Brazilians of the Muslim faith to speak up about their experiences to help raise awareness.
“What is not denounced doesn’t exist for the government,” she stated. “Only if the authorities know what is happening will they be able to take adequate measures, like investing in education against religious intolerance.”
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