Research output
Complete citation
Hassan, Abdi, and Emin Poljarević. “Adjudicating Muslimness: Islamophobia and the Limits of Swedish Law.” Islamophobia Studies Journal 9, no. 2 (2026): 200–218. https://doi.org/10.13169/islastudj.9.2.0005.
Status
Published (2026)
Publication type
Peer-reviewed journal article
Overview
This article examines why legal strategies adopted by Swedish Muslim civil-society actors have often failed to secure substantive protection against Islamophobia. Analysing four cases across administrative, civil, and criminal law, it shows how courts translate structural anti-Muslim harm into narrow legal categories such as religion, ethnicity, public order, or individual motive. Drawing on Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory, the study identifies gaps in Swedish legal definitions, a motive-centred hate-crime framework, and broad judicial discretion as recurring problems. Its central contribution is to explain how apparently neutral legal reasoning can make racialised Muslimness institutionally difficult to recognise. The article concludes by proposing more context-sensitive approaches to proportionality, evidence, indirect discrimination, and accommodation.
Research question or central concern
Why do Swedish courts so often render structural Islamophobia legally illegible even when litigation is pursued as a rights-protecting strategy?
Main argument, approach, and contribution
The article combines comparative case analysis with Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory. It argues that law’s individualising grammar fragments structurally produced harms and enables substantively unequal outcomes to appear neutral.
Keywords
Islamophobia; Sweden; adjudication; discrimination law; hate-crime motive; structural racialisation; Muslimness
Links
Related publications
- Civic Suspicion and Moral Sorting
- Introduction: Sweden’s Governance of Suspicion
- Islamophobia in Sweden – National Report 2021
Emin Poljarević 