Searching for the ‘Muslims’ in Islamophobia: notes from social cognition and the everyday racialisation of ‘Muslims’ in Czechia

At the height of the 2015-2016 European refugee ‘crisis’, the governments of the Visegrád countries adopted strong anti-refugee positions. Over this period, major political parties in the region (whether populist or not) employed Islamophobic rhetoric in an appeal to what, according to surveys, were electorates with marked negative attitudes towards ‘Muslims’. Since at least 2015, in several EU cross-national surveys, Czech respondents ranked as the most hostile or fearful national cohort towards ‘Muslims’ and ‘refugees’ (Heath & Richards, 2019; Kantar Public, 2018; Marfouk, 2019; TNS, 2015). Nonetheless, this paper will problematise claims made on the basis these surveys’ results by arguing that the specific processes of racialisation (Meer & Modood, 2019; Miles & Brown, 2003) and social cognition (van Dijk, 1990, 2018) of ‘Muslims’ among Czech citizens have fundamental implications for the study of Islamophobia in Czechia and Central and Eastern Europe. The paper relies on the results from twenty-three semi-structured interviews conducted with Czech citizens over the summer of 2020 in which participants attribute attitudes towards Muslims to other Czechs as well as expressing their own. Four topics that have the potential to shape future research on attitudes towards Muslims and Islamophobia in the country are analysed: the effects of intergroup contact on social cognition, the predominant thematic areas in the discussion of ‘Muslims’, the racialisation of ‘Muslims’ as Arabs and refugees, and some particularities regarding potential instances of religious prejudice. Following the analysis, I offer four recommendations for future research in Czechia which can be extrapolated to other Central and Eastern European countries.