Muslims are the religious group most frequently targeted by hate crimes in Sweden.
The recent provocative act of Quran burning by an extremist politician Rasmus Paludan, outside the Turkish Embassy building in Sweden has highlighted the targeting of Muslims in the country.
A report published by Sweden’s National Crime Prevention Council in 2021 revealed that Muslims bore the brunt of more than half (51 percent) of all hate crimes against religious groups that occurred throughout 2020 in Sweden.
The report added that Jews face 27 percent of hate crimes in Sweden, while Christians and other groups are targeted in 11 percent of the incidents.
Among victims, Muslim and Jewish women are more likely than men to be the targets of hate crimes.
Crimes related to religion are known to account for 18 percent of the total number of incidents that are considered hate crimes in Sweden.
According to the report, 55 percent of the 4,000 reported hate crimes in Sweden were racially motivated.
This worrying number is compounded by the 2021 Report on Religious Freedom by the United States Department of State (US), which states that there are still many hate crimes in Sweden that are not reported to the police for various reasons.
The number of Muslims in Sweden alone is estimated to reach 810 thousand people or around 8.1 percent of the total population in 2016. The number of Muslims is predicted to increase to 1.1 million people or 11.1 percent of the population in 2050 in a minimal immigrant scenario.
Whereas in the maximum immigrant scenario, the number of Muslims is predicted to be 4.4 million or 30.6 percent of the total population.
This data is the result of calculations by the Pew research institute, which studies the growth of Muslims in Europe. Meanwhile, there is no official data on the number of Muslims from the Swedish government.
