Since the late 2010s, Swedish Muslim civil society has pivoted from conventional political contention to courtroom strategies to contest Islamophobia. This article asks why, if courts are imagined as neutral rights-protecting forums, litigation has so often produced losses that normalize contested practices, from funding denials and “neutrality” bans on hijab to the permissibility of Qur’an burnings and closures of Muslim schools. We analyze four “Muslim cases” across administrative, civil, and criminal law and show how adjudication frequently effaces Islamophobia’s structural character by translating claims into individualized legal boxes: religion, ethnicity, public order, or offender motive. Drawing on Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory, we trace three misfits in Swedish law: fragmented normative coverage (e.g., “ethnicity” replacing “race,” “religion” undefined), a motive-centric hate-crime design with thin guidance, and broad judicial discretion that invites common-sense heuristics. These features, interacting with securitizing social imaginaries, render evidence of racialized anti-Muslim harm legally illegible, producing outcomes that appear neutral yet substantively disadvantage Muslims. Conceptually, we theorize how courts’ individualizing grammar depoliticizes structurally produced harms; empirically, we map recurring interpretive moves that sideline Muslimness. Normatively, we outline context-sensitive doctrinal and procedural adjustments—treating Islamophobia as a key contextual factor in proportionality, sharpening evidentiary standards for motive, and recalibrating indirect discrimination toward accommodation.
Hassan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.