Sao Paulo, Brazil – It was not uncommon for patients to arrive in a bad mood at the emergency room of the hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, where doctor Batull Sleiman worked.
After all, every day brought its share of new medical crises, new requests for urgent care. Sleiman had seen it all. But she didn’t expect the level of anger she received several weeks ago.
A patient had arrived in his exam room frustrated with the time he had spent waiting for a doctor’s care. Sleiman reiterated that his question was “not urgent.” Yet as she treated him, he accused her of being rude.
“You are rude to me because you are not from Brazil,” Sleiman recalled. “If you were in your country…”
Sleiman said she turned away rather than hear the rest. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she believes the man reacted the way he did because of one thing: her hijab.
“I was surprised and outraged,” Sleiman told Tel Aviv Tribune. But, she added, the atmosphere in Brazil has become more tense since the start of the war in Gaza. “I noticed people looking at me more in the street since October.”
But Sleiman is not the only one who feels left out. As the war in Gaza continues, Brazil is one of several countries facing growing fears of religious discrimination, particularly against its Muslim community.
A survey published last month by the Anthropology Group on Islamic and Arab Contexts – an organization based at the University of São Paulo – found that reports of harassment among Muslim Brazilians have become widespread since the start of the war.
An estimated 70 percent of those surveyed said they knew someone who had suffered from religious intolerance since October 7, when the Palestinian group Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,140 people.
Israel has since carried out a military offensive against Gaza, a Palestinian enclave, killing more than 21,000 people. The response has sparked human rights concerns, with UN experts warning of a “grave risk of genocide”.
While Palestinians are an ethnic group – not a religious one – Professor Francirosy Barbosa of the University of São Paulo found that the events of October 7 led to incidents of religious intolerance in Brazil, with Palestinian identity being conflated with Muslim identity.
She led the November survey of 310 Muslim Brazilians. Those interviewed, she said, said they had received insults reflecting tensions over the war in Gaza.
“Many Muslim women told us that they were now being called ‘Hamas daughters’ or ‘Hamas terrorists’,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
The survey, conducted online, also found that many respondents also had direct experience of religious intolerance.
“Approximately 60 percent of those surveyed said they had experienced some kind of offense, either on social media or in their daily lives at work, at home or in public spaces,” Barbosa said.
Women in particular, the study notes, reported slightly higher rates of religious intolerance.
The issue of Islamophobia was thrust into the national spotlight this month when a video posted on social media showed a resident of Mogi das Cruzes, a suburb of São Paulo, rushing towards a Muslim woman and grabbing her scarf. The video was even broadcast on media like CNN Brasil.
One of the women involved, Karen Gimenez Oubidi, known as Khadija, had married a Moroccan man and converted to Islam eight years ago. She told Tel Aviv Tribune the altercation involved one of her neighbors: she was upset after their children argued.
“She came down with her brother and was very aggressive. She called me a “cloth-wrapped slut.” I quickly realized that it’s not just about the children’s fight,” Gimenez Oubidi said.
Neighbors tried to separate the two women. However, a man in the video grabbed Gimenez Oubidi from behind, putting an arm around her throat to hold her down. Gimenez Oubidi identified him to Tel Aviv Tribune as his neighbor’s brother.
“He said to me several times: ‘What are you doing now, terrorist?’ He didn’t say it out loud: it was just so I could hear it. He knew what he was doing,” Gimenez Oubidi said. She added that the argument her son had with the neighbor’s child was also over her hijab.
The woman who attacked Oubidi, Fernanda – she said she did not want her full name revealed for fear of a public backlash – disputed this version.
Fernanda said her son was hit by Oubidi’s son in the playground and that although she physically attacked Fernanda, she did not refer to his religion. “I never insulted her because of her religion. It just didn’t happen. I would never do something like that,” she said.
A July government report noted that religious intolerance “hits people of African origin most intensely, but it also affects indigenous people, Roma, immigrants and converts, including Muslims and Jews, as well as people atheists, agnostics and non-religious.
Brazil is predominantly Christian and has around 123 million Catholics, more than any other country in the world.
But there is a long-standing, albeit smaller, Muslim population. Scholars believe Islam arrived in the country with the transatlantic slave trade, as kidnapped African Muslims continued to practice their religion in their new environment.
A group of enslaved Muslim Brazilians even launched a rebellion against the government in 1835, called the Malê Uprising – a term derived from the Yoruba word for Muslim.
Brazil’s Muslim population grew with waves of immigration in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Arab immigrants, especially from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, began to know Brazil as their country of origin.
The exact number of Muslims in Brazil today is unknown. The 2010 census counted 35,167 people identified as Muslim, but other estimates have since been released putting the population at 1.5 million.
Some advocates, however, point out that other demographic and political trends are setting the stage for rising tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim groups.
Evangelical Christians now constitute the fastest-growing religious segment in Brazil, making up about a third of the population. Their numbers made them an important political force.
Evangelical voters helped elect far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2016, with polls showing them 70% in favor of him.
During his failed re-election bid in 2022, Bolsonaro repeatedly invoked Christian imagery in his appeals to voters, describing the race as a “fight of good against evil.”
Mahmoud Ibrahim, who runs a mosque in Porto Alegre, believes the us-versus-them mentality has translated into antagonism against his community.
During recent protests against the war in Gaza, he said spectators called him a “terrorist” and a “child rapist.”
“The evangelicals and the Bolsonarists insult us all the time. They even chased down a person who was going to our protest the other day,” he said.
Ibrahim added that he had heard of at least one woman bleeding after attackers tried to tear off her hijab, causing the pins of the scarf to embed into her skin.
Girrad Sammour heads the National Association of Muslim Jurists (ANAJI), a group that offers legal support in cases of Islamophobia. According to him, the number of reports to ANAJI has always been high, but since the start of the war on October 7, it has exploded.
“There has been a 1,000 percent increase in the denunciations we have received,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune, attributing some to incendiary remarks by far-right evangelical pastors.
But Barbosa, who led the investigation, believes there are ways to alleviate the hatred and suspicion directed at Muslim Brazilians. She cited the lack of media representation as an example.
“Few Palestinian leaders and Middle East experts with a pro-Palestinian view have been invited by television shows, for example, to comment on the conflict in Gaza,” Barbosa said.
But she also encouraged Muslim Brazilians to speak out about their experiences, in order to raise awareness.
“What is not denounced does not exist for the government,” she declared. “Only if the authorities know what is happening can they take appropriate measures, such as investing in education against religious intolerance. »