“A Lot of People Want Malmö to Fail, Just as They Want Salahuddin and Me to Hate Each Other”

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting in the home of Imam Salahuddin Barakat in the Swedish city of Malmö. I’ve just met him for the first time; but his other guest, Rabbi Moshe David HaCohen, is a regular here. As the imam serves Arabic coffee and kosher cinnamon buns, I adjust my camera and the rabbi, with a notable air of familiarity, makes himself at home on the couch.

The two men first met three years ago, after Imam Barakat reached out to the local Jewish community in an attempt to bridge the gap between Jews and Muslims in Sweden’s third-largest city, which has justly earned a reputation for virulent anti-Semitism and gang-related crime—much of it associated with the largely Muslim immigrant population. The imam’s move, as bold as it was unexpected, was politely but unambiguously rebuffed.

Salahuddin Barakat is in no way a liberal. Raised in Sweden by somewhat secular Lebanese-born parents, he started attending religious services in his early teens and went on to study sharia in Yemen before becoming a conservative Sunni scholar. In 2013, he launched his own religious network, Islamakademin, which services nine different Muslim groups around Malmö.