Thousands protest across Italy against detention of imam over Palestine comments
Activists say the government’s move to deport Mohamed Shahin is linked to a hostile portrayal of Muslim men by Italian media
Protests have been held across Italy following the arrest of Mohamed Shahin, an imam who faces deportation to Egypt by the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni for comments made during a rally in support of Palestine on 9 October.
Thousands joined demonstrations in Turin, Milan, Genoa, Florence and Naples amid growing outrage that minister of the interior Matteo Piantedosi is pursuing a case against Shahin, who leads the Omar Ibn Al-Khattab mosque in Turin. The expulsion order issued against Shahin states that criminal proceedings against him are ongoing — even though the Turin prosecutor’s office has already concluded there is no case for him to answer.
The move to extradite seems to have been triggered by a report in Italy’s influential La Stampa newspaper on 11 October, which the imam claims made it sound wrongly as though he was justifying the violence of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.
The La Stampa article became the pretext for a parliamentary question by Augusta Montaruli — an MP in Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party — who urged Piantedosi to investigate Shahin, claiming his statements proved that he had been radicalised and was a threat to public order.
“The media play a decisive role in Islamophobia, because deportation begins with words,” said Rosanna Maryam Sirignano, president of the association Islam Insieme (Islam Together). “When an Egyptian imam is illegally deported, his humanity disappears under the label of ‘terrorist’, making even state violence seem acceptable.”
Despite Shahin’s attempts to set the record straight — including in a Facebook post stating that “support for violence and terrorism has never found a place in my life or that of the Islamic community of San Salvario” — he was described in the extradition order as a “radicalised man” and a “threat to state security”. The order also quoted Shahin at the event urging any journalists present not to take his comments out of context and present him as a Hamas sympathiser.
Shahin, 46, who has lived in Italy for 21 years and has a long-term residence permit, was arrested on 24 November “for reasons of state security” while accompanying his two children, aged nine and 12, to school. He was later transferred to a repatriation detention centre in Sicily with no indication as to how long he would be detained.
His incarceration without charge has highlighted concerns about the use of administrative detention to target Muslim individuals for their political and religious views. His case follows that of Zulfiqar Khan, a Pakistani imam who had lived in Italy for almost 30 years but was expelled by the interior ministry in 2024 despite having no criminal record, based on his description of Palestinian struggle as “resistance” in a sermon. According to official data, 130 people were expelled for “reasons of state security” and 36 “extremists” were arrested between 1 January 2023 and 31 July 2024.
Shahin, in particular, has become a focus for growing public anger at the dehumanisation of Muslim men, particularly imams, in the Italian media, where they are routinely portrayed as a threat, often to the advancement of a populist agenda. This trend was flagged in a report published in 2022 by the journalism ethics organisation Carta di Roma Association, which describes a “machine of fear” in which the media routinely presents migration as a perpetual emergency, relying on alarmist predictions of incoming arrivals and emphasising disorder and risk.
“We are deeply concerned about what happened to Shahin — not because we share a religion, but because Islamophobia is being deliberately constructed for precise political purposes,” said Sirignano. “Muslim people are denied the right to political vision, dissent or indignation.”
