’No mosques in my backyard’: Koreans confront Muslims over building a mosque next door

The number of Muslims in South Korea, mostly workers and students from countries such as Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh, stands at under two hundred thousand today, less than half of a percentage point of the total population. However, given that in South Korea, Buddhism and Christianity are the most common religions, and that the population of all foreign national residents is only four percent, many Koreans, especially the older generation, still to this day lack a proper understanding of Islam. And after the 2007 kidnapping and deaths of South Korean missionaries in Afghanistan by members of the Taliban, some Koreans started to believe that Islam incites violence, causing fears against the local Muslim community. This uneasy situation is evident for Kyungpook National University’s Muslim international students, as they have been facing fierce backlash from their Korean neighbors after they decided to construct a two-story mosque in a residential area not far from