“Guys from Egypt” and others. Problematizing narratives about Islam of Polish female romance tourists

Polish female romance tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon linked to mass tourism to Middle East and North Africa with Egypt being one of the top travel destinations. Local exotic, travel and leisure time create conditions to enter a romantic relationship with local Muslim men. In this regard Islam is the source of danger and fascination. On the one hand it is about the essentialized submissive position of women, but on the other hand local context brings in the potential of a racialized sexuality. The paper aims to analyze how Islam is narrated and used in discussions at two Polish Internet forums dedicated to female romance tourism in Egypt and Tunisia. The data corpus indicates that information about Islam is used in order to decode, interpret and predict the behavior and motivation of Muslim men.