Nestled in a courtyard a short walk from the bustle of Wenceslas Square, Prague’s central Islamic Center isn’t exactly easy to find. Save for a rug and a few wooden shelves for shoes by the door, there’s not a lot here that could help you guess what’s inside — no sign in the window, no office hours, no name.

On a Friday afternoon, the main room down on the ground floor slowly fills almost shoulder to shoulder with maybe a hundred or more men and boys; the women and children use rooms upstairs. As the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, sounds out, a few latecomers manage to squeeze in. For half an hour, the mosque looks like the most popular place in Prague.

But nothing could be further from the truth, says Raed Shaikh, an engineer of Palestinian origin who has lived in Prague for over two decades. “If you look at our numbers, we’re nothing,” he tells me after prayers.

And yet, recently, Muslims in the Czech Republic have been forced into the media spotlight, getting an unprecedented amount of attention as the subject of viral, fake stories, ranging from tales of two Syrian migrant men allegedly escaping custody after raping two girls to accounts of Islamic State fighters supposedly training at a shooting range in the Czech countryside. Just this month, headlines from the popular Breitbart-style Parlamentní listy (Parliamentary Journal or PL) website told Czechs that Germans are fleeing from Arabs and Africans in their own country and that “Muslim immigrants” regularly rape women and children in Sweden. The site lamented “Islam’s conquest of Europe” with the subhed, “What we’ve lost and what we can still salvage.”