GENEVA, 4 May 2007 — Right-wing politicians from Switzerland’s largest political party yesterday launched a campaign for a referendum to ban the construction of minarets on mosques, claiming they symbolized an Islamist bid for power.
The group, including more than half of the Swiss People’s Party’s (SVP) parliamentarians, said in a statement that a ban would help stop “attempts by Islamist circles to impose a legal system based on the Shariah in Switzerland.” Some of the politicians said they did not oppose mosques or Muslims’ right to worship. The Swiss constitution guarantees religious freedoms and the legality of the initiative was questioned by one former judge.
Parliamentarian Oskar Freysinger branded minarets “lighthouses of jihad” while his colleague Ulrich Schlueer claimed that they were “Islamist buildings with an imperialist connotation.” Schlueer said minarets were not a religious symbol but a sign of a “political-religious bid for power.” Under the rules of Switzerland’s “people’s initiative,” the campaigners need to collect at least 100,000 signatures by November 2008 backing their call in order to trigger a national referendum on the issue, subject to legal checks.
The campaigners want to amend another constitutional article that upholds peace between members of religious communities, by inserting a clause explicitly forbidding the construction of minarets. There are just two mosques in Switzerland with minarets, in Zurich and Geneva, built in the 1960s and 1970s.
