The Swiss people have voted: They do not want minarets in their landscape. The first reaction from the European establishment was condemnation and indignation, and then slowly, other voices are coming to the fore. The reality is that the Swiss have simply told the truth: If you call a referendum and ask people whether they want places of worship of other religions in their neighborhood, the majority is likely to say no.
Except that it is not places of worship per se that the Swiss have banned, and on this they are right. A minaret is not strictly necessary in a Muslim place of worship; a mosque without a minaret is still a mosque. The role of the minaret is to call people to prayer and in this day and age, technology has replaced the need for it. The minaret has thus become an emblem of Islam, part of its architecture and history, but you cannot argue that banning minarets stops people from practicing their faith. If the Swiss had banned the construction of mosques or of Muslim prayer rooms, then that would be an infringement of the rights of Muslims to practice their faith, but that is not the case.
The Swiss have taken a hard knock. To read some of the papers you could easily believe that Switzerland is a land of racists who are fervently anti-Muslim. This is not entirely fair to the Swiss.
For a start, I would wager that if you undertook the same referendum in say France or the Netherlands, you would get the same result. That’s the problem with referendums: They’re democratic. Whereas local councils, ministers, government officials, planning officers and all the other bolts of bureaucratic decision-making have to follow principles and procedures to justify the validity of the decisions they make, the public at large don’t have to. Ask the man on the street if he would like to have a symbol of another religion loom tall over the local horizon and the knee-jerk answer is, no thanks. Ask him whether he would like to have a mosque in his back yard and the answer is also likely to be no thanks.
And let’s not be hypocrites. If you held a referendum in a Muslim country asking whether the construction of new church steeples should be permitted, you are also likely to get an overwhelming no. So let us not brand this a Swiss phenomenon and let us also remember that it is not the majority of the Swiss population that supported the ban but the majority of those who voted, which if you do the maths comes to 30 percent of the population.
Again that is part of the problem with holding referendums. Only those with strong opinions for or against will make the effort to vote. It is by its very nature a polarizing process.
What is more interesting is why the question was asked in the first place. There are up to 400,000 Muslims in Switzerland representing roughly five percent of the Swiss population. The early arrivals were mainly from Turkey whilst the recent surge in Muslim migrants has come from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia who now make up the bulk of Swiss Muslims. In other words, Swiss Muslims blend fairly well with the rest of the population. And yet the campaign against the construction of minarets depicted that beloved symbol of the anti-Muslims, that seriously scary figure: The woman in a burqa.
The French are considering a law to ban the wearing of the burqa in France and yet only a tiny minority of French Muslim women wear it. The Swiss have voted an amendment to change their constitution to ban the building of minarets and yet there are only a total of four minarets in the country.
T
his leads to at least two conclusions. First, it is the visibility of Islam that is at issue. A woman wearing a burqa stands out. She is immediately recognizable as Muslim. Similarly a minaret puts a Muslim stamp on the landscape. It states that in this land Muslims exist side by side with the Christian majority, that they are now part of the country’s cultural identity.
Partly this is a legacy of secularism. There is distaste not so much for Islam as for the idea of religion being visible and public.
Essentially the message sent by Swiss voters and now repeated across Europe is one that could be summed up by a French proverb: “To live well, live hidden”. In other words, you can practice your religion, but only privately and discreetly. Moreover, there is the idea that Muslims who choose to live in a European country should adopt the ways of the land. The onus is on them to adopt the local culture and the fear is that the opposite will happen.
Second, the fear is not of the moderate Muslims who have been living peacefully in Switzerland — or France, or Britain, or Germany — but of the influence of the extremists and the potential for, let us call them Westernized Muslims, to turn into the burqa-wearing missile-wielding terrorists of the Swiss posters.
There is undoubtedly a growing paranoia against Muslims and Islam as a religion. There are aspects of Islam or of the way it is practiced in certain countries that are unpalatable to Western thinking. If you listen carefully, the message you hear is not that Muslims are not welcome, but that a perceived movement toward a more radical form of Islam is ringing alarm bells. The problem is that by voting in such laws you achieve the exact opposite effect and create the very tension that can lead to radicalization. ([email protected])
