Islamophobia Busting Out All Over: The Swiss Ban Minarets
A Cow Muses On Swiss Anti-Minaret Campaign Poster (AP Photo)
Defying pollsters' predictions and the fervent hopes of the government, the Swiss yesterday voted overwhelming in favor of a ban on the building of minarets near the country's mosques, thus becoming the first European country to legislatively curb the religious practice of Muslims.
It was a stunning denouement to what most European observers assumed was a non-narrative.
Switzerland is home to about 350,000 Muslims, the majority of them refugees from wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. Only 10% regularly attend mosques, and there are just 140 mosques and prayer rooms in the country, only four of which even have minarets.
And those four minarets are purely decorative. Their traditional purpose -- broadcasting the meuzzin's call to prayers -- would violate the country's noise pollution laws.
There are no radical imams. No terrorist attacks. No more-than-normal tensions between faiths.
So how did this happen?
The minaret ban was the brainchild of the right-wing Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) and the ultra-conservative Union Démocratique Fédérale (UDF). The Swiss practice what is sometimes called "representative direct democracy," where groups can create constitutional amendments that can become binding law through referendum. In 2008, they began a petition drive to collect the 100,000 signatures needed to bring a measure to a national vote, and this summer presented 115,000 signatures to the nation's governing body.
Swiss-born Muslim Tariq Ramadan blogged in The Guardian last night that "The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol." Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, who did not support the ban, calls it a "proxy war."
The months-long campaign for the bill was nakedly, rancidly xenophobic. To the UDC and UDF and radical feminist groups working for the ban, the four minarets were just a sign of the encroaching "Islamification" of Switzerland.
"Mosques are not part of freedom of religion. This is not against Islam. The minaret is a symbol . . . of conquest and power, which marks the will to introduce sharia law as in other European cities. We will not accept that," said UDF politician Ulrich Schluer. Walter Wobmann, a UDC MP, amplified these statements, saying that "among other things, Islamic law is about honour killings, forced marriages, [female] circumcision, wearing of the burka, breaking school rules and even stonings."
The argument is purely absurd. There are 7.6 million Swiss, close to 80% of them Catholic or Protestant and 10% with no religious affiliation at all. Muslims represent 5% of the total population, and only 10% of them are observant. So that 0.5% of observant Muslims are going to start stoning people in the streets and forcing Swiss women into burqas the other 95.5% is going to let them?
And yet, on a respectable 53% voter turnout, the measure passed by almost 60%.
The minaret ban accomplishes nothing tangable. The Federal Council was quick to release a statement yesterday saying it would abide by the will of the majority, but that the ban would not affect the practice of Islam, the building of minaret-free mosques, or any currently standing minaret. In the words of one national newspaper, it was a "clear vote, with unclear consequences."
"How is it possible that such an intolerant campaign can be so successful?" Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler asked in a recent interview.
But a sociologist should know: human beings, as a whole, are easily swayed by fear of The Other. The whole history of Europe and the United States the 20th Century was defined by these fears. Balkans-born Muslim refugees in Switzerland could tell you exactly why it happened -- because after centuries of Christians and Muslims living side-by-side, some groups decided it was in their best interest politically to make them fear each other.
It has to be something hard-wired into us, something tribal or primal, because that fear overrides logic, reason and morality. It can have spectacular results....six million dead Jews, Gypsies and gays here, a million dead Hutus and Tutsis there.
Obviously, a ban on minarets in Switzerland is not going to turn into a genocide. It may not even survive a hearing before the European Union's Human Rights Commission, as it clearly violates human rights and religious freedom treaties and compacts to which Switzerland is a signatory.
But the success of the campaign is clearly going to embolden radicals across Europe to step up their efforts against Muslims -- and the only possible result is more pain, more strife, and more violence for all.
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Comments
The Hijab Martyr
http://open.salon.com/blog/heather_michon/2009/11/13/the_hijab_martyr
Sarkozy & the Battle of the Burqa
http://open.salon.com/blog/heather_michon/2009/06/23/sarkozy_the_battle_of_the_burqa
The full report is at http://www.prb.org/Articles/2008/muslimsineurope.aspx
Are their radical Muslims in Europe? Of course. But, does it ever occur than the vast majority of Muslims immigrate to Europe not in a stealthy attempt to use those namby-pamby human rights guarantees as a staging ground for world domination, but simply to enjoy the freedoms and rights denied to them in their home countries?
And yes, I refuse to surrender my "rationalistic discourse" to my fear of a phallic symbol.
"Yes, Western Europe has a growing Muslim population, but they still represent just 5% of the total Western European population."
My brain often works faster than my fingers. :-)
Anyone who thinks that Islam poses some existential treat to the future of Western Civilization really doesn't have much faith in Western Civilization, which has done quite nicely for itself lo these many, many centuries.
And "creepy" shouldn't really be a consideration. I find a lot of Catholic imagery "creepy," but I wouldn't amend the Constitution to ban it.
I'm off to fix a typo...
In much of the Islamic world, "tolerance" and "freedom of religion" only goes one way. For example, the last I heard Qatar has only one church in the entire country, a small Catholic chapel, recently built in 2008. Saudi Arabia has no churches, even though 800,000 immigrant Catholic workers live there. Around half of the 2,000 year old Iraqi Christian community has either been killed or forced to leave the country. Throughout much of the Middle East, Christian (and Jewish) populations have declined dramatically over the years, and within a few more decades may be effectively eliminated.
Of course none of this has anything to do with minarets in Switzerland -- except in one way. I think people are getting fed up with the whole situation around the world, and the double standards that seemingly have to be followed in the case of Islam. Liberals appeal to tolerance, multiculturalism, and freedom of religion in dealing with Islam, even as those concepts are virtually unknown in large parts of the Islamic world.
On one hand in democracies you have: secularism, science, freedom to criticize without fear of violent retribution and on the other side divine laws, revealed truth, male domination, tribal honor, forced genital mutilation of young girls and forced marriage with strangers on young women. If freedom is good for women in the west it is good for women of Islam.
France, Spain, the Phillipines and the Netherlands are all going through this same discussion on bans, hate-speech in the mosques, etc. And the U.S. is about to start its own discussion once again with the 911 killers on trial in New York and Major Hasan on trial pleading "insanity."
Many people fighting to defend Enlightenment values do not call this Islamophobia but the need for Islam to join the 21st century sooner, rather than later, for the sakes of us all.
If the Swiss really wanted to make a statement about Islamic intolerance, why go after a handful of minarets in their country? They have a lot more leverage than that.
According to CNSNews.com: "Arab-Swiss Chamber of Commerce figures show exports to the Arab world were worth more than $7 billion in 2007 while imports exceeded $3 billion. Between 2006 and last year, Swiss exports to Saudi Arabia rose by 26.5 percent, according to the Swiss foreign ministry. Government figures show Switzerland sold $767 million worth of weaponry in 2008, with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia the biggest non-European customers." And that doesn't include the untold billions Arab countries hold in Swiss banks.
But stopping that was not on the ballot, was it?
"Liberals appeal to tolerance, multiculturalism, and freedom of religion in dealing with Islam, even as those concepts are virtually unknown in large parts of the Islamic world."
So, we should be come intolerant, xenophobic, isolationist agnostics? That's going fix something? Solve something? If those concepts are indeed unknown in large parts of the Islamic world, than we need to exemplify them even more proudly, until they are embraced. No matter how long that takes.
Make no mistake: I am foursqaure in the corner of secularism, science and equal rights for women. Certainly we don't have to embrace those attributes of Islam that we find objectionable. We have civil and criminal laws that must be obeyed, so certainly we have to act if women in Europe are having their genitals mutilated or are being forced into the shadows against their will or if terrorists are plotting destruction.
But in our objections, we have to hold on to our own principles.
I believe in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- which will celebrate its 61st birthday on December 10 -- and I believe each and every one of its articles applies to Muslims living in Europe.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Sorry the powers that be in Switzerland decided to be so specific to Islam…but things gotta start somewhere, and this seems a reasonable first step.
The anti-minaret law is a tiptoe in the right direction. They are just too afraid to be more forceful. Ayaan Hirsi Ali asks us Western thinkers and politicians to stop exacerbating the Muslim tendency to avoid internal reflection by ourselves avoiding looking at Islam. Writers, academcis and journalists who voice their criticism of Islam are forced to take refuge in the West. Their works are banned in their own countries.
She asks that in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, the native white majority can help the Islamic minority by not trivializing the seriousness of the present crisis in Islam. More pressure should be put on minorities to become fully integrated into local and state cultures. She states Islam is not being held hostage by a terrorist minority. Islam is being held hostage by itself. As Thomas Friedman has written, "Westerners should hold Arabs and Muslims to the same high moral standards as Westerners hold for themselves."
The few enlightened Muslims run into direct opposition from Western cultural relativists who say, "It's part of the culture; you shouldn't detract from that." Or "If you criticize Islam, you hurt your own people, and that makes you a racist or Islamophobe."
Western socialist apologists are critical of the native white majority in Western countries but not of Islamic minorities. Criticism of the Islamic world, of Palestinians, and of Islamic minorities is considered as Islamophbia and xenophobia. Hirsi Ali says: "I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form." You are trapping these cultures in a state of backwardness.
Rated.
@Lonnie. Indeed. I saw a poll today that said only 40% of Democrats were thinking about voting in next years' midterm elections.
@susanmihalic. Kind of wish I'd phrased that a little differently, but it is funny.
@Deb. Islam may not recognize the UDHR, but the Swiss sure as hell do, not to mention the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Article 9 of which states:
Article 9 – Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, and to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
As I was saying to Caracalla's Amanuensis, we make a mistake to judge all Muslims by Arab and Northern African fundamentalism. Swiss Muslims are not radicals; they aren't calling for conformity with sharia law, there are no burqa-clad women roaming the streets, there is NO threat to the rights and freedoms of others. So how can the Swiss justify this vote?
@Gwendolyn. Thanks, and glad to read you've been writing, writing, writing!
That said, your argument is SOLID: the logic is impeccable and the evidence overwhelming. In other words your are 100% right. That is, any argument to the contrary--in the comments--is a right wing bigotry.
Great post, great argument, well written.
Rated for rational.
Plus, the Swiss, contrary to their benign PR, are largely snobs and very xenophobic. Their vaunted neutrality is a sham, covering up a venality and businesslike conservatism that would make the GOP proud. This doesn't really mean much of anything in the larger scheme of things.
As you point out it's not even going to mean much legally. What it may accomplish is further fuel radical Islamist groups who want to argue that muslims are unwelcome and disliked in the rest of the world.
Let's hope the rest of Europe is vocal in their disgust for the results of this refendum.
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Doesn't sound like a symbol of peaceful coexistence, really.
I don't have a strong, independent opinion on the subject though I'm swayed by its promotion by the far right - that can't ever be good. What influences me in the other direction is my concern that it seems that it is the most conservative, oppressive cultures that the secular west is pressured to defer to. Perhaps Islam is just the most visible face of that.
Side note: my congressman is Muslim and I wouldn't have thought of voting for anyone but him in either the primary or the election. I know I'm not among the most well informed but for me it's not about Islam as much as the fundamentalist Arab culture that seems inherent in every conflict between Islam and the west.
http://open.salon.com/blog/marywollstonecraft/2009/11/18/why_western_feminism_is_incompatible_with_islam--d_young/comment
how do you curtail some people's participation in a free society without compromising the society's values as a whole? i cannot tolerate oppressing the free exercise of islam any more than i can tolerate oppressing the free association of gay and polygamous families.
"Many people fighting to defend Enlightenment values do not call this Islamophobia but the need for Islam to join the 21st century sooner, rather than later, for the sakes of us all."
how is that accomplished by banning pieces of architecture?
"Western socialist apologists are critical of the native white majority in Western countries but not of Islamic minorities. "
have the islamic minorities banned steeples?
Yes, let the religious wars start again! That is how the West interacted with Islam for centuries.
It is amazing that Westerners, so proficient at analyzing symbols from popular potboilers like "Angels and Demons" to images in commercials and teenage clothing, are completely incapable of realizing the utterly obvious meaning of a thrusting tower overwhelming everything else in the vicinity, shadowing faceless shrouded women, housing a man who screams Stone Age tribal supremacism on an OCD schedule.
The upside is that they are not very representative of Europe as a whole. The fact that some other countries are discussing a ban on burqas or hijabs in the workplace should not be seen as a direct parallell to this silliness. After all, the main function of the burqa is the oppression of women, while the minaret is no more offensive than a church tower.
@Ardee -- Yup. With more than 1 billion adherents, it makes no more sense to say that all Muslims are alike than to say all Catholics or all Jews or all Protestants are exactly the same. There are radicals within Islam, and I'm sure there are a bunch of people out there who go to sleep each night and dream of tremendous destruction. I'm also sure most Muslims go to sleep exactly like we do -- exhausted from a long, hard day of work or worry, not giving a crap about all us infidels.
@maddymappo -- I wouldn't have nearly as much problem with this if it had just been about architecture or zoning. But the people who launched the anti-minaret campaign AND the people who supported it were pretty explicit that it wasn't the *minarets* they were scared of.
Given that history, if any country in Europe has a good reason for cracking down on Muslims, it's Christian Spain. And yet there is less anti-Muslim sentiment there in in most of Western Europe.
Muslims are not fully integrated, in part because most of them are dark-skinned North Africans, but they are generally left alone. Islamic studies are taught in public schools that have Muslim students. Nobody gets particularly exercised about women wearing the hijab. There are attempts at interfaith dialog. It's not perfect, but it shows that even a history of actual conquest does not have to forever determine the feelings of the non-Muslim majority.
@Tommy T - Can't speak for all Americans, but I would personally be just as vocal about the removal of Christian symbols from any non-governmental setting without good reason. But Biff is right: the separation of Church and State is inviolable. I don't think that pre-existing Christian symbols should be removed from public edifices, but I don't think new ones should be added, either.
I live in London, and grew up in the US. I am female and Muslim, and I wear a headscarf. I am amazed and distressed at the discourse taking place in Europe about its Muslim minorities. Maybe it's because I think that the US has, for all its faults, has done more to protect and uphold the rights of Muslim communities than European countries have, but I certainly feel like an outsider here, in the country of the special relationship.
To correct a few points made in the thread:
To claim a dislike of Islamic culture, rather than a religion, is ill-informed. There are cultures that have Islam as a dominant religion, but there is no such thing as an 'Islamic culture'. Islam is a religion. If there are civil complaints to be made about the faith or its adherents, using a weak dodge behind the somewhat ill-defined idea of 'culture' isn't the way to do it.
Second, minarets don't 'dominate' the horizon. They're not skyscrapers. They don't loom large except in our collective imaginations. Unless you've built a 15th-century style mosque, they don't have minarets. It also is worth mentioning that many mosques have no minarets at all. They are an architectural feature, not a symbol of the crusading Saracen hoards running amok through Europe.
Third, Juan Cole noted more eloquently than me here on Salon that those who say that Islam and Muslims have no place in Europe don't know much about the history of Islam or Europe. Muslims have lived in Europe, enriched its history, its sciences, its cosmology and contributed to its 'civilization' (another one of those loose terms like culture) for a good millennia.
Fourth, it is a crass misrepresentation and essentialization of Muslims to say we respect 'divine law over the rule of law'. Actually that phrase doesn't make sense altogether. The rule of law is the societal acceptance of a universal code to regulate public interaction on civil and criminal issues. One can uphold the rule of law whether upholding religious law or secular law. It is true that there are some Muslims that believe that religious law should take precedence over secular law in everyday affairs. It is also true that most Muslims in Europe do not subscribe to that idea, and that the desire to regulate one's own religious practice is different from demanding the implementation of religious law. Both lay and scholarly opinions are hugely divided in Muslim discourse. One thing is clear, even in Muslim religious law: minorities must respect and uphold the law of the land where they live, whether the laws are religious or not.
Fifth, as much as she would like to believe it, Ms. Hirsi Ali and others like her are not the only people who criticize Muslims or Islam. We do happen to have reflective and critical people amongst the, oh, billion or so of us that exist. Moreover, I'd encourage us to be critical of our critics. Ms. Hirsi Ali left Islam because she had been tortured through the rite of 'female circumcision', and the trauma of it drove her out of the religion. I cannot stress this enough, but someone the myth of it endures: there is nothing in Islam, the tradition, the texts, the law or anything else, that promotes the practice of genital mutilation. It is a a practice that precedes the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions. So as sorry as I am for Ms. Hirsi Ali's ordeal, I am not sure I am sympathetic to her efforts to demonize an entire religion based on what happened to her.
Sixth, and last, I suspect that the negative European obsession with its Muslim minority stems from factors that have little to do with Islam at all. Statistics demonstrate that most Muslims are not hell-bent on destruction, though I do not at all dispute the seriousness of modern terrorism. This uneasiness with outsiders has many complicated antecedents: the decline of Europe in the world, the instability of the European economy and the socioeconomic fuel for migration (climate change, conflict, poverty) are all contributing factors. There is also more than a little brute racism and xenophobia in the self-righteous tone of the European debate about its Muslim minorities, and these should be held up to criticism as well.
Coming from a human rights background, I am largely in agreement with Heather that a rights-based approach is our likeliest hope for resolving the internecine battles of our times between majorities and minorities.
:wipes sweat off brow, climbs off soapbox and returns to paid employment tasks:
Minarets do not serve the same function in Switzerland as they do in Arab countries. They don't broadcast a call to prayers, because Swiss noise pollution laws already forbid that, and is probably one of the reason so few Swiss mosques have wanted to build them. They are decorative.
I would argue that they thus function not as a threat or a warning or a watchtower, but as a comfort to worshipers who like the familiarity of it -- much as a Catholic church might be built with a high steeple even if a church bell was not an option.
But really, vertdave, how logical are those fears? Granted, there are hard-liners within Islam that talk about the establishment of a caliphate, but how *likely* is that to occur?
Historicallly, the kind of titanic shift you're talking about happens either through attrition or invasion.
The Muslim population in Western Europe is under 5% after 20 or 30 years of fairly brisk immigration. Even if those numbers picked up and the immigrants breed like bunnies -- which is not happening, by the by -- they are a long way from the significant numbers that would bring that kind of a religious-political shift to the region. It is highly improbable that Islamic fundamentalists could get the kind of military force needed to launch wide-scale invasion of Western Europe, and even if they could, how likely is it that they would succeed? Give me a (plausible) scenario.
The last decade has been marred by the willingness of people on all sides of the equation to give in to their most irrational fears. I just think that has to stop somewhere if we're ever to move forward.
Of course, as immigrants integrate (if they do) into French (or other European) culture, most likely their birth rates will decline. It's the ones who refuse any assimilation that worry the French, for this and some other reasons.
Would you like to tell me why you want to ban a Cross in the Mojave Desert, in the middle of nowhere? It was not hurting anyone.
BTW, does "duh" mean you are still trying to think?
I've been focusing on something a bit different lately with help for people with career ideas- I've been talking about some hot salary topics like is illustrated on this physical therapy assistant salary page, but I still can't turn my back on what is happening with this sort of thing, it's a real shame.
-Jenny