Switzerland: No more minarets allowed

Switzerland has suddenly become the land of intolerance, said Thierry Meyer in Switzerland’s 24 Heures. In a move that shocked pollsters, Swiss voters last weekend defied most religious and political leaders and voted to amend their constitution to ban the construction of minarets, the towers attached to mosques. It’s not as if minarets, from which the call to prayer is chanted, are crowding out church steeples—there are only four in all of Switzerland, as most Swiss mosques don’t even have them. Yet the ban garnered nearly 60 percent of the vote, “a margin so big it surprised even the initiator,” the far-right Swiss People’s Party. That can only mean that “the mistrust of the majority of the population toward the Muslim religion and its capacity for integration is deep—far deeper than any of us imagined.”

“Muslims in Switzerland don’t deserve this injustice,” said François Modoux in Switzerland’s Le Temps. Our Muslim residents, some 400,000 out of a Swiss population of 7.5 million, are a moderate bunch, hailing mostly from Turkey and Kosovo. They are Europeans, not Arabs, and they have nothing to do with “fundamentalists who believe in terrorism, sharia, the wearing of burqas, and the stoning of women.” But they did believe that they were a valued part of Swiss society—until we just proved them wrong. Of course, such is the demonization of Islam these days that a similar referendum in any other European country would probably get similar results. But that’s little consolation: It happened here. “The damage to Switzerland’s image is immense.” To the rest of the world, we now look like racists.

In Switzerland’s defense, said Andreas Zumach in Germany’s Die Tageszeitung, the vote to ban minarets likely stemmed not from racism but rather “wounded national pride.” Over the past few years, the Swiss have lost many of the foundations of their national identity. Their much-vaunted “banking secrecy” has been weakened, after it was revealed to be a tool for tax cheats. Swissair, their national carrier, went bankrupt. And they were humiliated by Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, who held two Swiss businessmen for more than a year in retaliation for the arrest of his son in Geneva. The Swiss needed someone to blame for their “loss of confidence,” and the far right offered up Muslims.

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That seems to be happening more and more these days, said Swiss-born Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in Britain’s The Guardian. “Every European country” has demonized its Muslim population in some way. In France, they say head scarves oppress women; in Britain, they say imams preach terrorism; in the Netherlands, they criticize Muslims for being intolerant of gays. Of course, there will always be xenophobes—but we don’t have to let them set the agenda. The mainstream political parties have failed to set “courageous policies toward religious and cultural pluralism.” They need to tell their constituencies the truth: that Islam is not an alien religion. It is now a European religion. Muslims can be Europeans, too.