Switzerland: No more minarets allowed

Swiss voters defied most religious and political leaders and voted to amend their constitution to ban the construction of minarets.

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.

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