The Battle of the Minarets in Switzerland

كتبهاعلاء الأسوانى ، في 27 أكتوبر 2009 الساعة: 19:22 م

The Battle of the Minarets in Switzerland

By Alaa Al-Aswany

October 27, 2009

On the occasion of the publication of my book “Friendly Fire” in German, the Swiss publishing house Lenos invited me to hold a number of seminars on the book in Switzerland and Germany. As soon as I arrived in Zurich I found that Swiss public opinion was preoccupied with an interesting and important matter: what they call here the battle of the minarets. The story began with the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP), a strong right-wing party which for years has proposed laws hostile to foreigners and immigrants. In the past SVP has led more than one campaign to crack down on immigrants, especially Arabs and Muslims. The new campaign which SVP has adopted calls for a ban on building Islamic minarets in Switzerland. Switzerland has a population of about 7 million people, of which about 300,000 citizens are Muslims. The Muslim community in Switzerland is peaceful and quiet and has not given rise to any incidents of violence whatsoever. But SVP has gathered more than 100,000 signatures to a petition which calls on the government to ban minarets. Muslims would have the right to set up mosques as they wish, but without minarets. The reason for this is that in SVP’s opinion Islam is a religion that advocates murder, violence and the oppression of women, and the minaret is an emblem of war rather than a religious symbol. To support his argument, SVP cited a rhetoric remark by Turkish Prime Minister Receb Tayyıp Erdoğan, who said in a speech: “The minarets are our lances, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.” Unfortunately SVP also bases his argument on calls by extremist sheikhs, prominently reported by Western media, for women to cover their faces completely and stay at home. SVP also claimed that many Muslim states prevent Christians from performing their religious rites, so Switzerland should treat Muslims in the same manner. SVP chose for his campaign a horrible poster showing the Swiss flag with a woman in a complete face veil standing on it and many minarets breaking through the flag as though they are bombs or missiles. Some Swiss cities refused to permit distribution of the posters on the grounds that they incited racism and hatred of Muslims, while others allowed them on freedom of expression grounds. So far the story is familiar and occurs frequently in the West: a right wing political party incites hatred of Islam and Muslims, and tries to restrict and persecute them. But the new element is the reaction of the Swiss. Independent intellectuals, left and centre parties, the Greens, and Christian, Jewish and Muslim organizations all mounted a big counter-campaign defending the right of Muslims to build minarets, and called SVP’s proposal a violation of the right of Swiss Muslims to freedom of worship and belief. Thomas Wipf, head of the Swiss Council of Religions, said: “We are strongly in favour of enabling Muslims to worship in freedom and dignity, and if minarets are a requirement of their religion we call on them to explain that to Swiss public opinion. Even if some Muslim states deprive their Christian citizens of their religious rights, that does not justify Switzerland persecuting its Muslim citizens because we should never answer one injustice with another injustice. If we did that we would be betraying our principles and values.”

Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, a former member of SVP, has strongly condemned the campaign to ban minarets, saying it would violate the Swiss constitution, which guarantees freedom of belief and worship for all citizens without exception. In response to this big campaign in support of the rights of Muslims, the Swiss parliament has strongly recommended that people vote against the initiative of banning minarets, as has the Federal council. All international organizations including the United Nations and Amnesty International have also taken a stand against banning minarets in Switzerland. In fact the Swiss government, to affirm its support for Muslims, has given permission for a new minaret, which would bring the total number in Switzerland to five. But the battle is not yet over and under Swiss law, in light of the petition signed by 100,000 people, on November 29 there will be an official referendum in which people can vote on whether to impose the ban. Opinion polls so far show that 53 percent of Swiss support the right of Muslims to build minarets against 34 percent who oppose and 13 percent who have not yet taken a final position. The battle over Islamic minarets is raging in Switzerland and perhaps it would be useful to make some observations:

Firstly, these events make it clear that not all Westerners are hostile to Islam as some of our extremist sheikhs repeatedly say. In fact a large section of them, in spite of the bad and erroneous image of Islam in the Western media, continue to defend the rights of Muslims in the West in the context of defending human rights in general. Angela Schader, a prominent literary critic in Switzerland, told me:

"I am Protestant and I received my religious education in a rather unsightly church. The Mosque - small, simple, but pretty - was right across the street, and then it looked like Paradise to me. Today, I see the mosque as the handsome and modest building that it is - in its way quite representative for the presence of our Muslim community. It is painful to imagine how insulted and wronged they must feel by this campaign."

Secondly, the Western racist ideology which hates Arabs and Muslims is not new. What is new is that it is acquiring more supporters because Westerners are afraid of the bloody and retrogressive image which some Muslims voluntarily present of their religion. Those who signed the petition to ban minarets are not necessarily racists who hate Islam but they are afraid of an unfamiliar religion which is always linked in their minds with killing, blood and the oppression of women. We have to imagine the reaction of a Westerner when he sees Osama bin Laden on television advocating the killing of as many Christians and infidels as possible or the reaction of a Western woman when she hears some extremist sheikh saying that Muslim women should wear face veils with just one eye-hole.

Thirdly, the battle raging now in Switzerland is extremely important and the outcome far transcends the question of building minarets. If SVP wins in the referendum on November 29 than Islam will become, officially and legally, a religion which incites violence, hatred and killing, and that would have negative effects on the Muslim community in all Western countries. Why don’t we take part in this battle? Of course I don’t mean our despotic rulers, of whom no good is to be expected, but where are the independent Islamic bodies? Why don’t enlightened Muslim clerics travel to Switzerland, before the referendum on November 29, to explain to people there that minarets have nothing to do with killing and bloodshed? Isn’t that the real struggle – to explain the true faith to those ignorant of it? The contest now under way in Swiss society is a golden opportunity for us to set out to Westerners the truth about Islam, which created a great civilization over seven centuries and taught the whole world the values of tolerance, justice and freedom. I really hope that Shorouk newspaper will take up the initiative and send to Switzerland a group of senior ulema and professors of Islamic civilization. I’m confident that the Swiss media would take an interest and give them a chance to address public opinion, because all Swiss people, even those who support the right of Muslims to build minarets, have distorted ideas about Islam and many questions to which they are seeking answers.

Finally, I cannot help comparing what is happening in Switzerland and what is happening in despot-stricken Egypt. In Switzerland no one can monopolize the decision-making process, even if it is a question of building minarets. The government is freely elected by the people, the people have full authority, and the government works to serve citizens. But here in Egypt the inspired ruler monopolizes all decisions, from whether to take part in wars to economic and foreign policies, even whether to slaughter pigs and poultry. The result is that democratic Switzerland is progressing and flourishing ,while Egypt has sunk to the lowest depths.

Democracy is the solution.

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