Swiss vote ill-advised and offensive

Q: What's your reaction to Sunday's decision by voters in Switzerland to ban construction of minarets, the slender towers from which Muslims are called to daily prayers?

By banning construction of minarets, Swiss voters have undermined their country's laudable commitment to neutrality. Their decision is not only ill-advised but offensive to any sensibility that values religious freedom.

Like the burqa, the minaret is a public symbol of Islam. Of course, neither a burqa nor a minaret is a universally recognized attribute of Islam. But a substantive consideration of Islam seems not to have been on the minds of the voters who decided to approve this particular restriction on new mosque construction. Instead, the issue is the influx of Muslim immigrants and their supposedly intrusive ways.

While banning the minaret might hide Muslim worship from sight -- or remove it from earshot -- it does nothing to address how European civil society is changing. Because Europe has become more secular, referring to an overarching Christian identity has become problematic. As a fall-back position, celebrating cultural identity becomes convenient -- especially if maintaining a singular linguistic identity is impossible, as is the case in Switzerland and for the European Union as a whole. Within such a context, Muslim immigrants, who have their own non Western-European traditions, can easily become the focus for more general anxieties about national identity in an increasingly globalized world.

Ideally, any civil society should be based upon a reasonable tolerance of difference. Such tolerance must go both ways: the nation state needs to ensure religious freedom while religious groups need to understand how their deeply held convictions and claims exist alongside sometimes contradictory convictions and claims deeply held by other groups and institutions. Negotiating the appropriate balance is a difficult and painful task. But it is hard to see how banning the construction of a minaret facilitates any constructive dialogue.

The goal behind the minaret ban seems to be to avoid discussion entirely in a reactionary effort to marginalize Muslims. While the majority of Muslims in Switzerland are Turkish immigrants, a significant number have come from the Balkans. It is thus particularly ironic that Eastern European Muslims, so painfully familiar with persecution and pogrom, should be subject to such suspicion in a nation that prides itself on neutrality. To revive this spirit of neutrality, the Swiss would be well-advised to regulate the size of steeples and the frequency of church-bell ringing -- but such legislation would show a concern for principle that seems to be absent among the majority of Swiss voters at the present time.

The demographics associated with Muslim immigration and religious practice will inevitably mean that Switzerland and other European countries will find it more difficult to exclude their Muslim minorities. In any case, Islam is rapidly becoming a real religious option for European citizens regardless of their birthplace. In treating Muslims as a threat to be contained, Switzerland and other European countries should keep in mind that laws restricting religious expression have disproportionately targeted Christians in some Muslim majority nations. If Western Europe's history of religious violence now seems too distant, such realities should remind the Swiss that the fear of difference often exacts a heavy social cost.

By Mathew N. Schmalz  |  November 30, 2009; 7:28 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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