Minarets of doom
Issandr El Amrani
What can you say about the Swiss decision to ban minarets — in their constitution, not the building code! — that hasn't already been said? I for one am kind of grateful for this decision, which simultaneously exposes the depth and the vacuity of anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Muslim, rhetoric in Europe. It's long been obvious to anyone with a strange last name and more-tan-than-usual skin, but the Swiss have taken it to new levels. To cite a great line from the Hitcock film Notorious, which I watched recently at the top secret Arabist retreat at the edge of the desert, "we are protected by the enormity of their stupidity."
Of course one is tempted to concoct some scheme to respond. An Arabist nadwa last night included the following possibilities:
- Building mosques on their sides, so the minaret goes sideways rather than up in the air;
- Building minarets into the ground;
- Painting minarets onto the side of buildings;
- Finally taking Arab money out of Switzerland — perhaps in the process we'll see who has that money they're so good at being discreet about;
I'd welcome your thoughts. In the meantime here are a few tangentially minaret-related links:
"But why the minaret? I suspect that this is a very Christian response, not unlike the centuries old designation of Islam as Mohammedanism. Since Church steeples are so emblematic in Christianity, it must be assumed that the minaret holds a similar position for Muslims. There is nothing in the Quran or traditions that mandates a minaret; just as Jesus never told his followers to build steeples. A minaret is also a visible difference for a building that may look ‘Middle Eastern’ but otherwise would not stand out as much. So the vote does not really prevent Muslims from worship, but it does send a message. This message is an Islamophobic domino theory response, since the real issue is not about architecture (or any misguided birds who may occasionally fly into a minaret) but about assimilation. News reports indicate that the fears behind the vote (which was not exactly a landslide) are more about women in hijab, application of sharia law and, of course, fear of extremist terrorism. Ironically, most of the Muslims in Switzerland are from European contexts like the former Yugoslavia, not from areas where they are likely to be violent."
Excuse me? Daniel Varisco starts off well with a look at the Christian reasons for obsessions with minarets, but then veers off with the comment on Muslims from Yugoslavia. The breakup of that country was a violent process that lasted most of the 1990s, it's not like Yugoslavian Muslims have no experience of violence (and indeed there were jihadis there, even if the best-known ones were foreign). Secondly, what's the link between the provenance of Muslim immigrants and their likelihood of being violent? Are Arab Muslims the most violent because al-Qaeda is largely an Arab organization? That might be so if membership of al-Qaeda was statistically significant among Arabs, but it isn't. So really this is about the "noises and smells" and dress code (and skin color?) of non-European Muslims.
✪ Minarets in Switzerland — Crooked Timber:
"The Times reports that there’s some evidence that more women were in favor of the ban than men, too. One can only suppose that, having waited until 1971 to give women the vote in Federal elections, and in some parts of the country until 1990 in Cantonal elections, the Swiss are now making up for lost time making good on their commitment to feminism."
✪ Speaking of which, here's a post on Islamic feminism [in French].
✪ AFP: Egypt mufti says Swiss minaret ban insults Muslims:
" Egypt's Mufti Ali Gomaa denounced a vote to ban new minarets in Switzerland on Sunday as an 'insult' to Muslims across the world, while calling on Muslims not to be provoked by the move."
But of course Gomaa has opened himself up to a counter-attack with Egypt's restrictions on church-building.
✪ Do It Yourself Minaret by a Swiss graphic artist:
Since this article is in French, I'll translate the gist of it: Swiss parties now considering further measures "against the rampant Islamization of Swiss society." These include a mix of good and bad things: fighting forced marriages, female genital mutilation (not that it's an Islamic practice anyway), a burka ban, and no dispensation from swimming classes for Muslim kids. Some want to take it further: no separate areas for Muslims in Swiss cemeteries, and a ban on Swiss Muslim from wearing a veil (any type) at the workplace. Note that they've thrown in decent ideas about protecting women's rights with all kinds of racist drivel, all in the name of "encouraging Muslims to integrate our societies." Obviously that will not work, because that is not their real intentions: they want to drive out Muslims from Switzerland, go back to some kind of purely Calvinist culture now that they don't need cheap labor anymore. They are racists, and next on their legislative agenda is a law that would enable them to deport any Muslim immigrant who breaks a Swiss law or defrauds state welfare.
You see, it starts with something silly and then loses all sense of proportions. In the process they will kill positive steps that can be taken towards integration.
✪ From Le Figaro, French right-wing politicians mull also banning minarets, but most don't care about the existing ones. It is giving a boost to wider right-wing calls against Muslim immigration, though.
✪ Saudi Aramco has an old article about minarets.
✪ Sharq al-Awsat has a round-up of reactions from prominent Islamic thinkers.
✪ In a rather timely fashion for all this, Laila Lalami's review of Christopher Caldwell's book on Europe and Islam. Unlike the many other reviews I've read it reveals some truly shocking passages (including one in which Caldwell equates European colonization and labor migration). Here, after talking about French racism, she traces the intellectual intellectual antecedents of European worry about the Mohammedan hordes:
So it would seem that the perfect Muslim immigrant in France is one who cleans the house, picks up the trash, attends to the infant or, increasingly, fixes the computer, heals the sick and runs the bank, and then disappears in a wisp of smoke, before his presence, his beliefs, his customs, his way of dress, his "noise and smell" offend the particular sensibilities of the general population. France is not alone in wishing that its Muslims were invisible. As anyone who has visited Western Europe in the past few years will tell you, the "Muslim question" is a matter of grave concern.European Muslims have unintentionally revived a whole genre of nonfiction--the alarmist tract, billed as a "searing" yet "necessary" exposé on Europe's impending demise now that it has allowed so many millions of Muslims to settle on its shores. The titles are each more ominous than the last: The Rage and the Pride, by Oriana Fallaci (2002); Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'Or (2005); Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (2006); Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's Too, by Claire Berlinski (2006); and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within, by Bruce Bawer (2006). The authors rely mostly on tabloid or newspaper accounts; the arguments are simple, or, more accurately, simplistic, and the preferred method of inference is extrapolation.
The latest offering in this genre is Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. However, just as Chirac and Sarkozy prefer to say more carefully what Le Pen says bluntly, Caldwell articulates in polite and embellished language what Bawer and others have been saying aggressively for years: Europe is being overrun by Muslim immigrants; these immigrants show no sign of assimilating to European culture and social mores; and as a result, Europe is in danger of becoming an outpost of the Islamic empire.
She concludes:
Yet no one in the chattering classes seems to have noticed that the voices of European Muslims are seldom heard. This is a debate about them--not with them. And indeed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has been reviewed in the American press mostly by people who are not European, much less Muslim. Not surprisingly, the argument that Muslims are collectively trying to "conquer" Europe "street by street" in order to turn it into an outpost of Islam has been taken at face value. But this argument is not serious criticism because it is not based on thorough empirical evidence; it is racism.
In other words, racism in Europe is raw and exposed -- what else can you say about the ridiculous ban of minarets -- but racism in America, which had a better history of integration of immigrants generally, remains cloaked in the anti-immigration rantings of mainstream personalities like Lou Dobbs and a view of the Muslim world defined by that deadly phrase, "why do they hate us?"
Reader Comments (13)
You forgot my suggestion: just build minarets that look like steeples.
Comme on don't be cynical , Saudi Arabia , just to number one is far more restrictive as a matter of non muslim religion practice, and it doesn't make the headlines !!
Don't worry, Saudi Arabia has a special place on my shit list.
It is not just the saudis. The simple fact is that almost every Islamic society discriminates against non-Muslims.
Putting SA on your shit list changes nothing.
Islam and Muslims deserve nothing but contempt for their hypocrisy and actions. There is no place for them in a modern liberal society. I say this based upon a deep knowledge of the Quran and hadith. Any body that worships a god like Allah and says PBUH after the name of Mohammud, based upon the content of those writings, obviously is either ignorant or evil.
It will get worse. What are you going to do after Muslims shoots up a school and kill a bunch of children? It will probably happen. It has happened in the past.
Yeah, keep complaining about this stupid ban and don't do anything really important like reform islam, end the apostasy laws or denounce the hundreds of verses that teach hate and violence against non-Muslims.
Let me tell you why Muslims hate the West. It is because we have so much and they have so little. They hate us because their religion tells them to. they hate us because their lives are miserable and hopeless. This hate gives meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives. Yep, I sure nailed that.
Pathetic.
Kay,
All of your arguments are racist.
Why do you not place all religions on the same place as Islam and say that they have no place in a secular society? Have you read the craziness that's in the bible? Have you not read about the atrocities committed in India by Hindus or jews in Israel? Have bible-toting white supremacists not gone into schools and killed children? (many times in fact?)
Kay, I don't understand your logic: why use the excuse that Muslim countries discriminate to excuse Swiss discrimination? And if you've read this site, you should know that we are very much for the secularization of legal systems and constitutions and an end to all discriminatory laws.
@arabist
As a matter of fact think you have a point, We should concentrate on pointing out every single discrimination , whatever site it comes from.
@ kay
What about successful and happy practicing Muslims who have grown up and live in the ‘West’? What about Muslim views that are completely contradictory to yours? Aside from being extraordinarily racist, your comment betrays your complete isolation to the real world. I’m dumbfounded (but not surprised) at how many individuals think they’re “deep knowledge of the Quran and Hadith” gives their opinions any credibility against the amassed scriptural research of 1400 years, and the blinding amount of contradictory examples. Wake up Kay, nobody cares or is jealous about the ‘West’, muslims immigrate to Europe to escape from miserable bigoted mentalities like yours.
Could anyone explain to me why are minarets so important? Why are mosques or any churches important? If someone is a believer, why would they need a special place to pray in? Isn´t religion about faith and spiritual life, own ideas about the meaning of life and lifestyle? If someone believes in a religion and shouts it out to all corners of the world, it means the person is strongly certain that they are those who know the truth and others just live in a lie.
The fact is, most of Muslims are way more intolerant to other religions or atheists than other religions, they tend to ignite easily when being criticized, shouting out at others they are racists (while they are just being criticized), although I never knew that religion is a race... If someone can get so upset so easily, it means the person is intolerant.
No religion has a place in a secular society, that is true. And if any religion aspires to hold a role in governing and social life, then it is nothing but ideology. The best religion is freedom and rising, changing our parents´ way of life, their opinions and base ours on those.
We were born naked, not knowing the truth. We were born free. That was what was given to us from God - freedom. Anything else which we receive from parents and others during our life are just assumptions.
Switzerland is an independent country. If they do not want minarets in the country, it is their own business. If the Saudis are so much against Christian churches or crosses in their country, it is their own business. You can criticize, you can get upset, you can debate, but you cannot demand because when you do, your are intolerant and in my opinion, very presumptuous and disrespectful.
I got an email from the Muslim student group on my campus, calling on Muslim students to boycott Swiss products. The list was relatively long. It also called on Muslims on campus to boycott study programs in Switzerland, such as the study program I will be going on in several months. This strikes me as silly, not only because I am fishing for a new Swatch or because I've already put down a deposit for my housing in Geneva, or whatever. It is silly because it acts as if hostile reactions from Muslims will make the Swiss change their minds about minarets, or more importantly, Muslims in general.
This notion of a "Muslim problem," fanned by idiotic tracts (e.g.,Caldwell, et al) and bigoted politicians is not an aberration from European history and I think it would be more effective for European Muslims to pursue the issues through the international legal channels related to the rights of minorities and religious freedom. Switzerland is party to a series of treaties and conventions, even if half of its electorate (or those who turned out) doesn't like it. Why Europeans increasingly feel Muslims are an "Exception" to their obligations to protect the rights of minorities is a question more people should question, rather than accept to explain away by saying "well, they're afraid of change" or that Saudi Arabia or some other Muslim country ought to allow churches or synagogues or Scientologist colonies before Europeans should uphold the rule of law and their obligations under frameworks they themselves came up with to protect minorities from the lynch mob mentality that is common when Europe has gotten anxious in the past. Sure plenty of Muslim countries have not upheld their obligations to minorities, especially when it comes to historical Islamic notions of the proper relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims and the modern ideas of equality between communities (which you might argue has done minorities more harm than good in some instances). But it remains the fact that Europe and the Muslim countries are different and that the Europeans are the ones who talk about their enlightenment, progressiveness and modernity as the highest state of human development. Our international order requires that state live up to their obligations and commitments. When governments don't we get all sorts of troubles. Why accept the demands of a mob when they're out of line with the principles of the state and the country's obligations internationally? We don't and we shouldn't encourage such behavior, unless it is reacting to some terrible injustice. The only injustice I see in this case is the bigotry of the majority becoming law.
Kal raises a good issue about the boycott. Although I certainly would encourage the boycott of Swiss banking, I always have because of the negative role banking black holes play in world economics and politics. I'd say the same of the Bahamas or Luxemburg. I certainly do not support a serious boycott of Swiss products (although perhaps the Gulfies might give a tough time to Philippe Patek and other luxury brands.)
My post was trying to get at that it's easier, and perhaps more productive, to tar the Swiss with ridicule.
Lou Dobbs is 'mainstream'? He was ranting about Obama's birth certificate and barely pulling 500,000 viewers when he got the boot from CNN. 500,000 people. That's less than the population of Wyoming and approximately .0015% of America, of which a significant portion were probably people stuck in airport terminals.
Xenophobes have always existed in the US and they are always ringing the alarms on the latest populations to discover the joys of combination Walmart/McDonald's, but they have repeatedly failed throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries to do much of anything beyond occasionally delay the inevitable. Anti-immigrant racism isn't cloaked at all in the US, it's just so thoroughly dominated by old people who will be dead in a few years that we, the chattering classes, can't help but find it a bit cute.
The ban on Minarets is wrong in that it damages the cause of moderate European Islam. The arguments cultural, asthetic and religious aren't for the politicians to decide. We went down that road hundreds of years ago in the UK & Ireland and we are still feeling the effects now.
In my view I would find it puzzling as to why no distinctly European arm of Islam has come to the fore with its own distinctive architecture, culture and so on but then you see the extremists on both sides (in the UK especially) are shouting down the moderates on both sides is it any wonder why British people of either Christian or Muslim backgrounds suffer from confusion, dissolusion and mistrust?