Column

There are 300,000 Muslims in Switzerland, a county whichpasses laws by holding referendums of its adult population. It recently voted by 57 per cent in such a referendum to ban minarets on mosques.

No, don’t check that last sentence for spelling mistakes. It didn’t say ‘miniskirts with smocks’ it distinctly said ‘minarets on mosques’.

In the legislative history of Europe this may not seem all that odd. Britain still has an ancient law on its statute books which allows gentlemen to urinate out of the left hand door of a moving horse-drawn carriage. Since carriages in Britain drive on the left hand side of the road this would not cause any nuisance to the carriages of other gentlemen and ladies passing by on the right, but would merely inconvenience, startle with unwelcome sights and even splatter the passing pedestrian hoi-polloi who can’t afford carriages.

But these minarets? What does it mean? In other countries where some practice serious religious dogmatism, they set Australian Christian missionaries and their families on fire in caravans; one sect of a religion invades and bombs or machine-guns the devotees of the other; holy places of unbelievers are demolished and their gold deities carried away as loot. But outlawing not whole mosques, not domes, not ugly green-painted buildings, not the practice of loud-speaker azaans, but minarets?

In my, admittedly inexpert, aesthetic judgement, the minarets I see in the urban landscapes of Europe are not in any way more garish or more obtrusive than some of the houses that municipal socialism builds for its working classes, or even some of the ostentatious architecture of the well-heeled. At the other extreme the Taj Mahal seems to me perfectly balanced by its four minars.

Which leads me to believe that this is not so much an aesthetic judgement on minarets as a symbolic gesture against the religion of Islam.

The debate that preceded this referred decision is evidence. Several feminist groups joined the debate with the public contention that Islam is a religion that doesn’t allow its women even the shadow of the freedoms enjoyed by Swiss female citizens. Other political groups recalled the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh for making a film critical of Islam and recalled the Danish cartoons incident.

With the growth of the Muslim population of Switzerland, mainly from Turkey, Bosnia and recently in very tiny numbers from Afghanistan and Iran, the Swiss population was expressing not its religious intolerance but an irrational fear.

France has made moves to ban the burkha and head-scarves in schools. This is said to be in the interests of the uniformity of secular education but the popularity of the measure is indicative of the widespread hostility to aspects of Islam. The same fear, the same disapproval, the same symbolic gesture. Banning head-scarves or minarets won’t alleviate the lot of oppressed females anywhere.

The minaret ban is a cowardly and symbolic gesture of something deeper, something that the Swiss with their deep liberal and democratic traditions should admit to themselves and express clearly. The Turks, Bosnians, Afghan and Iranian Muslims in Switzerland are by definition anti-terrorists, in Europe for work as immigrants or as refugees from the terrors of religious bigotry. What would such a migrant feel when the demolition squads come for the minarets of the mosque at which he worships? Isn’t the gesture likely to cultivate antagonism and hatred where there is as yet none? Wouldn’t the Swiss be better advised to integrate their Muslim population into their liberal democratic traditions and send their spies and police to detect, detain and deport the Islamist infiltrators who may be attempting to corrupt this population with
un-Islamic doctrines and hatreds?