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Tag: EU-wide minaret ban

  • International right-wingers gather for EU-wide minaret ban

    International right-wingers gather for EU-wide minaret ban

    By IRR European News Team

    31 March 2010, 2:00pm

    Extreme Right parties are hoping to use the citizens’ initiative of the Lisbon Treaty to ban the construction of minarets across the EU.

    IN February, Liz Fekete warned in a briefing paper from the European Race Audit that the extreme Right in Europe could well use the direct democracy provision of the Lisbon Treaty to pursue racist aims. Unfortunately she has been proved right. Last Saturday, at an anti-minaret conference hosted by a German right-wing group called Pro-NRW, delegates from the Belgian Vlaams Belang, Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom, Pia Kjaersgaard’s Danish People’s Party, the Front National and other extreme Right parties across Europe discussed how to begin collecting the one million signatures required to push through a Europe-wide ban on minarets.

    Filip Dewinter, leader of the Vlaams Belang in the Flemish parliament has told der Spiegel Online that ‘minarets are not part of our heritage’. Despite the fact that the European Parliament has yet to complete the legal framework for citizens’ initiatives, Dewinter appears to relish the idea of the threat. ‘Brussels is afraid of such a referendum’, he said ‘and they know it will be a very powerful weapon in the hands of right-wing conservative parties … the collection of signatures will be a political campaign in itself.’

    The Pro-NRW, organisers of the conference, is seeking to establish a political foothold in Germany ahead of state elections and is apparently testing the waters to see whether populist Islamophobia (as used in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere) can be exploited in Germany to effect.

    The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.
    RELATED LINKS
    Download a copy of ERA Briefing Paper no. 1: The Swiss referendum on minarets: background and aftermath (pdf file, 152kb)

    Download a copy of ERA Briefing Paper no. 2: Direct democracy, racism and the extreme Right (pdf file, 200kb)

    Read an IRR News story: ‘How the extreme Right hijacks direct democracy’

    Read an IRR News story: ‘Swiss poll crushes minarets’

    , 31 March 2010
  • When Church Bells sound in Saudi Arabia, then Minarets can rise in Europe

    When Church Bells sound in Saudi Arabia, then Minarets can rise in Europe

    Muslims should learn how to build bridges before
    demanding any more minarets in Switzerland


    MINARE
    December 6, 2009

    When Church Bells sound in Saudi Arabia, then Minarets can rise in Europe

    Raheel Raza
    AverroesPress.com

    TORONTO – Voters in Switzerland approved a referendum last week to ban the building of new minarets on mosques. Nearly 58% of voters, and all but four of the country’s 26 regions, supported the initiative, with support for the ban reaching 70% in some regions.

    Today, throughout the Muslim world, leaders have condemned this move and are of course in the usual way, calling for their own ban on the Swiss. Are we are going to stop eating Swiss cheese and chocolate or are we going to ban Swiss precision?

    Perhaps there is no better time than today for Muslims to understand the deeper, more profound implication of the Swiss move, and use it as a red flag to bring about internal change.

    Swiss charmer and speaker Tariq Ramadan who was recently in Canada, flowed eloquent about the beauty of Islam, but failed to mention the self-inflicted problems besieging Muslim communities of the West, especially Europe, which are swept under the rug for benefit of mass audiences.

    And herein lies the problem. Yes, Islam is a beautiful message for me and many fellow Muslims. But it may not be so for the person on the street and this is what we must accept and learn to live with. The beauty of Islam has to be shown in our daily interactions with diverse groups of people, not in our overt in-your-face religiosity or the cloth coverings on our face.

    We have become a people who carry our “Muslim-ness” to the extreme, and the only community I know who insist on using religious terminology in our daily rhetoric with non-Muslims who have no idea what this means. In doing so, we demonstrate a lack of vision and continue to be intolerant of “the other”, while making unreasonable demands of our own.

    In Canada we have a saying that what goes round, comes around. Well, in Europe the tides are changing so fast that unless Muslims wake up and smell the Nescafe, they’ll be swept away into an abyss of their own making.

    The solution is not rocket science.

    How hard is it for Muslims to understand and accept that Islam is not a stand-alone faith and neither is the message exclusive. Islam is the youngest of the three Abrahamic faiths, yet Muslims are the most spoilt and ill behaved of the three. Unless Muslims learn to extend their hand to other faiths in total unison, they can’t progress.

    Muslims must also understand that every criticism of their acts is not Islamophobia (a term too widely and easily used for my comfort). First they should understand that the term Islamophobia means “fear of Islam” and yes there is fear of Islam and Muslims and we don’t seem to be doing much to eliminate it. Our knee jerk reactions and instinct to defend Muslims, no matter what they do, is back firing. We are not the keepers of our faith. Our only duty is to learn to live in peace and harmony with other human beings, which we are not doing very well.

    For example, rarely do Muslims take time to discuss and debate how non-Muslims are treated in Muslims lands. If Muslims in the West were restricted in their worship and treated like third-class citizens, then perhaps they would understand what discrimination and harassment really means. We love to shout “racism” at the drop of a scarf, yet remain quiet when others are mistreated.

    So in Switzerland, there is a ban on building new minarets. Does this impact or harm Islam? No. Minarets were not even part of the first mosque of Islam and were incorporated into Islamic architecture, much after the death of the Prophet when Islam was becoming a political dynasty. More importantly, from a spiritual perspective, the creator does not reside inside domes or minarets, but in our hearts.

    Actually, before we start to build minarets, first we have to learn to build bridges of understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.
    ————–
    This article is dedicated to our Swiss friend, the late Joseph Egger who taught family and friends, the meaning of giving without prejudice and beyond barriers.

  • Switzerland’s Invisible Minaret

    Switzerland’s Invisible Minaret

    By PETER STAMM
    Published: December 4, 2009
    Winterthur, Switzerland

    Related Times Topics: Islam

    THREE years ago I was invited to the Tehran International Book Fair; afterward I traveled around the country. The mosques I visited were so empty as to give the impression that Iran was as secular as Western Europe. It wasn’t until I took a trip to a place of pilgrimage in the mountains that I saw large numbers of the faithful. The traffic started piling up even before my group reached the town of Imamzadeh Davood. A few of the pilgrims were making the trek on foot, together with the sheep they intended to sacrifice. The narrow streets were bustling just as at Christian places of pilgrimage: booths crammed with junk, groups of teenagers taking pictures of each other, every nook and cranny packed with candles lighted by believers in the hope their wishes would be fulfilled. I was received by the mayor and invited to dinner — the first Swiss he had ever met. He showed me the mosque and led me to the tomb of the saint. I, the unbeliever, was allowed into places where even pilgrims were not permitted. During my three weeks in Iran, my faith, or rather the lack thereof, was never an issue. However bellicose the political face of Islam often appears, in everyday practice what I experienced was a religion of hospitality and tolerance. Switzerland, on the other hand, appeared alarmingly intolerant last weekend, when 58 percent of our voters approved a ban on the building of new minarets. When the minaret referendum was proposed by the rightist Swiss People’s Party, no one really took it seriously. Some consideration was given to having it declared invalid on the grounds that it was unconstitutional as well as a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, but in the end the government agreed to allow the referendum to go forward, probably in the hope that it would be roundly defeated and thereby become a symbol of Swiss open-mindedness. So certain were the politicians of prevailing that hardly any publicity was fielded against the initiative. As a result, the streets were dominated by the proponents’ posters, which showed a veiled woman in front of a forest of minarets that looked like missiles. Minarets have never been a problem in Switzerland. There are four in the entire country, some of which have been standing for decades. (One of them is in my city but I’ve never seen it.) And only two other minarets were being planned. Most mosques are in faceless industrial districts where no one notices them. But perhaps that is exactly the problem. Islamic immigrants don’t live with us but beside us, just as French, German, Italian and Romansch-speaking Swiss live alongside each other without a great deal of animosity — or interaction. The average Swiss citizen has no real contact with Islam. Headscarves are seldom seen on the street, and chadors are practically nonexistent. Moreover, when young proponents of the ban talk about problems with Muslims, they almost exclusively mean young men from the Balkans, who come across as male chauvinists but are almost never active members of Muslim communities. Most people encounter Islam only through the news media, which don’t report on the Muslims in our country but focus on terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Iranian plans for an atomic bomb and Muammar el-Qaddafi’s absurd proposal to abolish Switzerland. It’s hard to find one overarching explanation for why the Swiss voted as they did. Similar referendums have brought surprises: 35 percent of voters wanting to do away with the army, for instance, or 58 percent approving of same-sex partnerships. The prevailing Swiss attitude is both conservative and liberal: on the one hand everything should stay the way it is, on the other everyone should be able to do what he or she wants. What’s most conspicuous in these referendums is that we are a nation of pragmatists, inclined to our dour obstinacy, and we owe our success not to grand ideas but to problem-solving. So focused are we on getting things done, it almost doesn’t matter if the problem isn’t a problem, or if the solution risks sullying the country’s reputation. We Swiss sacrificed our good standing as a multicultural and open-minded society to ban the construction of minarets that no one intends to build in order to defend ourselves against an Islam that has never existed in Switzerland. Perhaps Muslims here are more Swiss than the rest of us might think. They too will solve the problem we’ve made for them: they are likely to swallow the results of this referendum, do without their minarets and continue to assemble for prayer, unnoticed and unperturbed.
    Peter Stamm is the author of the novel “On a Day Like This.” This essay was translated by Philip Boehm from the German.