IP: 72.11.103.229
Posted on November 30, 2009 at 10:05:50 PM by mb
Some Muslim reactions to the Swiss ban vote on Mosque Minarets
SWITZERLAND:The president of Zurich’s Association of Muslim Organisations, Tamir Hadjipolu, told the BBC: “This will cause major problems because during this campaign mosques were attacked, which we never experienced in 40 years in Switzerland.
“Islamophobia has increased intensively.” “The most painful thing for us is not the ban on minarets, but the symbol sent by this vote,” said Farhad Afshar, leader of the Swiss Coordination of Islamic Organisations. “Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community,” he said.
FRANCE: The rector of the great mosque in Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who has contacts with other Muslim leaders, said the the decision caused surprise, dismay and disbelief among Muslims in Europe.
“The result of the referendum is an expression of Islamophobia and we don’t understand it.
Nobody had expected this ‘no’ to minarets. It’s a sight that the Swiss confuse a peaceful practice of Islam and militant Islamism,” says Dalil Boubakeur.
The referendum results has already lead to demonstration in several parts of Switzerland, in Bern and Zurich, and more protests are in wait, says Boubakeur.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) Monday condemned as “tragic and deplorable” the Swiss vote on banning of minarets in the alpine country. The vote revealed the extent to which far-right racist groups were “winning the battle of ideas on the future of Europe,
” MCB secretary general Muhammad Abdul Bari said in a statement. “The Swiss referendum results show how far and how quickly Europe is moving in the wrong direction in its attitudes and policies towards Muslims and other minority groups in Europe,” he said. ”Mosques and minarets in our European cities are manifestations of the proudly indigenous nature of Islam in Europe. It is tragic that the far right is stripping away at our illustrious heritage of coexistence between different faiths and cultures in Europe and replacing it with their warped and xenophobic outlook,” said Bari.
“This is no less than a battle of ideas for the future of a plural and progressive Europe.
Tariq Ramadan in the Guardian: Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked.The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.
SWEDEN: Mahmoud Aldebe of the Swedish Muslim Assocation regrets the Swiss decision.“The relationship with the Muslim world and Switzerland will be affected very negatively.
I think that people will see Switzerland in a different way than in the past – netural and free. Now people see that there’s a lot of xenophobia and racism that somehow creeps in among the people there. But there’s lacking much, much knowledge about Muslims and it is perhaps our fault that we aren’t capable of informing about Islam and Muslims in a way that others can grasp and understand.
GERMANY:Head of the Turkish Community in Germany (TGD) Kenan Kolat told Berlin daily Berliner Zeitung that the decision was “very regrettable,” adding that basic rights such as religious freedom should not be allowed to come to popular vote. “A minaret belongs to a mosque,”
ISLAM IN EUROPE
Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and STEVEN ERLANGER, Published: November 29, 2009
GENEVA — In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.
The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.
The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.
The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”
Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the justice minister, said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.”
While such concerns “have to be taken seriously,” she said in a statement, “The Federal Council takes the view that a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies.”
The government must now draft a supporting law on the ban, a process that could take at least a year and could put Switzerland in breach of international conventions on human rights.
Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, said Manon Schick, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Switzerland.
“Most painful for us is not the minaret ban, but the symbol sent by this vote,” said Farhad Afshar, who runs the Coordination of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland. “Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community.”
The Swiss vote reflected a growing anxiety about Islam, especially its more fundamentalist forms, in many countries of Western Europe. France, for example, has been talking about banning the full Islamic veil as a way to stop the influence of the more fundamentalist Salafist forms of Islam, popular among some of the young and also converts.
Pre-referendum polls had indicated a comfortable, if slowly shrinking, majority against the proposal, after a controversial campaign that played aggressively on the same fears of Muslim immigration and the spread of Islamic values that resonate in other parts of Europe.
Media Tenor International, which monitors television coverage, said that the main Swiss evening news programs tended to report about Islam “primarily in the context of terrorism and international conflict.” Representatives of Islam “were quoted only infrequently,” said the group’s president, Roland Schatz.
“That Switzerland, a country with a long tradition of religious tolerance and the provision of refuge to the persecuted, should have accepted such a grotesquely discriminatory proposal is shocking,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Amnesty International’s deputy program director for Europe and Central Asia.
Campaign posters depicting a Swiss flag sprouting black, missile-shaped minarets alongside a woman shrouded in a niqab, a head-to-toe veil that shows only the eyes, starkly illustrated the determination of the right to play on deep-rooted fears that Muslim immigration would lead to an erosion of Swiss values.
In a recent televised debate, Ulrich Schlüer, a member of Parliament from the S.V.P., said minarets were a symbol of “the political will to take power” and establish Shariah, or religious law.
He also claimed that Switzerland already suffered from thousands of forced marriages.
That debate prompted the government to mount a public relations campaign overseas to try to avoid a backlash like the one Denmark faced in Islamic countries after a newspaper published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and to avoid damage to lucrative commercial and banking ties with wealthy Muslims.
Muslim leaders have tried to keep out of the spotlight and to avoid internationalizing the issue, shunning interviews with most news outlets from Muslim countries, according to Youssef Ibram, an imam at Geneva’s main mosque and Islamic Cultural Foundation.
Still, the campaign was accompanied by sporadic shows of hostility. Last week, vandals threw stones and a pot of paint at Geneva’s main mosque.
In an interview before the referendum, Mr. Ibram said that whatever the outcome of the vote, Muslims would lose out from a campaign that had played on fears of Islam and exposed deep-seated opposition to their community among many Swiss.
Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html?_r=1
Replies:
- The current election crisis in Somaliland: outcome of a failed ‘experiment’? - By mb November 29, 2009 at 05:19:50 PM
- LAND USE PLANNING GUIDELINES FOR SOMALILAND - By mb November 29, 2009 at 05:17:32 PM
- Project Summary: Summary of Somaliland Fishery Development Programme For Both Short and Long Terms - By mb November 29, 2009 at 05:14:04 PM
You must register before you can post on this board. You can register here.
Post a reply: