[Editor's Note: This is the second in a three-part series on the Swiss minaret ban. Read the first entry here.]
Europe’s religious leaders—including the Vatican, the Swiss Catholic bishops, and the Conference of European Rabbis—have condemned the ban on minaret construction imposed by a nearly three-to-two majority in a referendum of Swiss voters. The Elizabeth Church, Basel’s oldest Protestant house of worship, declared its bell-tower to be a minaret in protest against the ban and brought a Turkish imam to the church to bless the transformation—although the Turkish government has rebuffed numerous requests to permit the construction of a Protestant church. Prima facie, Switzerland’s voters have restricted the symbolic manifestation of a religion, if not its practice. It would be hard for Catholic, Protestant or Jewish clergy to respond otherwise.
We have heard for years of the “Arab Street”—call this the debut of the “European Street.” A scissors has opened between the sentiment of European voters and the positions of mainstream leaders. The sponsor of the referendum resolution, the Swiss People’s Party, has about a quarter of the national vote, but it pulled 57.5 percent of the vote for this symbolic slap to Islam. The Swiss initiative was cleverly designed: The minaret ban combines the maximum insult to Muslim pride with the minimum infringement of actual religious practice. Six hundred years after the Battle of Sempach the Swiss evidently know how to pick a fight.
Switzerland’s unique system emphasizes direct votes on major issues, and it is very likely that if the Dutch and other Europeans were allowed to vote directly on such issues, the result would be similar. The Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who came to prominence attacking radical Islam and unrestricted immigration, polled second in his country’s 2009 elections. Like the Swiss People’s Party, the Freedom Party has nothing in common with the extreme right—it is allied with the Dutch trade unions on some major economic issues.
Popular hostility to Islam often is misrepresented as a reaction against radical Islam; as Rabbi Aba Dunner, the head of the Conference of European Rabbis said December 4, “ Europe cannot beat radical Islam by knocking down minarets.” On the contrary, the trouble lies in the moderate position, articulated forcefully by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s statement that “assimilation [of Muslim immigrants into European culture] is a crime against humanity,” in a speech before 20,000 Muslim immigrants in Germany.
Erdogan’s tirade against assimilation rankled German politicians. Prominent German conservatives have rebuffed Erdogan’s comments. Erwin Huber, the head of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, fumed, “Erdogan preached Turkish nationalism on German soil.” But the official German response has been to import professors from the theology faculty of Ankara University to train Muslim clergy and teachers for the growing cohort of Turkish children in German schools.
It is not only Erdogan, but also Europe’s institutions—including its churches—who seem determined to prevent Muslim assimilation. According to the leading Italian journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Benedict XVI received into the Catholic Church on the Easter vigil of 2008, large numbers of Muslim immigrants already have converted, but are afraid to admit this for fear of violence. After his conversion Allam said:
His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message [by personally receiving Allam into the Church] to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.
On the contrary, Magdi Allam was left to his own devices following his high-profile conversion and the Vatican has shown no interest in the predicament of Muslim converts. A leading Jesuit Islamologist excoriated the pope in the Jesuit monthly Popoli shortly afterwards for failing to renounce proselytization of Muslims. This seems to have prevailed.
Whether Muslim immigrants to Europe are assimilable is unclear, since Europe’s institutions have made no effort to assimilate them. And in the absence of efforts to integrate Muslims, the extremist minority has free reign. In a recent speech, Gert Wilders expressed the anguish of Europeans at the cultural dissonance:
All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. . . . These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: We rule.
Bernard Lewis famously predicted a Muslim majority in Europe by the end of the century. Whether this will occur is unclear; European countries assiduously avoid reporting birth rates by religion. But the enormous and growing presence of Islamic institutions in Europe jars the existing culture, and provides a host for a truly frightening extremist minority.
Abandoned by their leaders, Switzerland’s voters took matters into their own hands. It is hard not to recall the famous lines of from the Swiss national drama, Schiller’s William Tell: “When oppression becomes intolerable, you reach into the heaven and grab hold of your eternal rights, which are hanging up there, inalienable and indestructible as the stars themselves.” Of course it is the wrong way to respond to an urgent problem. But if Europe’s leaders exclude the right way to respond, the European street will choose whatever way remains.
David Goldman is senior editor of First Things.
Comments:
Thanks.
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."
The people on the Swiss Street are no dummies.
"Last Sunday in Switzerland, voters approved a constitutional ban on the construction of minarets, the spires atop Islamic mosques where the call to prayer is issued five times a day. The result came over the explicit opposition of the country's Christian leaders, including the Swiss Catholic bishops, who issued a statement before the vote warning that "fear is a poor counselor." Afterwards, an official from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Migrants as well as L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, called the outcome a blow to religious freedom." (http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/benedicts-headache-populist-catholicism)
Church of the East member:
I'm sure you've heard the adage about not having a mind so open that everything falls out. One might well say the same about open societies. There is no mandate from above that dictates that any "open" society must avoid "hypocrisy" to the point of committing suicide. The Islamic countries wouldn't think of being open to the point that Western countries do. We don't have to imitate them in all respects, but we should value our heritage and our culture at least to the point where we draw a line when another culture wants to intrude and potentially engulf ours.
In the interests of logical and moral consistency, you may allow yourself to be annihilated, if you wish. I promise not to try to dissuade you. Clearly, you are a more enlightened person than I am.
I, however, am resisting radical Islam with every cell in my body. I view it as the moral equivalent of the ebola virus. I am going down fighting.
You may smirk now.
http://www.asca.it/news-ISLAM__L_OSSERVATORE___NO__SVIZZERO_DANNEGGIA_LIBERTA__RELIGIOSA-878262-ORA-.html
I disagree that there is no mandate from above on this matter. The applicable mandate from above is honesty and truthfulness, which dictates moral and intellectual consistency. If a person fancies him- or herself open, tolerant, and liberal, then he/she has no business endorsing the bans of minarets and such. If a person insists on endorsing the ban on minarets and such, then honesty requires acknowledging, to both oneself and the world at large, that one's attitude in this case contradicts the logic of tolerance, liberalism, and openness, and that it is therefore dishonest and hypocritical to think of oneself, and present oneself to the world, as such a person.
Please understand that I am not necessarily saying that liberalism is a good thing, and that exclusivist forms of cultural conservatism that would endorse things such as minaret bans are a bad thing. Those are both debatable propositions. What I am insisting on is simply that people who have opinions (especially strong ones) endorsing the banning of minarets and such call themselves what they really are. To endorse the banning of minarets in Switzerland may or may not be the right thing to do, but it is certainly not open, liberal, or tolerant. It is dishonest to think of oneself as such if one endorses this position. The intellectually honest approach to take would be to acknowledge the intolerant and illiberal nature of the position, and to argue that the values of tolerance, openness and liberalism are not absolute values anyhow, and are superseded in the case of minarets and such by higher values.
May I remind you that the Christian faith calls its adherents to a life of suffering and prayer, and explicitly disclaims (in the words of its founder) the inflicting of violence upon one's enemies. Vengeance is to be left to God, and God promises to bring the requisite vengeance, and to right the wrongs of history, at the occasion of Christ's coming return in glory, which we await with eagerness as the Blessed Hope of the Church.
As a Christian who attempts to be morally and intellectually consistent, I am willing to embrace the possibility of annihilation on the basis of this moral logic, since it seems to me to be integral to the Christian faith. It is a logic involving the willingness to embrace annihilation that happens to be congruent with the outcome of a logic of liberalism and tolerance, though the underlying grounds for this willingness differ substantially in the two cases. (In the case of the Christian moral logic, the term "annihilation" is actually a misnomer, since the hope of personal resurrection and divine recompense is integral to the logic, which is not true in the case of the liberal moral logic.)
I should also say that I find it very laudable that the Vatican has chosen to adopt the morally and intellectual consistent course in this current controversy involving the banning of minarets. Regardless of whether this is because of their adherence to the logic of liberalism or the logic of the Christian hope, I find the moral and logical consistency admirable.
In any event, the sovereign value of moral and intellectual consistency is something that needs to be pointed out, and I don't see why my pointing this out makes me ipso facto a person who superciliously and self-righteously considers himself superior to others, as your most recent remarks imply. I respectfully ask you to leave these judgments of my personal character up to God, and God alone.
I would be very cautious about uncritically accepting the veracity of attribution of quotes such as the one you have attributed to Erdogan. It has come to my attention in the past that inflammatory quotes of this sort have been deceitfully attributed to President Ahmadinejad of Iran by American and Israeli propagandists, and the instance you cite involving Erdogan may very well fall into a similar category.
I accidentally posted another response to you in the comments of the third of this series instead of here. Please refer to it there.
In a public gathering in 1998, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the ruling Islamist party and current Prime Minister of Turkey, recited: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...
Should you have any evidence to the contrary, do let us know.
What you have written in your most recent post is an instance of the ad hominem fallacy. It is completely irrelevant to the thrust of my original argument, and strikes me as a rather dishonorable way of pursuing a supposedly civil and Christian discussion. The fact that you are trying to be coy about hurling a gratuitous insults in your last post does not change the fact that it is in fact a gratuitous insult.
Peter Leavitt,
I accept the veracity of the attribution of these remarks to Erdogan based on the evidence you cite. Nevertheless, one would do well to approach such attributions with caution, as a general matter. As I have said before, not everything that has been attributed to Ahmadinjad in recent years by his Israeli and Western enemies has in fact been uttered by him.
"Islam is the cancer, Switzerland is the answer."
CEO, perhaps you've not heard of the "just war" theory; just so you know, there are arguments for self-defense.
It's easy to be logically consistent in the comfort of one's own environment, but in real life, sometimes one's diagram's cancel cancel each other out.
