The return of the nativists

Dec 3rd 2009 | GENEVA, ISTANBUL AND ROME
From The Economist print edition

A surprise vote to bar new minarets suggests that suspicion between faiths and cultures, even in calm democracies, runs deeper than liberal types admit

THE result was not what was expected by decent, right-thinking people, the sort who think religions can rub along together. To the shock of their government, and the dismay of onlookers ranging from the Vatican to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (which groups 57 Muslim countries), the citizens of Switzerland voted by a comfortable margin (57%, with majorities in 22 of the 26 cantons) for a ban on mosques having any new minarets.

In a Europe that is criticised, in various parts of the world, for sliding lazily towards a Muslim-dominated “Eurabia” or else for clinging stubbornly to the remnants of Christian theocracy, the referendum on November 29th was the most dramatic move any nation has made to limit the visibility of Islam.

And it happened in a land where Islam has never been very visible. The most striking feature of Geneva’s 30-year-old mosque is its modesty: its minaret (one of only four in the country) merely matches the height of the building, even though permission existed for a much taller one. And the Muslim call to prayer has not been heard in Switzerland, except (during the referendum campaign) from anti-Islamic activists trying to alarm the public.

Muslims in Switzerland are numerous (about 400,000, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey) but not especially zealous. Yet among its many effects, the result will strain relations between the Swiss and the Turks. Atilla Toptas, a Turkish-born Swiss legislator, said the campaign stirred up feelings that were as much anti-Turkish as anti-Muslim. Anti-minaret agitators pointedly referred to a poet once quoted by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan: “The mosques are our barracks…the minarets our bayonets.” (Mr Erdogan made the allusion long before he took national power, and it landed him in jail.)

Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, said he was shocked by the Swiss vote and hoped that the decision would be reversed. And he may well be right; the decision could be overturned either by Switzerland’s supreme court, or by the European Court of Human Rights.

But the ballot was still a troubling landmark in Europe’s dealings with Islam, and in the global relationship between the monotheistic faiths. Among groups with a stake in good ties between Islam and the historically Christian West, there was an instant sense that the challenge they faced might be bigger than people thought. “Support for the most extreme forms of religious violence is falling off, but we may have underestimated the suspicion that persists between followers of our faiths, especially when they are not well informed,” said Alistair MacDonald-Radcliff, an Anglican priest who is director of a forum called C1 World Dialogue, led by eminent figures in Islam and Christianity.

Awkwardly for those who like to accentuate the positive, some of the commonplaces of interfaith discussions are implicitly challenged by the vote. For example, whenever Christians and Muslims talk politely, the point is often made that today’s world no longer divides into geographical areas where one faith or another predominates. For liberal-minded Muslims, the old split between Dar al-Islam (the realm of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the realm of war) hardly applies to an era in which some of the happiest adherents of their faith live as minorities. And in the West, the old term “Christendom” is generally used with a touch of irony, if at all.

But the right-wing Swiss People’s Party struck a chord by telling voters that there was still a binary choice: either they would be subjected to misogynism and cruel punishments in the name of Islam, or else their existing culture, based on liberal Christianity, would prevail. Minarets were shown as a menacing force: on posters, dark shapes (resembling both minarets and missiles) rose from a Swiss flag.

The resonance of such tactics may embarrass French and German politicians, both on the centre-left and the centre-right, who have predicted that Muslims will soon be integrated as their fellow citizens get used to them, and as their ties with homelands like Turkey and Morocco weaken. In the view of Jonathan Laurence, a professor at Boston College, the vote may be seen as a setback for strategies based on bringing Islam into the European mainstream by encouraging Muslims to “emerge from the basement” and build more visible places of worship.

And the Swiss vote will certainly give heart to politicians in Italy who are resisting mosques in frankly nativist terms. They include Roberto Maroni, Italy’s interior minister, who is a senior figure in the anti-immigrant Northern League. Its leaders hailed the Swiss result and called for a similar ballot in Italy. Anti-Muslim feeling is strong in many Italian cities, such as Genoa where critics of a mosque project held a candle-lit protest on December 1st.

Europeans, who are used to being told off by Americans for being too soft on Islam, have in recent days found themselves being scolded for the opposite reason; their continent is failing to live up to the ideals of pluralism and free speech that were a European gift to the world.

Freedom House, an American lobby group, called the Swiss vote a “dangerous backslide” for religious liberty in a country that prided itself on tolerance. Reza Aslan, a California-based writer on Islam, said the Swiss vote would be seen as “an appalling violation” of basic rights, even by Americans who did not much like Islam. In his view, the ballot laid bare an “institutional racism” in Europe which contrasted with the restrained reaction of Americans to the shoot-out at a Texan army base in which a Muslim officer killed 13 people. Although populist Islam-bashing obviously exists in the United States (on talk radio, for example) it will never—in Mr Aslan’s opinion—gain real political respectability.

Meanwhile, for all the unhappiness that the Swiss vote triggered in the Muslim world, there was no immediate sign of the street violence which broke out after Pope Benedict XVI quoted an anti-Muslim Byzantine ruler or when the Danish press published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The anti-Danish protests peaked several months after the drawings came out; this time lag suggested to some that they were the result of a calculated stirring, not a spontaneous outburst.)

If the reaction in Muslim-majority states has been muffled, that could be because certain of them share the Swiss voters’ belief that the world really does divide into Huntingtonian blocks, where one religion or another prevails, and the rest exist on sufferance. There is virtually no Muslim land where religious minorities and dissident Muslims enjoy unimpeded civil rights, like the right to build places of worship without big bureaucratic hurdles.

Western governments, including the Vatican, have refused to play a game of reciprocity, where the freedom of their own Muslim citizens is held hostage to the status of Christians and other minorities in the Islamic world. But as the Swiss vote suggests, European governments may find it hard to resist populist calls for a tit-for-tat approach—unless they take a leaf from America’s book and a draw up a simple, transparent set of legal rules for all faiths. If they do, it will be harder for Swiss zealots to argue that today’s architectural feature implies tomorrow’s stoning.

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