Europe unites to deplore Swiss ban on minarets

From Times Online
November 30, 2009
Charles Bremner in Paris

The Swiss and European establishment united today in deploring yesterday's decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets but conservative leaders warned that the referendum showed genuine fear over Islam on the continent.

Swiss officials, media and business leaders voiced shame over a vote that they say will stigmatise the country's 400,000 Muslims and stain Switzerland's name in the Muslim world. In contrast, hard right leaders in France, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands hailed what they depicted as a triumph for the people against the elite...

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Swiss Scholar Tariq Ramadan: My compatriots' vote to ban minarets is fueled by fear

My compatriots' vote to ban minarets is fueled by fear
By Tariq Ramadan

It wasn't meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34 percent of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organized in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57 percent of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to -- a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people's fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?

There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext -- the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.

Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands -- and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic -- and it is scary.

At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalizing, migratory world, “What are our roots?”, “Who are we?”, “What will our future look like?”, they see around them new citizens, new skin colors, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.

Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates -- violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few -- it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamize our country?

The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonized 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 colonizing 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.

Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organizations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely “integrated”. That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence -- challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone -- it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, and hosts Islam & Life at Iran’s Press TV.

(Source: The Guardian)

Spain marks anniversary of Muslim exodus with "discomfort"

Source:

Madrid - Spain is marking the 400th anniversary of the expulsion of some 300,000 Moriscos - Muslim converts to Christianity - in what is being described as an early precedent for European operations of ethnic cleansing.

The anniversary on Thursday of the expulsion order, which was signed on April 9, 1609, follows a meeting in Istanbul of the United Nations' Alliance of Civilizations project, a brainchild of the Spanish and Turkish prime ministers, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Official commemorations expressing regret for the expulsion of the Moriscos would be in line with the Alliance of Civilizations, which seeks to increase understanding between the West and the Muslim world, novelist Jose Manuel Fajardo wrote recently.

Some events, including conferences, exhibitions and book launches, are indeed being organized.

On the whole, however, 'official and academic Spain has withdrawn into the fortress of a cautious silence, which reveals its obvious discomfort,' novelist Juan Goytisolo observed.

Spain's Muslim history began in the 8th century with the arrival of conquerors, who became known as Moors, from North Africa and Arabia.

The Moors ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula for eight centuries, bringing cultural advances and living in a relative peace with the local Christians and Jews for much of the time.

The so-called Christian reconquest of Spain was in fact a kind of civil war, because many of the Muslims of al-Andalus - as Moorish Spain was known - were by then of local origin, Moroccan expert Said Jedidi pointed out.

The reconquest was completed in 1492, when the last Moorish bastion, Granada, fell to Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.

That same year, Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were ordered to leave Spain, but the agreed conditions of Granada's surrender initially guaranteed Muslims the practice of their faith and customs.

However, forced conversions to Christianity soon followed around the country, along with orders to abandon the Arab language, names or dress.

Many of the nominal Christians nevertheless persisted in their Muslim ways, defying attempts to create a homogenous state. There were doubts about their loyalty to the crown, and the Inquisition persecuted them.

In 1609, at a moment when a politically and economically weakened Philip III needed a victory over an internal enemy, his regime decided to expel the Moriscos from the kingdom.

From September onwards, the Spaniards of Muslim origin began to be shipped to North Africa in a well-oiled operation.

The expulsion, which lasted from 1609 to 1614, was 'the first European precedent of the... ethnic cleansings of the last century,' Goytisolo writes.

It took place in 'brutal conditions,' including killings of people who did not want to leave, explained the renowned Spanish novelist, who lives in the Moroccan city of Marrakech.

The majority of the Moriscos settled in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, where their descendants still take pride in their 'Andalusian' heritage.

Traces of the common heritage are visible not only in North Africa, but also in Spain, from architecture and music to cooking and crafts. The Spanish language has thousands of words of Arab origin.

However, an 'official one-dimensional version' of the Spanish identity was 'imposed' for centuries, equating Spanishness with being Catholic and conservative, Fajardo wrote.

Today, Spain's Moorish past is often used for ideological purposes, ranging from al-Qaeda calls for a Muslim reconquest of al- Andalus to visions of Moorish Spain as an idyllic paradise of multiculturalism.

A movement involving some Moroccan historians, Spanish and international Muslim groups wants to Spain to apologize for the expulsion of the Moriscos, and to make some gesture of compensation.

Many historians now concede that the forced conversions and the expulsion signified a major cultural and economic loss for Spain. An official recognition of that loss is, however, not on the government's agenda.