A country without minarets: analysis of the background and meaning of the Swiss vote of 29 November 2009

Abstract

The Swiss popular vote of 29 November 2009 banning the building of minarets reflects wider trends across Europe regarding Islam. It cannot be reduced merely to anti-immigration feelings. Minarets have been used as a symbol of what Islam is alleged to represent. Islam is being constructed as an ideological threat in a way that is to a large extent disconnected from the local Muslim population and largely derives from wider developments and perceptions. The article provides an analysis of the background of the vote and of the various reasons that contributed to the outcome.

Keywords:

• Islam
• Europe
• Switzerland
• migration
• politics
• islamophobia

Notes

¹The following short summary of the background and genesis of the minaret vote is mostly based on an overview I wrote in a collection of essays published shortly before the vote (Mayer 2009).

²In Switzerland, a ‘popular initiative’ means that a group that manages to gather at least 100 000 signatures of citizens within 18 months can force a national vote for introducing a change in the Federal Constitution, even without any support within the Federal Parliament. The government can decide to send the initiative to a national vote either with or without a counter-proposal. In order to be accepted, it is not enough for a popular initiative to gather a majority of individual votes: since Switzerland is a federal system, it must also win a majority of the cantons, i.e., the units of the federal state (some of which are significantly more populous than others).

³The Swiss district of the Society of St Pius X (i.e., the followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist Catholic organisation with its international headquarters in Switzerland) took the opposite standpoint and supported the minaret ban, considering that the Islamic doctrine is not acceptable to all who study it and that the attitude of the Swiss bishops resulted in equating the Christian message of loving one's enemies with the Islamic message encouraging Muslims to kill them. Communiqué, November 2009, http://www.laportelatine.org/communication/presse/2009/minaretsWuilloud0911/suisse0911.php.

⁴The German-language original version of the four-page document was entitled ‘Warum gegen Minarette?’ (Aseba: Bollodigen, 2009). There were actually two versions of it: version one was meant for a Christian audience, version two for the general public. Among arguments for opposing minarets in version one, one can find reasons such as: ‘Because Islam rejects Jesus Christ as the Son of God’; such reasons are not listed in version two. Thus I will limit myself to listing arguments found in version two. For a more detailed analysis of anti-minaret arguments during the campaign before the vote, see Lienemann (2009).

⁵Ironically, research has shown that Muslims living in Switzerland feel on average more trust toward central institutions (government, Parliament and the judiciary) than non-Muslim Swiss citizens (Gianni 2010: 60).

⁶In July 2008 Hannibal Gaddafi, one of the sons of Libya's leader, was arrested by police in a five-star hotel in Geneva because he had assaulted two of the servants who had been travelling with him, leading hotel staff to report him to the police. Hannibal Gaddafi was jailed and then released on bail. Colonel Gaddafi reacted strongly to the incident: two Swiss businessmen who were in Libya at the time were denied permission to leave the country, and one of them would finally return to Switzerland only in mid-June 2010. This ongoing situation had created a great deal of irritation among Swiss citizens, especially since Colonel Gaddafi obviously played a cat-and-mouse game with and ridiculed the Swiss government, among other things (he also accused Switzerland of supporting terrorism and advocated the country's dismemberment).

⁷The yearbook was published in printed form (in German), but it is also available online. The chapter on the minaret reporting can be found at http://jahrbuch.foeg.uzh.ch/kapitelVI_vertiefungsstudien/minarett/Seiten/default.aspx. A 25-page summary of the entire study can be downloaded from http://jahrbuch.foeg.uzh.ch/Broschren/Broschueren/Englisch.pdf.