Perhaps it is fitting that it was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who came to the defence of the Swiss, who voted in November to ban the construction of new minarets in their country. Sarkozy’s father was an immigrant to France, and his mother’s ancestors included Ottoman Sephardic Jews from Thessalonica. Sarkozy’s father abandoned his family and refused to help them financially. Sarkozy grew up poorer than his peers and resented it. “What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood.”
He was, in other words, something of an outsider. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that he might be predisposed to sympathy toward the millions of other outsiders now trying to find their place in Europe—the continent’s growing Muslim population. Yet Sarkozy reacted to the Swiss vote by urging that it be respected. “Instead of condemning the Swiss out of hand, we should try to understand what they meant to express and what so many people in Europe feel, including people in France,” he wrote in the French newspaper Le Monde. “Nothing would be worse than denial.” He urged French Muslims, who make up four per cent of France’s population and are more numerous than in any other country in Europe, not to challenge France’s Christian heritage and republican values.
Sarkozy, a populist politician, was simply reflecting widespread popular discomfort about Islam in Europe. A 2008 survey funded by the Germany Marshall Fund of the United States found that more than 50 per cent of respondents in Germany, Italy, Holland, and France believe that “Western and Muslim ways of life are irreconcilable.” Another study, by the Pew Research Center, revealed an increase in negative views toward Muslims and Jews in Europe from 2004 to 2008. (Attitudes towards Muslims and Jews in the United States improved during the same time period.)
Some sort of symbolic demonstration was likely inevitable. But the Swiss never looked like obvious candidates to launch what is arguably the most illiberal and bigoted legislation Europe has seen in years.
Switzerland hasn’t suffered an Islamist terror attack. And Swiss Muslims, who make up about five per cent of the population, are more integrated and upwardly mobile than Muslims elsewhere in Europe. Most Swiss Muslims come from Turkey, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia. Few are radical or even all that conservative. Women who hide their faces behind Islamic niqabs are a common sight in east London, but not in Berne.
Islam’s presence isn’t that visible in Swiss architecture, either. In the entire country, there are a grand total of four minarets—the steeple-like spires that often adorn mosques where Muslims pray. But that was four too many for the Swiss. More than 57 per cent of participating voters approved the proposed ban, with majorities in 22 out of 26 cantons supporting the constitutional amendment.
The conservative Swiss People’s Party spearheaded the referendum campaign. Their anti-immigrant public relations campaigns in the past have included posters depicting three white sheep kicking a black one off of a Swiss flag. This time around, their posters featured a sinister-looking woman in a black burka standing before a Swiss flag riddled with missile-like minarets.
Those supporting a minaret ban pointed to a poem Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recited more than 10 years ago that compares minarets to bayonets. But the vote wasn’t really about minarets, or architectural harmony, or even, as some have suggested, the Swiss thumbing their noses at political and media elites who assured them that the responsible thing to do would be to reject the proposed ban.
