Swiss Irony

For Ayaan Hirsi Ali the Swiss referendum banning the building of minarets needs to be understood in the context of Islam as a political force, rather than simply a religion:

Political ideas have symbols: A swastika, a hammer and sickle, a minaret, a crescent with a star in the middle (usually on top of a minaret) all represent a collectivist political theory of supremacy by one group over all others.

On controversial issues, the Swiss listen to debate, read newspapers, and otherwise investigate when they make up their minds for a vote.

What Europeans are finding out about Islam as they investigate is that it is more than just a religion. Islam offers not only a spiritual framework for dealing with such human questions as birth, death, and what ought to come after this world; it prescribes a way of life.

Islam is an idea about how society should be organized: the individual's relationship to the state; that the relationship between men and women; rules for the interaction between believers and unbelievers; how to enforce such rules; and why a government under Islam is better than a government founded on other ideas. These political ideas of Islam have their symbols: the minaret, the crescent; the head scarf, and the sword.

The minaret is a symbol of Islamist supremacy, a token of domination that came to symbolize Islamic conquest. It was introduced decades after the founding of Islam.

In Europe, as in other places in the world where Muslims settle, the places of worship are simple at first. All that a Muslim needs to fulfill the obligation of prayer is a compass to indicate the direction of Mecca, water for ablution, a clean prayer mat, and a way of telling the time so as to pray five times a day in the allocated period.

The construction of large mosques with extremely tall towers that cost millions of dollars to erect are considered only after the demography of Muslims becomes significant.

The mosque evolves from a prayer house to a political center.

Imams can then preach a message of self-segregation and a bold rejection of the ways of the non-Muslims.

Men and women are separated; gays, apostates and Jews are openly condemned; and believers organize around political goals that call for the introduction of forms of sharia (Islamic) law, starting with family law.

This is the trend we have seen in Europe, and also in other countries where Muslims have settled. None of those Western academics, diplomats, and politicians who condemn the Swiss vote to ban the minaret address, let alone dispute, these facts.

It's back to that old debate about the extent to which Islamism is a distortion of Islam, or its true face. I rather doubt that Swiss Muslims were ever particularly interested in cultural domination; especially as the majority are originally from Bosnia or Kosova, where the ideals of secularism are far better grounded than they are in the Muslim heartlands further east. If there was one European country where Hirsi Ali's argument had least force, it would probably be Switzerland.  

Comments

[Libertyphile]

Guardian Cif readers seem to be overwhelmingly in support of the Swiss ban. See here:

http://libertyphile2.blogspot.com/

The analysis gives also a good picture of why people support the ban.

[Paul Moloney]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali appears to have jumped the shark(tm) from arguing on behalf of freedom to arguing against freedom.

P.

[Noga]

With respect, P., I think you are using the phrase "jump the shark" incorrectly.

[Dom]

"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"

I'll say this till I'm blue in the face. The Danish cartoons were inoffensive. They were reprinted in an Egyptian newspaper and no one blinked. The imams carried them from country to country, no one noticed. They then added three of their own -- including one showing a moslem woman being raped by a dog. Presto.

[Fritz]

Sweden has accepted many immigrants from Kosova and they have integrated very poorly into our society and are overrepresented in crime statistics. Islam is part of albanian culture.