Right-wing politicians from Switzerland’s largest political party on Thursday launched a campaign for a referendum to ban the construction of minarets on mosques, claiming they symbolised an Islamist bid for power. The group, including more than half of the Swiss People’s Party’s (SVP) parliamentarians, said in a statement that a ban would help stop “attempts by Islamist circles to impose a legal system based on the sharia in Switzerland”.
Some of the politicians said they did not oppose mosques or Muslims’ right to worship. The Swiss constitution guarantees religious freedoms and the legality of the initiative was questioned by one former judge. Parliamentarian Oskar Freysinger branded minarets “lighthouses of jihad” while his colleague Ulrich Schlueer claimed that they were “Islamist buildings with an imperialist connotation”. Schlueer said minarets were not a religious symbol but a sign of a “political-religious bid for power”. Under the rules of Switzerland’s “people’s initiative”, the campaigners need to collect at least 100,000 signatures by November 2008 backing their call in order to trigger a national referendum on the issue, subject to legal checks.
| 'Lighthouses of Jihad', eh? There's a phrase I want to borrow. |
The campaigners want to amend another constitutional article that upholds peace between members of religious communities, by inserting a clause explicitly forbidding the construction of minarets. The move follows at least four localised challenges by rightwingers to plans to build small minarets or even the principle, although the challenges have often been rejected by local authorities or courts. There are just two mosques in Switzerland with minarets, in Zurich and Geneva, built in the 1960s and 1970s. Swiss Roman Catholic bishops dealing with relations with Muslims said in a statement that they opposed the campaign for a blanket ban on minarets. Supporters of the anti-minaret initiative include 36 of the SVPÂ’s 63 parliamentarians and two from a small hard right party. The SVPÂ’s assembly is due to decide next month whether or not to grant the partyÂ’s support to the initiative. The campaign will also coincide with general elections in October. |