The Swiss minaret ban: Anxieties, unveiled

Europe's call to intolerance

Though there are just four minarets in all of Switzerland -- which has about 350,000 Muslim residents, most from Turkey and Kosovo -- for supporters of the ban the towers carry heavy architectural and cultural weight. "The minaret is a symbol of a political and aggressive Islam," another lawmaker from the Swiss People's Party, Oskar Freysinger, told BBC News earlier this year. "The minute you have minarets in Europe it means Islam will have taken over." One prominent anti-minaret poster, above, showed a phalanx of black towers rising like missiles from the red field of the Swiss flag.

My question for Switzerland and other European countries enthralled by the right wing: When did Saudi Arabia become your role model? Even before 57.5 percent of Swiss voters cast ballots on Sunday to ban the building of minarets by Muslims, it was obvious that Switzerland's image of itself as a land of tolerance was as full of holes as its cheese. When the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) came to power in 2007, it used a poster showing a white sheep kicking black sheep off the country's flag.

As a Muslim who believes in the separation of church (and mosque and synagogue) and state, I pay attention when people say they are opposed to political Islam. But to suggest, as nationalist parties in Switzerland did, that minarets are symbols of political Islam is ridiculous.

Minarets are used to issue the call to prayer, not to recruit people to Islamic political groups. If the SVP finds such prayer calls too noisy, I'd like to see it try to stifle church bells. Raising the specter of "political Islam" or "creeping Islamicization" to frighten voters diminishes the concerns that ought to be discussed, such as an ideology's opposition to many minority and women's rights.

Meanwhile, condemnations from the Muslim world -- where some have semi-jokingly called for a boycott of Swiss chocolate -- underscore the other sort of hypocrisy that must be confronted if Muslim complaints of bigotry are to be taken seriously.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt, for example, denounced the ban as an "attack on freedom of belief." I would take him more seriously if he denounced in similar terms the difficulty Egyptian Christians face in building churches in his country. They must obtain a security permit just for renovations.

Last year, the first Catholic church -- bearing no cross, no bells and no steeple -- opened in Qatar, leaving Saudi Arabia the only country in the Persian Gulf that bars the building of houses of worship for non-Muslims. In Saudi Arabia, it is difficult even for Muslims who don't adhere to the ultra-orthodox Wahhabi sect; Shiites, for example, routinely face discrimination.