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ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

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This three-part series on the recent Swiss vote against construction of new minarets
was published online recently in First Things.



Minarets in Switzerland and
crucifixes in Italy

by Robert Louis Wilken

Dec. 7, 2009


Wilken, a member of the editorial ­advisory board of First Things, is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia.


Two stories were front-page news last week, the President’s speech on Afghanistan and the spectacle of Tiger Woods smashing his Cadillac Escalade into his neighbor’s tree at 2:30 a.m. But two other items caught my attention, the one from Italy and the other from Switzerland.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that crucifixes be removed from Italian classrooms. According to the blogger Fabio Paolo Barbieri, in response hundreds of mayors in Italy passed town ordinances requiring that every classroom display a crucifix.

Even in red Tuscany, a historic communist region, the mayors have been sending Carabinieri to the schools to check that every classroom has its crucifix. In one case when a high school teacher tried to remove a crucifix his students revolted, and when the headmaster heard what the teacher had done he suspended him for ten days without pay.

The other story came from Switzerland where voters, and a majority of the cantons, adopted a law imposing a ban on the construction of minarets in the country.

Though the initiative was opposed by most political parties, churches and businesses, a solid majority of 57 percent voted in favor of the new law.

The four existing minarets in the country will be allowed to stand, but construction of new minarets is now banned. What struck me in reading editorial opinion on the decision was that the only language writers had to discuss the matter was that of human “rights.”

Predictably the vote was seen as a triumph of bigotry and intolerance, an infringement of the rights of Muslim.

I mentioned to a friend that I thought the vote in Switzerland and the defense of the crucifix in Italy were perhaps part of a piece, signs that, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, the peoples of Europe apparently still believed in the potency of Christian symbols.

He responded that these protests had little to do with religion, only about culture. But isn’t that the point? Religion does not exist without culture and culture is a carrier of religion.

When Christianity first came to northern Europe in the early middle ages, conversion meant a change of public practice and the creation of a new public space, in architecture, law, calendar, language, communal rituals, et al.

For the Swiss, erection of minarets taller than church steeples would alter the skyline of cities and towns, visibly severing links to the past. The construction of minarets was seen as an assault on memory, and memory is attached to things. Without memory a people have no sense of who they are.

In Italy the assault on memory had to do with the central Christian symbol in the west. In a historic Christian culture wrote Barbieri, “the symbol of a naked, suffering, unjustly condemned man in whom all that is good and worthy of worship and respect . . . is centered, is buried deep in their souls.”

In Italy even atheists and Communists respect the Crucifix “because it means so much about the condition and value of a man.”

The issue is not human rights or religious freedom, but respect for cultural traditions and fealty to those who have gone before. There is no reason to think that prohibiting the erection of minarets in Swiss cities will jeopardize the rights of Muslims to practice their religion.

But if a society loses all memory of its Christian traditions, there is a real question whether those things that make western civilization unique, e.g. human rights, freedom of religion, will endure.


My view from the start: That the Swiss vote reflected a cultural expression much more than about religion, since therre is no objection to the construction of new mosques.





The “European Street” on minarets
by David P. Goldman

Dec. 8, 2009


Goldman is now senior editor of First Things, which he joiend last fall as asociate editor.

Europe’s religious leaders — including the Vatican, the Swiss Catholic bishops, and the Conference of European Rabbis — have condemned the ban on minaret construction imposed by a nearly three-to-two majority in a referendum of Swiss voters.

The Elizabeth Church, Basel’s oldest Protestant house of worship, declared its bell-tower to be a minaret in protest against the ban and brought a Turkish imam to the church to bless the transformation —although the Turkish government has rebuffed numerous requests to permit the construction of a Protestant church.

Prima facie, Switzerland’s voters have restricted the symbolic manifestation of a religion, if not its practice. It would be hard for Catholic, Protestant or Jewish clergy to respond otherwise.

We have heard for years of the “Arab Street” — call this the debut of the “European Street.” A scissors has opened between the sentiment of European voters and the positions of mainstream leaders.

The sponsor of the referendum resolution, the Swiss People’s Party, has about a quarter of the national vote, but it pulled 57.5 percent of the vote for this symbolic slap to Islam.

The Swiss initiative was cleverly designed: The minaret ban combines the maximum insult to Muslim pride with the minimum infringement of actual religious practice. Six hundred years after the Battle of Sempach the Swiss evidently know how to pick a fight.

Switzerland’s unique system emphasizes direct votes on major issues, and it is very likely that if the Dutch and other Europeans were allowed to vote directly on such issues, the result would be similar.

The Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who came to prominence attacking radical Islam and unrestricted immigration, polled second in his country’s 2009 elections. Like the Swiss People’s Party, the Freedom Party has nothing in common with the extreme right — it is allied with the Dutch trade unions on some major economic issues.

Popular hostility to Islam often is misrepresented as a reaction against radical Islam; as Rabbi Aba Dunner, the head of the Conference of European Rabbis said December 4, “ Europe cannot beat radical Islam by knocking down minarets.”

On the contrary, the trouble lies in the moderate position, articulated forcefully by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s statement that “assimilation [of Muslim immigrants into European culture] is a crime against humanity,” in a speech before 20,000 Muslim immigrants in Germany.

[What an outrageous statement, proclaiming, in effect, the right of immigrants to remain apart and un-integrated into their host nation. That is contrary to every immigration practice in modern times, and contrary to the very spirit of immigration itself. The host nation cannot be expected to willingly harbor an un-integrated potentially hostile population.]

Erdogan’s tirade against assimilation rankled German politicians. Prominent German conservatives have rebuffed Erdogan’s comments. Erwin Huber, the head of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, fumed, “Erdogan preached Turkish nationalism on German soil.”

But the official German response has been to import professors from the theology faculty of Ankara University to train Muslim clergy and teachers for the growing cohort of Turkish children in German schools.

It is not only Erdogan, but also Europe’s institutions — including its churches — who seem determined to prevent Muslim assimilation. According to the leading Italian journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Benedict XVI received into the Catholic Church on the Easter vigil of 2008, large numbers of Muslim immigrants already have converted, but are afraid to admit this for fear of violence. After his conversion Allam said:

His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message [by personally receiving Allam into the Church] to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.


On the contrary, Magdi Allam was left to his own devices following his high-profile conversion and the Vatican has shown no interest in the predicament of Muslim converts.

A leading Jesuit Islamologist excoriated the Pope in the Jesuit monthly Popoli shortly afterwards for failing to renounce proselytization of Muslims. This seems to have prevailed.

[Goldman is taking a one-sided view on the Italian situation. On the contrary, there have been signs that more liberal Italian communities - and the Church hierarchy within them - are tending to bend over backwards to accommodate the Muslims in the most questionable of politically correctgestures. Such as making available churches and chapels for the regular Friday services of Muslims, or the recent scandal of thousands of Muslims occupying the piazza in front of Milan's Cathedral during a Mass to stage a prayer rally [replete with prayer mats and facing Mecca] and protest demonstration.]

Whether Muslim immigrants to Europe are assimilable is unclear, since Europe’s institutions have made no effort to assimilate them. [And how exactly should they do that? Schools take them in freely, and so far, no one but France has forbidden Muslim schoolgirls and students to wear their head veil. They set up mosques and prayer halls on their own, and with virtually no opposition so far [except a German city that opposes construction of a mosque in a declared historic sone that would thereby lose its character]. But should European courts suddenly adopt sharia law as a gesture of 'assimilating' Muslims?

Assimilation is a two-way process. Immigrants with a foreign culture who wish to be assimilated will be assimilated in time, as America's 200-year history has abundantly proven. The problem is that most Muslim communities in Europe appear to wish to remain 'autonomous' and separate - for the simple reason that they look down on the culture of the host nations that they live in, and that sense of inherent superiority is the greatest factor against their assimilation and integration.]


In the absence of efforts to integrate Muslims, the extremist minority has free reign. In a recent speech, Gert Wilders expressed the anguish of Europeans at the cultural dissonance:

All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. . . .

These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: We rule.


Bernard Lewis famously predicted a Muslim majority in Europe by the end of the century. Whether this will occur is unclear; European countries assiduously avoid reporting birth rates by religion. But the enormous and growing presence of Islamic institutions in Europe jars the existing culture, and provides a host for a truly frightening extremist minority.

Abandoned by their leaders, Switzerland’s voters took matters into their own hands. It is hard not to recall the famous lines of from the Swiss national drama, Schiller’s William Tell: “When oppression becomes intolerable, you reach into the heaven and grab hold of your eternal rights, which are hanging up there, inalienable and indestructible as the stars themselves.”

Of course it is the wrong way to respond to an urgent problem. But if Europe’s leaders exclude the right way to respond, the European street will choose whatever way remains.

The valuable insight in Goldman's essay is that the Swiss vote is a sign that the European man-on-the-street - unlike the representatives they have in all the European institutions - may not all be that complacent (nor cowardly) when confronted with actual, practical threats to their centuries-old culture. About time, and may their tribe increase!




Minarets and 'the conditions of Umar'
Gabriel Said Reynolds

Dec 9, 2009

Reynolds is the Tisch Family Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

The Qur’an includes Jews and Christians among the “People of the Book,” among those to whom God has revealed something of divine truth in past times. Yet Islamic tradition insists that the Jews and Christians corrupted that revelation, and laments their failure to recognize the final revelation given to Muhammad.

Therefore in the ideal vision for society articulated by Islamic jurisprudence Jews and Christians are to be tolerated only by virtue of a certain contract (or dhimma) that makes them subject to a set of conditions (for which reason they are often called dhimmis).

These conditions were often attributed to the caliph Umar II, who ruled the Umayyad Empire from Damascus in the early eighth century, and hence called the “Conditions of Umar.”

According to the “Conditions of Umar” Jews and Christians are to wear a distinguishing item of clothing (in a color identifying their particular religious denomination); they are forbidden to wear fine clothing, ride horses, bear arms, own a Qur’an, insult Islam, construct new churches, or build houses higher than those of Muslims.

These conditions, it might be noted, address largely symbolic matters. They are not meant to annihilate Jews and Christians, as is sometimes suggested. Instead the conditions of Umar are meant to insure that Jews and Christians in no way interrupt the dominant order of Islamic society, an order shaped by the divinely revealed edicts of Islamic law.

By the new law in Switzerland Muslims can still build new mosques and they can still build tall houses, but they cannot put tall minarets, or any minaret at all, on their mosques.

Now the minarets that already exist in Switzerland no longer perform the function for which they were designed. There is no broadcast of the call to prayer in Switzerland, and even if there were, a minaret would hardly be necessary. These days the call to prayer is broadcast by loudspeakers, not by a muezzin who climbs to the top of the minaret. So the issue is largely symbolic.

In recent years the Vatican has raised the question of Muslim-Christian relations in terms of reciprocity. It has demanded that Christians in the Islamic world enjoy the same liberties already enjoyed by Muslims in Europe.

The legal prohibition of minarets in Switzerland might be thought of as an example of reciprocity in light of the “Conditions of Umar,” but this is certainly not the sort of reciprocity the Vatican has in mind. Not surprisingly, the Swiss bishops are opposed to this law.

But both supporters and opponents of the law might be surprised to discover that it has a precedent in, of all places, Islamic tradition.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/12/2009 21:43]
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