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Focus Article: Swiss choose fear over freedom
by Asma T. Uddin (Washington Post)
After centuries of wars, after the Enlightenment, and after the secularization of society from the Volga to Iceland, Europe thought it was done with religion as a factor in public life. Then Europeans discovered Muslims in their midst. Some, in the Balkans, had been there since the Ottoman conquests seven centuries ago. Others arrived in the past half-century: economic migrants welcomed — and as often ghettoized — by European nations without the populations to do needful work.
The Nov. 29 referendum in Switzerland, in which the electorate approved a prohibition on the construction of minarets in that country, is one of many signs that Europe’s welcome is being withdrawn. This sign in particular — a ban on minarets in a county possessing a mere four of them — eloquently testifies to a society ill-equipped to deal with Islam, by virtue of being ill-equipped to deal with faith.
The Swiss minaret ban finds its intellectual purchase in a deeply flawed model of secular reaction to religion in the public square: laïcité. This French concept, in which religious expression is forcibly curbed in public, evolved as an 18th- and 19th-century reaction to the Catholic Church’s influence in that country’s politics. It persists today as a tool of repression employed by parties with an interest in expelling faith and the faithful from civic participation. From well-meaning liberals (as in France) to aggressive secularists (as in Turkey) to tyrannical atheists (as in the old Soviet bloc), laïcité holds that religion is not a legitimate participant in the public square. Faith is, rather, inimical to the common good, and should therefore be relegated to private life, and invisible outside of it. Continue reading…
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