Category Archives: Islam in Europe

Fear of Minarets

Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101

My compatriots’ vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear

by Tariq Ramadan, The Guardian, 29 November 2009

It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth? Continue reading Fear of Minarets →

Why Minarets?

Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101

Swiss voters, at least those who bothered to show up at the polls, today voted to deny any future building of minarets in their country. As reported on Al-Jazeera:

Of those who cast votes in Sunday’s poll, 57.5 per cent approved the ban, while only four cantons out of 26 rejected the proposals.

The result paves the way for a constitutional amendment to be made.

“The Federal Council [government] respects this decision. Consequently the construction of new minarets in Switzerland is no longer permitted,” the government, which had opposed the ban, said in a statement.

The minaret is, of course, a symbol, but a rather unusual choice. In one sense it is like saying that MacDonalds cannot have a high sign (as is the case in some municipalities) but they can serve all the hamburgers they want. Thus, this ban is not on building mosques, nor does it prevent Muslims from praying in mosques. Since minarets long ago ceased to have functional value, apart from perhaps holding a loud speaker, the minaret is indeed symbolic.

But why the minaret? Continue reading Why Minarets? →

Swiss Minaretxia

Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Luke R. E. Publican, Terrorism Issue


Cows will no longer give milk in Switzerland if minarets are allowed to stand.

The rightwing political parties in Switzerland are up in arms, preparing for a vote on Sunday to save their alpine paradise from the dreaded cultural eyesore of mosque minarets. This proposed ban on minarets comes from the same friendly yodelers in the nationalist Swiss People’s Party that has previously campaigned against foreigners, including a proposal to kick out entire families of foreigners if one of their children breaks a law and a bid to subject citizenship applications to a popular vote. But they have the pure white chocolate science to back up their campaign this time. It is now evident from a pretentious hypothetical analysis that purebred Swiss cows refuse to give milk, even 1 percent, when they see a minaret. This spells the end of Swiss milk chocolate, a loss that would udderly ruin the Swiss economy, not to mention the sense of shame the bovine residents of the country would feel.

Save Switzerland for the pure Swiss, those wily Swiss Bankers who for decades have allowed brutal dictators to launder their money in untouchable Swiss bank accounts. Continue reading Swiss Minaretxia →

We Are All Moors

Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe

[Note: The latest book by Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) provides a provocative thesis, suggesting that we examine the issue of Muslim minorities in contemporary Europe through the prism of history, specifically the treatment of the Moors (los Moros) in Spain. Here is a sample of his argument (from pp. 3-4).]

Indeed, anyone watching the events unfolding in Europe and the United States in recent years cannot help but be struck by the confluence of the two overriding concerns of these two continental states: the mounting anxiety over coexisting with Muslims and the seemingly unstoppable waves of illegal and nonassimilable immigrants. All sorts of explanations have been offerd about these twin elements fueling the global crisis — bookshelves are filled with books about Islam, minorities, and questions of immigration — but no one seems to be reading the intense debate over immigration and minorities who resist assimilation as the continuation of a much older conflict, the one pitting Christendom against the world of Islam. We are often being asked to ponder “what is wrong with Islam” and “what is wrong with the West,” as if these two abstract, ideological entities suddenly bumped into each other in their travels and were jolted by the shock of discovery. The West encountered an archaic Islam stuck int he primitivism of pre-modern cultures, whereas Muslims discovered a dizzying, fast-dissolving secular West that is guided by the fleeting fantasies of materialism. All of this is by now amply documented. Yet what I propose in this book is that a secular, liberal Western culture and Islam were never really parted, that they ahve been traveling together since (at least) 1492, despite all attempts to demarcate, first, zones of Christian purity and , later, national homogeneity. Continue reading We Are All Moors →

Contesting Islamism

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Islamophobia, Scholars, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue

Stanford University Press has just published Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, edited by Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar. In this book Political Scientist Donald Emmerson argues for an inclusive use of the term “Islamism” in order to rescue the term from its misappropriation in the media. This is followed by my essay, in which I argue that the term “Islamism” is as tainted as “Mohammedanism” and should be avoided as a replacement for fundamentalist and political Islam. Our two essays are followed by twelve short responses from a variety of perspectives, Muslim and non-Muslim. The contributors include Feisal Abdul Rauf, Syed Farid Alatas, Hillel Fradkin, Graham Fuller, Hasan Hanafi, Amir Hussain, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, M. Zuhdi Jasser, Bruce Lawrence, Anouar Majid, Angel Rebasa and Nadia Yassine. Given the range of perspectives on one of the hot topics of the day, this volume will be a great addition to courses on Islam or the Middle East.

The publisher’s description is presented below: Continue reading Contesting Islamism →

Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam

Anthropology/Sociology, Conferences and Talks, Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Scholars


Left to right, Jocelyne Cesari, Dan Varisco, Jens Kreinath, Nadia Fadil, Refika Sarionder at AAR in Montreal

Last Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion I had the privilege of serving in a “responding” role on one of the first panels on the program. This was a session entitled “Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam,” organized by Jens Kreinath (Wichita State University), presided over by Refika Sarionder (University of Bielefeld) and with presentations by Jocelyne Cesari (Harvard University), Nadia Fadil (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), Jens Kreinath and Bruce B. Lawrence (Duke University). [Abstracts of the panel and papers are posted at the bottom of my comments.]

Following a typically powerful presentation by Bruce Lawrence and placed in the difficult role of representing Talal Asad (who was not present), I began my remarks by noting that I felt myself between a rock (a solid one at that) and a hard place. Drawing on my anthropological roots, I offered myself in the metaphorical role of Thomas Henry Huxley to Darwin, dubbing my wrapping-up task as akin to Asad’s Bulldog. This is not to say that the papers were overtly critical of Dr. Asad’s work; on the contrary, all expressed appreciation of his work as formative in their own ideas. Yet, in reading over the individual papers I detected several criticisms that stem more from dealing with isolated comments than considering the impressive and expanding corpus of Asad. I decided the best approach was to sum up what I see as some of the reasons the continuing intellectual trajectory of Dr. Asad is useful for those of us interested in something that might be called an “anthropology” of Islam.


Bruce Lawrence at AAR in Montreal

Continue reading Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam →

Reduced to a four-letter word

Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Immigration Issues, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media


Tamanna Rahman: Even at home in Manchester, Tamanna is now wary of attacks

Tamanna Rahman spent two months living on a Bristol housing estate for the BBC’s Panorama programme Undercover: Hate on the Doorstep.

Here she explains her reasons for agreeing to take part in the programme and describes how it felt to be a daily target of racist abuse, both physical and verbal. Her report contains details of racial abuse.

by Tamanna Rahman, BBC Panorama, October 19, 2009

In 2000, as a 16-year-old at my culturally and racially diverse Manchester secondary school, I was asked by a local television news team examining the hopes and aspirations of the first class of the new millennium if I felt that racism in Britain was a thing of the past.

Fresh-faced, naïve and optimistic, I answered yes; racism is dead.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2009 and my answer is very different.

What changed? As part of a Panorama programme, I spent two months working undercover on a Bristol housing estate.

Over the course of our investigation I would have glass, a can, a bottle and stones thrown at me. Continue reading Reduced to a four-letter word →

Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims?

Anthropology/Sociology, Contemporary Art, Danish Cartoon Controversy, Humor and Satire, Islam in Europe, Terrorism Issue


The Prophet Muhammad, 17th century Ottoman copy of an early 14th century (Ilkhanate period) manuscript of Northwestern Iran or northern Iraq (the “Edinburgh codex”). Illustration of AbÅ« Rayhān al-BÄ«rÅ«nÄ«’s al-Âthâr al-bâqiyah ( الآثار الباقيةة ; “The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries”). Source: Wikipedia article on Muhammad

Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims?
By Daniel Martin Varisco, Religion Dispatches, September 8, 2009

Two decades ago, the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses caused a tsunami of protest in the Muslim world. The author was forced into hiding for nearly a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill him and his publishers. Rushdie was accused of blasphemy, both for slandering the prophet Muhammad by subverting his character to Mahound (a medieval English term synonymous with the devil) and for reducing the holy city of Mecca to Jahiliya (a term used by Muslims to refer to the pagan past of Arabia). It was only a novel, but the fact that it was written by an Indian-born Muslim and published in the West was enough to frustrate even moderate Muslims.

Academic books rarely cause riots in the streets, but a forthcoming study on the recent Danish cartoon controversy may come close. Continue reading Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims? →