the real reason the Swiss banned minarets? fear – not of Islamism, but of religion itself. Asma Uddin points out how the ban has its roots in laïcité, whereas Ian Buruma notes that symbols of faith like minarets remind the secularists of the hole left behind by faith’s absence. These two pieces are enormously insightful and complement each other very well in helping to understand just how secularism is making Switzerland – and Europe as a whole – hostile to any expression of faith at all. As I’ve pointed out, the faithful of all religions – jews, muslims, and even Christians – must make common cause in the face of this threat.
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razib, murtad fitri 1:50 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink |
this is seems a weird thing to place at the feet of laicite when
1) most swiss cantons have official religions
2) the more religious the canton, the greater the vote in favor of the minaret ban. shouldn’t these be the most self-assured by buruma’s argument?
3) the vote to ban minarets was weakest in the french-speaking regions. i believe these are the regions most in close connected culturally with france (e.g., french-swiss tariq ramadan is a figure in the media of france)
the public polls in the USA consistently show it is we secularists who are least hostile to muslims. that very religious christians are the most hostile to muslims. it is correct that terror and religious repression has gone with communist regimes, and still does. but in general it seems in europe muslims tend to immigrate to the most secular, not most religious, states.
razib, murtad fitri 3:41 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink |
i read the pew survey you linked to (the PDF). there’s a robust connection between anti-jewish and anti-muslim attitudes. but it doesn’t seem to be linked to secularism. the most pro-jew and pro-muslim european nations are france and england. the most anti is spain.
johnpi 3:47 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink |
Agreed.
I only read Uddin, and I felt it was kind of a radical, unconventional take on the relationship between secularism and religion.
Here’s what – to my mind – is the more conventional expression of that relationship.
razib, murtad fitri 3:55 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink |
udin’s is a common take. it just doesn’t seem to be founded on much data that i can tell. also, it seems to neglect the fact that excluding france almost every european nation has more church-state mixing than the united states does. the american attitude toward religion is somewhat different than the european attitude, and i think that causes confusions. an atheist wrote a book a few years ago about how denmark was the most atheist country in the world, and the danes got all mad. they were mad because just because they never went to church and didn’t really believe in god didn’t mean they weren’t lutheran!
johnpi 4:53 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink
Umar Lee has a greatest hits retrospective of pre-9/11 Hamza Yusuf videos up on his blog right now, with the one titled “Secularism: The Greatest Danger” highlighted.
I’m not going to try to restate Yusuf’s argument, since I was distracted while listening, but it seems to resemble laïcité as described by Uddin, where secularism is is said to have been conceived in opposition to religion.
I need to clarify my earlier characterization of Uddin’s piece too. She posits that laïcité is “a deeply flawed model of secular reaction to religion.” The article ‘a’ implies more than one model of secularism.
Zack 6:41 am on December 7, 2009 Permalink |
I agree with Razib.
Also, see Chapati Mystery.