Author: Kanchan Gupta
Publication: Kanchangupta.Blogspot.com
Date: December 5, 2009
URL: http://kanchangupta.blogspot.com/2009/12/mosques-as-barracks-minarets-as.html
Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan was being faithful to his creed when he declared, "Mosques are
our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our
soldiers." Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a fascist Sunni imam with a huge
following among those who subscribe to the Muslim Brotherhood's antediluvian
worldview, was more to the point when he thundered at an event organised by
London's then Labour mayor Ken Livingstone, "The West may have the atom
bomb, we have the human bomb." Sheikh Qaradawi, who is of Egyptian origin,
frequently exhorts Muslims not to rest till they have "conquered Christian
Rome" and believes "throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the
Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment
was carried out by Hitler". Islamic schools in Britain funded by Saudi
Arabia use textbooks describing Jews as "apes" and Christians as
"pigs". Theo Van Gogh, who along with writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali produced
Submission, a film on the plight of Muslim women under sharia'h, was shot
dead by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim, in Amsterdam. Rallies by
radical Islamists, which were once rare, are now a common feature in European
capitals with banners and placards denouncing democracy as the 'problem' and
Islam as the 'solution'.
Such crude though accurate assertions of Islamism,
coupled with the relentless jihad being waged overtly - exemplified by the
London Underground bombings and the riots in Parisian suburbs - and covertly
as exposed by Channel 4's stunning investigation in its Dispatches programme
titled 'Undercover Mosque', have now begun to raise hackles in Europe. The
first signs of an incipient backlash came in the form of French President
Nicolas Sarkozy demanding a ban on the burqa (the sharia'h-imposed hijab is
already banned at public schools in France). Any doubts that may have lingered
about Europe's patience with Islam's rage boys running thin have been removed
by last Sunday's referendum in Switzerland where people have voted overwhelmingly
to ban the construction of minarets which are no longer seen to be representing
faith. For 57.5 per cent of Swiss citizens, the minaret, an obligatory adjunct
to a mosque which is used by the muezzin to call the faithful to prayers five
times a day, is now a "political symbol against integration". They
view each new minaret as marking the transmogrification of Christian Europe
into Islamic Eurabia. The Islamic minaret, according to Swiss People's Party
legislator Ulrich Schluer, has come to represent the "effort to establish
sharia'h on European soil". Hence the counter-effort to ban their construction.
Last Sunday's referendum and the massive vote
against Islamic minarets is by no means an unexpected development, as is being
pretended by Islamists and those who find it fashionable to defend Islamism
or are scared of taking a stand lest they be accused of Islamophobia, which
Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration,
Islam, and the West, describes as a "standing fatwa" against Islam's
critics. Resentment against assertive political Islam has been building up
in Switzerland for almost a decade, triggered by refugees from Yugoslavia's
many civil wars seeking to irreversibly change the Swiss way of life to suit
their twisted notions of Islam's supremacy. For the past many years the Swiss
People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, both avowedly right-of-centre
organisations, have been trying to initiate an amendment to Article 72 of
Switzerland's Constitution to include the sentence, "The building of
minarets is prohibited." After doing the cantonal rounds, both the parties
set up a joint Egerkinger Committee in 2007 to take their campaign to the
federal level. The November 29 referendum is the outcome of that campaign.
The resultant vote - 57.5 per cent endorsing
the proposed amendment to the Constitution with 42.5 opposing it - provides
some interesting insights. For instance, the Swiss Government and Parliament,
which are opposed to the amendment, clearly suffer from a disconnect with
the Swiss masses. The voting pattern also shows that the spurious 'cosmopolitan
spirit' of Zurich, Geneva and Basel, where people voted against the ban by
a narrow margin, is not shared by most Swiss. The initiative has got 19.5
of the 23 cantonal votes - Basel city Canton, with half-a-vote and the largest
Muslim population in Switzerland, barely defeated the initiative with 51.61
per cent people voting against it. This only goes to show that the Left-liberal
intelligentsia may dominate television studio debates, as is often seen in
our country, but it neither influences public opinion nor persuades those
whose perception of the reality is not cluttered by bogus 'tolerance' of the
intolerant.
Daniel Pipes, who is among the few scholars
of Islam not scared to be labelled an 'Islamophobe', is of the view that the
Swiss vote "represents a turning point for European Islam, one comparable
to the Rushdie affair of 1989. That a large majority of Swiss who voted on
Sunday explicitly expressed anti-Islamic sentiments potentially legitimates
such sentiments across Europe and opens the way for others to follow suit".
As always, Pipes is prescient. An opinion poll conducted by the French Institute
for Public Opinion after the Swiss referendum shows 46 per cent of French
citizens are in favour of banning the construction of minarets, 40 per cent
support the idea, while 14 per cent are indecisive. "That it was the
usually quiet, low profile, un-newsworthy, politically boring, neutral Swiss
who suddenly roared their fears about Islam only enhances their vote's impact,"
says Pipes. The post-referendum opinion poll in France shows that one in two
French citizens would not only like to see minarets banned, but along with
them mosques, too.
The 'sudden roar' heard in Switzerland has
found a resonance in countries apart from France. A comment on the Swiss vote
that appeared in the mass circulation German newspaper Bild reflects the popular
mood in Germany which is remarkably similar to that which prevails in Switzerland
at the moment: "The minaret isn't just the symbol of a religion but of
a totally different culture. Large parts of the Islamic world don't share
our basic European values: The legacy of the Enlightenment, the equality of
man and woman, the separation of church and state, a justice system independent
of the Bible or the Quran and the refusal to impose one's own beliefs on others
with 'fire and the sword'. Another factor is likely to have influenced the
Swiss vote: Nowhere is life made harder for Christians than in Islamic countries.
Those who are intolerant themselves cannot expect unlimited tolerance from
others."
Yet, it may be too early to suggest that the
tide of Islamism will now have to contend with the fury of a backlash. Governments
and organisations that find merit in toeing the line of least resistance have
reacted harshly to the Swiss vote; rather than try and understand why more
and more people are beginning to loathe, if not hate, Islamism, a case is
being made all over again for the need to be tolerant with those whose sole
desire is to subjugate the world to Islam. The UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights, Ms Navi Pillay, who is yet to utter a word about the suppression of
freedom and denial of dignity in Islamic countries or the shocking violation
of human rights by jihadis, has been scathing in her response, describing
the Swiss vote as "a discriminatory, deeply divisive and thoroughly unfortunate
step". The Organisation of Islamic Conference has warned that the vote
will "serve to spread hatred and intolerance towards Muslims". The
OIC's complaint would carry credibility if it were to demand tolerance towards
non-Muslims in its member-countries, especially Saudi Arabia, and denounce
Islam's preachers of hate. That, however, is unlikely to happen. On the contrary,
the OIC will continue to defend, even while accusing others of intolerance
and hate, the denial of religious, social and cultural plurality in Islamic
countries as also the repudiation of the core values of a modern democracy
by those Muslims who find themselves living in one. The absence of 'multiculturalism',
which Muslims demand in non-Islamic countries, is one of the defining features
of any Islamic country, including those touted as being 'moderate' and 'modern',
for example, Egypt and Turkey.
It is amusing that Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali
Gomaa, whose salary and perquisites are paid for by the Government, should
feel upset over the Swiss vote: "This proposal ... is not considered
just an attack on freedom of beliefs, but also an attempt to insult the feelings
of the Muslim community in and outside Switzerland." In his own country,
Coptic Christians live in increasing fear of Muslim attacks with anti-Copt
violence fast becoming a regular feature. No less amusing is Turkish Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's response to the Swiss rejection of Islamic minarets.
Mr Davutoglu finds the proposed ban on the construction of minarets "reminiscent
of the sectarian wars of the Middle Ages" and has warned that the move
could "incite clashes on a global scale if sufficient measures are not
taken". Had he been honest, Mr Davutoglu would have added that the posters
exhorting Swiss citizens to vote for the proposed ban were inspired by his
leader's vivid description of Islamic minarets as Islam's bayonets.
Hence, those who are crying foul over the
Swiss vote and those who are pretending disquiet and anguish are perfectly
at ease when Saudi Arabia ruthlessly deals with the faintest expression of
faith in any religion other than Islam or Malaysia pulls down Hindu temples.
Nor have Ms Pillay and those who blithely cite her criticism of the Swiss
referendum to absurdly insist that the vote "represents a fundamental
threat to millions of Muslims" ever bothered to protest against the discrimination
meted out to Copts in Egypt or the raucous, coarse anti-Semitism of Iran whose
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad misses no opportunity to reiterate his threat
of "wiping Israel off the map of the world". Closer home, Muslims
are not known to have disowned those of their co-religionists whose murderous
campaign to cleanse Kashmir Valley of all Hindus resulted in 250,000 Pandits
fleeing their ancestral land and being reduced to refugees in their own country.
Nor were anguished voices heard when Muslims took to the streets to prevent
the construction of temporary shelters along the Amarnath Yatra route for
Hindu pilgrims, although Muslims in India and abroad would see any move to
curtail facilities and subsidies for Haj pilgrims, which are paid for by non-Muslims,
as a "fundamental threat" and a manifestation of Islamophobia. We
are yet to be told by Muslims who demand equal rights and more in non-Islamic
countries - for instance, public funds for schools in Britain where children
are taught Hizb-ut-Tahrir's hate agenda and madarsas in India which excel
in bigotry -- what they have to say about Hindus being asked to pay jizya
to Islamist thugs in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or the abduction and rape of
Hindu women under the Jamaat-e-Islami's supervision in Bangladesh. What we
have heard, most recently in India, are exhortations for Muslims to stand
apart from the national mainstream, to maintain their separate Islamic identity,
to banish women from public places and to reject all secular statutes.
Instead of indulging in manufactured rage
and pretending imagined victimhood, Muslims across the world would do well
to ponder over Bild's pithy comment: "Those who are intolerant themselves
cannot expect unlimited tolerance from others." As for the limp-wristed
Left-liberal intelligentsia, it is welcome to be tolerant of Islamic intolerance,
but it should not expect the vast majority to meekly subjugate itself to Islam
- if that is Islamophobia, so be it. The time to feign tolerance so as to
be seen as 'secular' is over. The age of dhimmitude is drawing to a close.
That is the real significance of the Swiss vote.
(This is an expanded version of my Sunday
column 'Coffee Break' which appears in The Pioneer.)