Minarets in Switzerland - Grey Wolves and Grey Bears


The debate on whether minarets are good or bad in Switzerland should
not be left to the extreme right of both Turkey and Switzerland

A legal row over the permission to build a minaret between a
Turkish Cultural Association which is said to be related to the
extreme right nationalist group "Grey Wolves" and the local political
authorities of the municipality of Wangen near Olten in the Swiss-
German Canton Solothurn has now evolved into a major subject for a
group of political activists within the Swiss People's Party, to be used in the federal parliamentary election year 2007.
The major arguments brought forward against minarets in Switzerland are the
following:

a) Minarets could transform traditional architectural
structures, often protected historical monuments, among them, and
particularly prominent, churches, some of them built even more than
1200 years ago. Minarets would present a menace to the cultural
tradition of the country. This argument is most strongly present in
the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino with it's impressive
"Campanile" with their characteristic stone roofs, often standing
alone beside a rather modest basilica or chapel. Resistance against the constructions of minarets is strong here on the aforementionned grounds

b) Minarets should not be permitted because they represent the
religious fundamentalism, aggressivity and intolerance that has been associated lately with the Muslim world in general, as a consequence of the rhetoric of fundamentalist groups within Islam. This argument is probably the one most often brought forward

c) the minaret of Wangen is considered to be a religious pretext for implanting
extremist, probably terrorism-prone political organization. This is the argument used by the local opponents to the project.

d) A mosque is a Mosque even without a minaret (in fact there are historical mosques without the characteristic stiletto type minaret, e.g. in Africa, as the picture of a Sankore mosque in Timbuktu shows)



Source: Road to Timbuktu
http://www.pbs.org/wonders/Episodes/Epi5/5_wondr6.htm

The real problem lies in the nature of the exponents of both sides.
The Turkish nationalist extreme right (the Grey Wolves) has been
known for decades for it's violence-prone rhetoric and behavior.
On the opposite side, in Switzerland, Ulrich Schlüer, member of the group most active in the fight against minarets (the "Egerkinger Gruppe") - let us call them
"Grey Bears" - has been known for years for his inflammatory
nationalist rhetoric. This type of rhetoric rhetoric easily creates an
atmosphere of confrontation where words facilitate the use of fists by frustrated citizens, and eventually of knives, guns and/or explosives, which in turn would justify heavy police intervention.
In the long term, an authoritarian regime , e.g. of the type of Mr
Putin's ideal: "Dictatorship of the Law", might be the consequence.
It is not known if Mr Schlüer has ever been to the Middle East or
to Northern Ireland, where there is overwhelming evidence for the
devastating consequences of a systematic build-up of violence through
violent rhetoric. It is difficult to imagine that Mr Schlüer really
desires this type of political climate in Switzerland, but the public still
waits for a formal dementi.

During the wars in Former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo) systematic mutual destruction of cultural heritage was
an important method of "cultural genocide", as the images below of two destroyed churches in Vukovar (Croatia),of two mosques in Stolac (Bosnia) and of the title page of a book on "Spiritual Genocide" testify:




























These destructions are the concrete results of a longterm, unrestrained, uninterrupted and systematic mutual discriminatory discourse


A reminder: In Zurich-Balgrist,a mosque with a minaret that had been built 43 years ago lies peacefully next to the evangelic-reformed (protestant) church.