The Swiss Minarets Ban and Muezzin in Europe

JERUSALEM — Jew­ish res­i­dents of the Holy City are becom­ing increas­ingly annoyed by the five-times-a-day calls to prayer broad­cast by local mosques:

While recent riot­ing in and around Jerusalem’s Old City has left reli­gious ten­sions between the capital’s Mus­lims and Jews sim­mer­ing, a new dis­pute — this time con­cern­ing the vol­ume of prayers, more than the prayers them­selves — is res­onat­ing in out­ly­ing neighborhoods.

Jew­ish res­i­dents of these areas, all of which are in close prox­im­ity to Arab neigh­bor­hoods in the capital’s east, have begun to com­plain that the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, which is broad­cast five times a day from loud­speak­ers inside local mosques, has become an intol­er­a­ble nui­sance, par­tic­u­larly when it blasts through their neigh­bor­hoods at 4 a.m. every day.

“It’s as if they took the speak­ers and put them inside my bed­room,” Yehu­dit Raz, a res­i­dent of the north­east Pis­gat Ze’ev neigh­bor­hood, told the Jerusalem Post on Thurs­day. “And it’s not from one mosque or two mosques — we’re talk­ing about tons of speak­ers going off, one after the other, every morning.”

As with every­thing in the Mid­dle East, the issue is com­pli­cated. Pray­ing at the assigned times is a devout man­date among Mus­lims, so it is imper­a­tive for them that peo­ple be reminded to do so. This would not be a prob­lem if the call to prayer could some­how ring only in the ears of believ­ers. But the major­ity of Jerusalemites — who are mainly Jews but also include some Chris­tians — hear the call as well. So the issue, polit­i­cally and eth­i­cally, is one of com­pet­ing pri­or­i­ties: the desire to ensure free­dom of reli­gion and the desire not to have a reli­gion forced on those who do not believe in it.

Still, Europe is also fac­ing this philo­soph­i­cal dilemma. The his­toric Eng­lish city of Oxford has been debat­ing whether to allow the Cen­tral Oxford Mosque to broad­cast the calls to prayer. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, a major­ity of vot­ers in Switzer­land recently voted in a ref­er­en­dum to ban the con­struc­tion of minarets (from which many calls to prayer are broadcast):

Swiss vot­ers on Sun­day adopted a ref­er­en­dum ban­ning the con­struc­tion of minarets, seen by some on the far right as a sign of encroach­ing Islamism.

“The Fed­eral Coun­cil respects this deci­sion,” said a state­ment from Switzerland’s gov­ern­ment. “Con­se­quently the con­struc­tion of new minarets in Switzer­land is no longer per­mit­ted. The four exist­ing minarets will remain.

“It will also be pos­si­ble to con­tinue to con­struct mosques,” the gov­ern­ment state­ment said. “Mus­lims in Switzer­land are able to prac­tice their reli­gion alone or in com­mu­nity with oth­ers, and live accord­ing to their beliefs just as before.”

The issue, of course, is sim­i­lar to that of Chris­t­ian churches ring­ing bells every Sun­day. When Europe was over­whelm­ingly Chris­t­ian for many cen­turies, this was not a prob­lem. But now I won­der what would hap­pen if a group of non-Christians in Europe or the United States sued to stop the ring­ing out of the same desire that non-Muslims have to stop the calls to prayer. But the fact remains that Europe has been tra­di­tion­ally Chris­t­ian. As Ross Douthat notes, the ref­er­en­dum could have occurred any­where on the continent:

Switzer­land isn’t an E.U. mem­ber state, but the minaret moment could have hap­pened almost any­where in Europe nowa­days — in France, where offi­cials have floated the pos­si­bil­ity of ban­ning the burka; in Britain, which elected two rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the fascis­tic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment last spring; in Italy, where a bill intro­duced this year would ban mosque con­struc­tion and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.

More and more Euro­peans are feel­ing — rightly or not — that their civ­i­liza­tion is under attack and in dan­ger of become Islamizied after decades of lax immi­gra­tion poli­cies. As Douthat observes, this view is both cor­rect and not:

The immi­grants came first as guest work­ers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor short­ages, and then as ben­e­fi­cia­ries of gen­er­ous asy­lum and fam­ily reuni­fi­ca­tion laws, designed to salve Europe’s post-colonial con­science. The Euro­pean elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as anti­quated as scim­i­tars and broadswords, and that a lib­eral, mul­ti­cul­tural, post-Christian fed­er­a­tion would have no dif­fi­culty absorb­ing new arrivals from more tra­di­tional societies…

Mil­lions of Mus­lims have accepted Euro­pean norms. But mil­lions have not. This means polygamy in Swe­den; rad­i­cal mosques in Britain’s fad­ing indus­trial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muham­mad in Den­mark; and reli­giously inspired mur­der in the Nether­lands. It means ter­ror­ism, and the threat of ter­ror­ism, from Lon­don to Madrid.

And it means a ris­ing back­lash, in which Euro­pean vot­ers sup­port extreme mea­sures and extrem­ist par­ties because their politi­cians don’t seem to have any­thing to say about the problem.

As I wrote in an ear­lier post on the philo­soph­i­cal con­flict between fem­i­nism and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in regards to the way that some devout Mus­lims treat women badly, the solu­tion to the con­flict in Europe over the call to prayer in Islam is sim­ply to enforce the law (and enact one before­hand, if nec­es­sary). If there are zon­ing laws or sim­i­lar ordi­nances that restrict the broad­cast­ing of noise, enforce them. If not, enact them. Mus­lims and Chris­tians, for exam­ple, may com­plain about a vio­la­tion of their reli­gious free­dom, but there would be no vio­la­tion if the law is applied equally and fairly to all reli­gious insti­tu­tions. For once, the answer is actu­ally quite sim­ple. As my twelfth-grade AP Polit­i­cal Sci­ence teacher once put it dur­ing a dis­cus­sion of a U.S. Supreme Court case that denied the right of a Native Amer­i­can tribe to use drugs dur­ing a reli­gious rit­ual, hav­ing a reli­gion does not give you the right to break the law.

How­ever, this solu­tion might not work in Jerusalem and else­where in Israel. Islam is only reli­gion here that broad­casts mat­ter relat­ing to reli­gious prac­tice, so any laws or ordi­nances lim­it­ing noise might be inher­ently dis­crim­i­na­tory against Mus­lims. I do not know the solu­tion here.

Adden­dum: If any of my Amer­i­can read­ers live near Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties, I am curi­ous: Do you hear the calls to prayer? Are they reg­u­lated by zon­ing or any related ordi­nances? I used to cover zon­ing issues when I was a reporter in Boston, so I am curious.

Else­where: Daniel Pipes argues that Chris­tians in Arab coun­tries should be treated equally if Mus­lims in Europe want to be, and he adds that the Swiss ref­er­en­dum could be a bell­wether of Islam’s future in Europe.