Islam in Switzerland: the discussion

Are Muslims being singled out?

First audience member: It occurs to me that, in Switzerland, Muslims are not simply regarded as people with a specific religion but there is also some racism towards them. You said that some fundamentalist Muslims are not allowed visas or nationalisation. Would there be any same rule towards fundamentalist Jews, let’s say, or towards someone who has very extreme views politically, such as a Nazi person? Because to my mind fundamentalism is something which exists in every religion – it’s not only limited to Islam.

Farian Sabahi: As far as permits and visas are concerned, obtaining them is not just a question for Muslims but a problem for immigrants in general in Switzerland.

Francis Piccand: I agree that maybe Islam today has a problem. After the terrorist attacks in the United States, opinions are very polarised. I think Muslim religious leaders have to explain that Islam is really a religion of peace and tolerance. Unfortunately there are leaders who say the opposite – that to suffer hatred is a divine punishment. This is not the way for a religious leader to speak on this problem. To indicate what people in general say about religions – and in particular Islam – in Switzerland, I have an analogy. When we arrived here in England from Switzerland we had to drive on the left side not on the right side – why? When you arrive in a country you have to adapt – without forgetting your culture and your religion, which is another point.

How can Muslim values find expression?

First audience member: I think that there is a difference between the law of a country and the values of a country. A person from a socialist party and a person from a conservative party in a European country don’t share the same values. But there is one law that everybody in each country has to abide by. If that law is against the values or the culture of one group of people, they have the right to fight against it but that fight should be through the legal systems that exist in democracies. Muslims, like any minority, have to abide by these laws – but if you ask anything more than that I think it is unjust. They are entitled to their different values. You all said you are immigrants from a hundred years ago and that’s the beauty of the world today – that we import our values from other places.

Amira Hafner al-Jabaji: I do agree to a certain point, but we have to analyse first whether there is really a difference between the values of European countries and those of Islam. The problem with Hani Ramadan is that he speaks in the name of Islam. When he says ‘this is my opinion’, nobody gives a reaction – in giving his personal opinion he can say whatever he wants. But when he claims that in Islam things are one way or another then it becomes problematic.

In Switzerland, Imams express different views and values. Islam, like many other religions, is diverse – there are many different views within it. I understand that Swiss society might be very new to understanding Islam but it is wrong to accept one man’s views on Islam as the one and only view.

A broader picture of Islam

Second audience member: One factor that we often ignore is that a bulk of our people, 90 per cent or more of the Muslim immigrants in Britain, come from rural areas. I believe that if these people from the subcontinent of India had gone to Karachi or Dakar they would have found it as difficult to adjust in that environment. For example, think of the change that has taken place for a religious zealot in Bangladesh who has all of a sudden arrived here. This has to be taken into account. Our third and fourth generations are very different. They understand, they are born here, they are articulate enough and can interact in dialogue.

There are other problems. We have become obsessed with fundamentalist Islam. Until the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, we in the British system of education in India were told that somehow we were on the same side – the god-fearing west, America, and Islam – and we all had differences with godless communism. When the Soviet Union invaded, very few of us realised that America was interested in liberating Afghanistan because they knew what lay in Central Asia. We saw some kind of alliance between two god-fearing peoples. But, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, America does not need holy warriors, so this chapter is closed. American foreign policy makers were looking for another bogeyman, who had to arouse sufficient hatred in Europe and America. Islam fitted the bill because of the crusades among other things. Now, if we want to make improvements in our relationship, both sides have to make efforts.

One other thing. Are we – especially our academics and scholars – honest in calling this modern civilisation ‘Judeao–Christian’? Is it not true that Islam provided the basis for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Europe? Why do we not call this civilisation Judeao–Christian–Islamic civilisation? By ignoring this reality, perhaps we have subconsciously said to people of Islam that they are beyond the pale, beyond civilisation. This way of thinking has led some people at least to say there is a clash of civilisations. But if we are part of the civilisation there can be no such notion. Islam has contributed greatly but, like all civilisations, it declined. It declined intellectually, failing to produce new and better ideas. Of course this led to political, social and cultural decline, and the collapse of Islamic civilisation. As a result, Muslims are behind in modern languages and ideas of knowledge. They are not acquainted with a new paradigm of knowledge that has emerged.

After 11 September 2001, a substantial number of people recognise that Muslims are victims of oppression and dispossession, while for Muslims the process of self-criticism has started. The idea is emerging that in the eighteenth century, where our mind is frozen, it was possible to withdraw yourself if you did not like something. You went into the wilderness and hoped that one day you would emerge to something different and better. But now that we are living in a global relationship the only way forward is to interact and engage constantly to create a space.

Finding common ground

Third audience member: Two points, one critical and one positive. In the introduction, it seemed to me that maybe there was too much emphasis on Islam as a problem in Switzerland. Granted, we have to be realistic. I think if one sets up a model of a culture or religion as problematical, one tends to have a self-fulfilling prophecy. One way of coping with these negative stereotypes is to emphasise the cultural contribution Islam has made to Europe and to western civilisation – picking up the point made a moment ago. In this country there is now a tremendous emphasis on the contribution of Islamic poetry and philosophy. St Thomas Aquinas, the king of theologians of the western church owes a great deal to Ibn Rushd (or Averroes in Latin) the great Islamic commentator on Aristotle in Islamic Spain. It seems to me that we should bring this cultural education to schools, to a wider context. That is a way of conveying a positive picture of Islam.

My second point concerns dialogue between the Christian churches and the Muslims, which seems almost a paradigm for how one could go ahead. One of the things you can say about Muslims is that they care about their religion and the churches do as well, so they have a ground for understanding that is immensely fruitful and should be acknowledged by our overwhelmingly secular culture.

And I would like to point out that maybe here there is a ground for a certain humility that we Europeans should have. We should be a bit self-critical because not all our values are self-evidently right or wholly good.

AHJ: I often hear from people who work for the churches that it is not as difficult to lead this dialogue as secular people think. We are on the same level from the point of view of faith and values. For me it is much more difficult to lead a dialogue with secular people who don’t have a faith and who don’t believe.

FP: We have been arguing for a year trying to find subjects of discussion and actually it’s very difficult to find a starting point. At first, it seems that Christianity and Islam have some common points of departure but obstacles emerge – I don’t know why.

Third audience member: I remember one of the Christian missionaries who had been imprisoned by the Taliban just before the war. When he was freed he said he found it easier to talk about God with one of the Taliban than he did with the people from his own town in Germany. And so I think that if we just make an effort maybe we can find a lot of ground in common with Muslims – much more than we find sometimes with people of our own culture who have forsaken their own spiritual heritage. Maybe Switzerland should try to encourage the churches to go ahead more on that.

FP: Which Islam are we speaking about? Islam from Africa? Islam from Asia? Islam from the Middle East? Islam is so different depending on the people you meet and speak to. We must remember that in Switzerland there are many Muslims who don’t practise any more. What’s important for many third or fourth generation Muslims is to get a job and to have a good life – religion is simply not present much any more.

Preserving a heritage and educating for the future

Fourth audience member: I am very interested in what Amira Hafner-al-Jabaji said about the specific points on Muslims living in Switzerland. You said that the main population is made up of young men. I think it’s a cultural problem that these young men have such a different view on how to treat women. I have daughters in Switzerland who complain about it even though they are very open-minded and we all accept Muslims as the same people as we are. But the problem is the values they are taught. We live in an age when women are so proud to be equal now in Switzerland. How should you try to educate the young Muslim children in school? Should you try to keep them separate or to integrate them in the Swiss schools and teach them the values we are so proud of?

AHJ: We want a level of integration. We do not want to teach them Islam from the practical side alone. We don’t want to teach them how to do the prayer or what Ramadan means – this can be taught by parents or in the Koran schools or mosques. What we need at school is to teach the ethical standards – how to behave, what the values of Islam are – and to show them that they don’t differ so much from the Christian values. But we have not got this far yet. There have been no such opportunities to teach them in school until now. They go to the mosques and we don’t know what they learn there because the public is excluded from these places. If no one knows what the children there are going to learn, then no one can control what they learn. This is dangerous – dangerous for the Muslims but also for the non-Muslims. If it were done openly, everyone could see what they learn and the non-Muslim Swiss would see that there is no danger in teaching the children in Islam. Now it is the time to convince the Swiss that there is a need for public teaching of Islam in public schools.

In August we started this in two places: in Kriens, which is in Lucerne in the centre part, and also in Ebikon, which is also close to Lucerne. These are very conservative areas actually. There are two primary schools, which had educated Muslim women in Germany to teach Islam in schools. After only two weeks, we had very negative headlines in the newspapers because they found out that the institution where these young teachers were educated was close to the Milli Görüsh, which is a party of opposition in Turkey. Soon words such as ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘extremism’ were being used, even though the project was a good thing. The teachers, the Muslim teachers, the school authorities, the children, the parents of the children, they were all happy. We hope to extend this idea but up to now it has happened in places that are too small.

Overcoming the barriers to dialogue

Fifth audience member: Francis Piccand mentioned the existence of different groups competing for the attention of their congregations. I would just like to ask all of you about whether you have a sense of anyone winning – whether, for example, the Saudis and their brand of Wahhabi Islam is being spread – or that of Milli Görüsh. Secondly, is there any debate between these groups over important theological and social issues or do they basically just want to sell their own version?

FP: To your first question, I would answer it’s a question of money. The Muslim centre in Geneva is financed by Saudi Arabia, and you have other places financed by the Emirates. There is no winner in this race and that’s a problem for the Muslim community, who have no representative body. You find leaders in Geneva and in Zurich who disagree with each other. There is dialogue between them – sometimes with good results – but also conflict. Leaders such as Tariq Ramadan try to say they represent all the Muslims from Switzerland, and even from Europe, but they are contested.

Sixth audience member: If we want dialogue to succeed, first we should establish our principles, aims and objectives. We are not talking about all of Islam – Islam as religion and culture or Islam in history and politics. So what are the areas we need to be concentrating on? For example, it is very important to concentrate on the schools or the police and the various institutions that enable us to live together. The dialogue is very easy if it is among people who know what they want to get from it – those who like to talk to each other know their aims clearly. It is very easy to come from many individual standpoints and to come together very successfully, and I support this. But it depends upon how clear their aims are is, how those in dialogue can be clear about what is needed from the schools – what is needed from the next generation. We must see if we can establish something like a syllabus or curriculum.

Seventh audience member: Increasing dialogue is obviously a very good idea – but the important caveat, that we shouldn’t include offending remarks, needs to be interrogated. If you engage in talking to people you do end up comparing and disagreeing. Sometimes you change your mind through that process of disagreement. My concern is that we might end up censoring people’s opinions and views. Why don’t you remove the caveat against including offensive remarks and include them? That’s the only way you’re going to get proper dialogue.

Eighth audience member: I was wondering whether the native Swiss people who convert to Islam could bridge the gap between the Swiss and Islam. Could these people who belong to both worlds be used as intermediaries?

AHJ: I can say from my experiences – especially those with Swiss women who have converted to Islam – that they tend to be more extremist than the immigrant Muslims, and I think this has often to do with biographical matters. Nobody knows why they convert. Sometimes they find a Muslim partner and they marry and convert but it’s not easy to work with them because what they know about Islam they know from their husbands or from other people but not from the base of Koran and the Hadith (the traditions of the Prophet’s life). This is a difficulty.

Ninth audience member: I understand there are three main language groups in Switzerland: Italian, German and French. Is there any difference between the reception of Muslims in these three linguistic groups and does one part of Switzerland have more Muslims than another, in German speaking Switzerland, Zurich or in Geneva?

AHJ: There are a lot of Muslims from the Mahgrebian countries in the western part of Switzerland, which is the French speaking part, and usually they know French from their home countries. Here there are not the problems experienced in the German part of Switzerland, where most of the Muslims come from the Balkans, Turkey, Macedonia or Kosovo and so on. These Muslims speak all their own languages and often, because of their relatively low level of education, they are not motivated to speak the local language or to learn German. Sometimes they speak better Swiss German than proper high German. But the Turks speak Turkish, the Albanians Albanian and so on.

Language is really one of the main reasons why there are no contacts and why integration is so hard. We have now made suggestions about how to reach Muslim women with offers to learn German. At first there was, for example, a school that gave out a small programme and they circulated this programme to every house. But the Turkish women, for example, don’t read it. They just throw it away. So they found out it is better to make the offer through the schoolchildren. The children go to school where the teachers give them written information about the opportunity for learning German. When they bring it home they give it to the mother and suddenly they have full classes. So sometimes it needs just something small to change.

Fundamentalism dominating debate

Tenth audience member: I have a few queries to do with your suggested solutions for trying to deal with the problem of Islamic fundamentalism after 11 September, and the importance of teaching tolerance and respect and encouraging a tolerant version of Islam. From my experience of going to a few rallies of Islamic fundamentalist groups, the mood of these young guys is often very much against that idea of tolerance. They are looking for rules, they want to fight for something and it’s as if the tolerance of Tony Blair invites them to become more bellicose. So I’m not sure how effective encouraging tolerance is because I think that often just invites contempt from Muslim youth.

About building Muslim institutions – recently we’ve had quite a lot of reports in the UK reflecting on the experience of building institutions in the 1980s. ‘Institutionalising division’ was one of the phrases used because, basically, building these separate Muslim institutions has created lots of division between communities. In many cases, the institutions aren’t accountable to members of the community themselves. I wondered how you think you could deal with that in Switzerland.

FP: I completely agree with you about this radicalism and the fact that these feelings are very strong. When I speak with Muslims and they say something about politics and America or Israel for example, their discourse is very violent. It’s really urgent to do something. The media for sure have a part to play in this dialogue.

Regarding this polarisation, I was also astonished by the language of some people working in federal offices in Switzerland and working with the police. Many centres between Geneva and Zurich are now really under scrutiny. Fundamentalism is not only Muslim – it comes also from other religions. The problem is that today after these events – Bali is another example – Muslims are victimised completely. The French researcher Gilles Kepel wrote a book on Islamism and he says that we are in a situation of post-Islamism now. Fundamentalism is not Islam – it’s maybe the end of one form of Islam, so what will be next? That’s the important question to be asking and the responsible parties on each side have to speak to each other and ask themselves why did this happen? Today we can communicate and we have all the facilities to try to understand each other, but it seems that the opposite takes place and Muslims are victimised by stereotypes.

Eleventh audience member: It is very important that we should try to find some remedies for certain phenomena and try to find the cause of these symptoms. When we look at the history of Islam it shows itself to be the most tolerant religion in its relations with other religions. Medieval Spain is a good example for that, with Jews, Christians and non-Muslims coexisting with Muslims. So what actually produced this present phenomenon of fundamentalist Islam that the west complains about? I think it is very important that the west also should equally try to question its contribution to the situation of today through more than 250 years. It is only by examination of the western contribution that we can also understand the kind of political leadership in the Muslim world that is more or less backed by the west.

Twelfth audience member: I’m very worried about an imbalance of tolerance and a lack of clarity among ordinary people who have come from Christian tradition about what we actually believe in. I wanted to ask you, Amira, whether you felt the same aid and help you demand for Muslims would be given to other religions. I think that we need to be obsessed by fundamentalism at the moment and I feel that the ordinary non-fundamentalist Muslims – the tolerant Muslims – should speak out more against the fundamentalists and should be heard to do so.

AHJ: For Muslims it’s very tiring to be always in the situation of defence because we have really different problems. While we do have the problem of fundamentalism in one centre or among a certain number of Muslims, this minority definitely does not represent all of us. Muslims in non-Islamic societies have concrete problems – how we want to practise our faith in our life, how we can express ourselves in society, how we can participate in politics, in the economy, in culture. To talk only about fundamentalism is not representative of the problems Muslims have.