Islamophobia,Muslimophobia or racism? Parliamentary discourses on Islam and Muslims in debates on the minaret ban in Switzerland

Introduction

There is increasing attention paid to the categorisation and naming of discriminatory discourses about Muslims and Islam in order to challenge and contest them. The problem is, however, that traditional categories for challenging discrimination no longer apply to ‘Muslims’ as a group: Muslims transcend categories of ‘race’, nationality, ethnicity and skin colour, because, technically, anyone can choose to become Muslim. However, this disregards the fact that people do not choose to be born into a Muslim family or to be born into a society in which to look like a Muslim or to be a Muslim incites suspicion and hostility (Meer and Modood, 2009: 345). It would be naive to suggest that since Islam is a religion one cannot look like a Muslim. There is strong evidence that Islam is conflated with a ‘non-white’ religion, and Muslims are racialised depending on the particular national context of the country where they reside – in Britain Muslims are racialised as South Asian people, in Germany as Turks, in the United States as Arabs, and in France as Maghrebians (Moosavi, 2015: 44). Muslim dress, especially the female headscarf, is also a visual indicator of one’s adherence to Islam. Arguments that one can hide or change one’s religion but not one’s skin colour are also discriminatory in themselves in that the onus is then on Muslims to change aspects of themselves or forego certain beliefs in order to prevent discrimination and vilification, rather than the onus being on the perpetrator to forego his or her prejudiced views.

Due to the way Islam, ‘race’, ethnicity and religious dress are all conflated, the question of how to name the discrimination against Islam and Muslims remains problematic. One reason for this is the various factors that come into play: Islam as a religion, and Muslims as people who are identified (sometimes inaccurately) by such things as physical appearance, names and dress. Until now, Islamophobia has been the most common term used to describe such discrimination. However, other terms have also been suggested, namely, Muslimophobia (Erdenir, 2010; Modood, 1997), anti-Muslimism (Allen, 2010), anti-Muslim racism (Fekete, 2004; Kundnani, 2007), anti-Muslim prejudice (Malik, 2009; Ogan et al., 2014) and anti-Muslim hate (Kumar, 2014; Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012). However, in anti-Muslim or anti-Islamic arguments, it is often unclear who or what is the source of the so-called problems: Muslims, the people, or Islam, the religion. Muslims and Islam are often accused of, for example, backwardness, extremism, violence and misogyny. Often in these derogatory discourses, Muslims and Islam are conflated with no differentiation between the two.

Furthering these discussions, this article examines whether there are distinctions bet-ween anti-Islamic discourses (Islamophobia) and anti-Muslim discourses (Muslimophobia) ¹ and whether they overlap with racism in parliamentary debates on the minaret ban in Switzerland, which was implemented after a successful referendum in 2009. By doing so, it untangles and clarifies some of the complexities bound up in attempts to understand, categorise and combat discrimination against a much maligned and complex minority group. Amid arguments that being Muslim is a voluntary choice and therefore not deserving of the same protection as involuntary identities (see e.g. Meer, 2008), this article aims to reveal that ‘being Muslim’ is far more complicated and intricate than simply adopting and constructing a voluntary religious identity as depicted in many anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim discourses.

Islamophobia and Muslimophobia

Prejudice and discrimination against Muslims is not based on hostility towards a particular ethnicity or nationality, but is targeted at Muslims as a community with particular social identities. Such discrimination poses both theoretical and practical problems when it comes to identifying the form(s) of discrimination in order to combat them. One of the most common neologisms to describe this kind of prejudice and discrimination is Islamophobia. Stolz (2005) defines Islamophobia as ‘a rejection of Islam, Muslim groups and Muslim individuals on the basis of prejudices and stereotypes’ and argues that it ‘may have emotional, cognitive, evaluative as well as action-orientated elements (e.g. discrimination, violence)’ (p. 548). Islamophobia is also not a phobia in the clinical psychology sense of an individual anxiety disorder, but rather, the suffix ‘phobia’ is used in the same way as xenophobia and homophobia ‘to connote socially, culturally and politically produced prejudice, aversions and discrimination against specific [socially constructed] categories of humans, in this case Muslims’ (Gardell, 2014: 133). In Islamophobic discourses, Islam is perceived as a living being and ascribed an agency of its own: it commands, oppresses, hates, deceives, conspires and wages war (Gardell, 2014: 133). These discourses, based on an essentialist understanding of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’, determine ‘how Muslims are’, that is, Muslims are considered to be violent, terrorists, oppressive to women (or themselves oppressed) and a threat to freedom of expression (Gardell, 2014: 132). Furthermore, in Islamophobia, Muslim minorities become an object of obsessive pre-occupation and are made responsible for all the ‘sins of society’ such as job loss, gender discrimination and crime (Malm, 2012: 197–198).

However, Islamophobia is sometimes considered a misnomer for prejudice and discrimination against Muslims, since the hostility is directed towards an ethno-religious community in Western countries ² rather than hostility towards practices and tenets of a worldwide religion (Richardson, 2009). Islam is not the enemy per se, since it is not threatening to take over large parts of Western society; the attack is not on Islam as a faith, but rather on Muslims as a people (Halliday, 1999). The problems that Muslims face in Western countries such as dietary laws, dress, religious education and the observance of religious ceremonies may seem like religious problems, but are in fact social problems that have implications in a secular system (Erdenir, 2010). It would be misleading to identify Islam as the main cause of the ‘phobia’, as the fear emanates less from a theological conflict than from a secular and modern form of anti-Muslim sentiment (Erdenir, 2010). Erdenir (2010) thus believes that ‘Muslimophobia’ is a more accurate term because it targets the ‘cultures, lifestyles and physical appearances of Muslims’ (p. 29).

The question is thus whether Muslimophobia is the more appropriate term which should replace Islamophobia, or whether Muslimophobia exists in addition to Islamophobia, that is to say, Muslimophobia signifies an unfounded hostility towards Muslim groups and individuals, and Islamophobia unfounded hostility towards the Islamic religion. In the latter case, a further question is whether the two always must exist in tandem or whether one can exist without the other. These questions are particularly important when considering if Islamophobia/Muslimophobia is a form of racism.

Racism, Islamophobia and Muslimophobia

Nowadays, there is a common demarcation between so-called ‘old’ biological and ‘new’ cultural racism. While ‘old’ racism presupposes a colonial type of domination legitimised by the ideology of inequality of human types, in ‘differentialist racism’ (‘new racism’), there is no (explicit) inequality of ‘races’, but rather ‘otherness’ is valued to the point that different groups should not mix (Taguieff, 1990). Similarly, Wieviorka (1997) argues for distinguishing between two types of racism: ‘universalist racism’, which postulates essential differences between human ‘races’ to legitimise prejudices based on unequal practices, and ‘differentialist’ or ‘cultural racism’ in which the differences between races lead to irreconcilable cultural differences where the ‘other’ is a threat. However, while Taguieff and Wieviorka emphasise that it is difference and not hierarchies that is the overarching feature of differentialist racism, ‘an inferiorisation of the cultures of the “others” is always presupposed by the social, economic and political inequality between the members of the “own” culture and the members of the “other” culture(s)’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 10). Indeed the logics of the two racisms exist side by side and both are reproduced by a similar racialisation process: reinforcing existing cultural privilege, a belief in cultural essentialism and inherentism, and a reliance on physical appearance for the selection of victims (Dunn et al., 2007: 566–567).

Reisigl and Wodak (2001) argue that ‘cultural racism’ is tautological because racism has always been a cultural phenomenon (p. 9). They believe ‘culturalist racism’ is a more accurate term due to the ideologising orientation towards and reference to culture. To this end, they argue that racism contains the following practices and processes (Wodak and Reisigl, in press):

In light of this understanding of racism, there are two general schools of thought in regards to whether discrimination against certain groups of people is a form of racism: (1) the discrimination needs to involve some reference to biology (‘natural differences’) and a linkage between biology and other characteristics (‘cultural differences’) in order to be considered racism, or (2) a process of racialisation of certain traits (‘cultural’ differences) occurs so that racism can exist without explicit reference to biology. In the latter case, there is no direct linkage between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ differences as such in contrast to Wodak and Reisigl’s definition. Here, cultural characteristics tend to replace biological features and operate in the same essentialised way. The key here is the supposed cultural and social deficiencies of the victims rather than their biology. This is how, for example, White Eastern European immigrants can become demonised and discriminated against in Western European countries, not for their skin colour or somatic differences but because of ascribed social attributes: ‘criminal tendencies, uncivilised behaviour, and moral deficiencies’ (Fox et al., 2012: 690).

Wieviorka’s (1997) and Modood’s (1997, 2008) arguments show the nuances between the two different theories on how racism against Muslims can be enacted. Wieviorka (1997: 142) supports the first definition of racism in that he believes that racism can only legitimately be considered cultural racism if cultural phenomena are repackaged in a way that makes them appear in some way biological, and that it is not cultural racism if the racist person refers exclusively to cultural characteristics. To this end, he argues,

To dislike Islam to the point of violence … is racist if Muslims themselves are constructed as a natural category and their behaviour, – real or imagined, is presented as informed in some way or another by an essence, by innate attributions or an almost genetic cultural heritage.

Here, there is a link between Muslims as a constructed ‘race’ and their behaviour. Wieviorka, however, conflates a hatred of Islam with a hatred of Muslims, which, as discussed earlier, can potentially be two different phenomena. While it appears that Wieviorka means practising Islam is the ‘behaviour’ that is linked to Muslims’ genetic (‘racial’) heritage, it is not entirely clear whether he differentiates between disliking Islam and disliking Muslims, only the latter of which can be considered racist.

On the contrary, Modood (1997) argues that ‘cultural racism builds on biological racism a further discourse which evokes cultural differences from an alleged British or “civilised” norm to vilify, marginalise or demand cultural assimilation from groups who also suffer from biological racism’ (p. 155). Anti-Muslim racism exists because of the cultural and ‘racial otherness’ of Muslims that is contrasted with European or White people (Modood, 2008). This is a socially constructed ‘otherness’ based on arbitrary traits such as being of ‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘South Asian’ appearance. Modood (2008) concedes that the racialisation and ethnicisation of Muslims is not ‘pure’ biological racism, but is best understood as ‘cultural racism’ based not on biology or phenotype, but on cultural norms and community structures.

Cultural characteristics can also become racialised. For example, Dunn et al. (2007) argue that the abuse and exclusion of Muslims, premised on cultural inferiority, incivility and incompatibility, is a racialisation process without a ‘race’ (in the pure biological sense of the word). Similarly, Semati (2010) argues that Islamophobia, as a form of racism, is an essentialist view of people whose ‘culture’ is considered ‘different’ in an eternal, fixed and immutable fashion (p. 267). Meer and Modood (2009) warn against conceiving of racism as only a form of ‘inherentism’ and ‘biological determinism’, which leaves little space to conceive of the ways in which cultural racism draws on physical appearance as one marker, among others, but is not solely premised on conceptions of biology in a way that ignores religion, culture and so forth (p. 344). A racialisation process can take place, often of Muslim dress. In such a process, ‘vicariously constructed phenotypes (including prayer caps, beards, baggy trousers) …’ are linked to ‘terrorism, radical Islam, sexual slavery, drug trafficking and cultural backwardness’ (Amin, 2010: 8). Wearing a headscarf can also ‘foreignise’ women, as if it had changed their physical appearance. For example, ethnic Dutch female converts to Islam in the Netherlands who start wearing the veil were suddenly considered less intelligent and uneducated because Islam is considered a ‘belief of foreigners’ (Van Nieuwkerk, 2004: 236). That is to say, foreigners are considered less capable than ethnic Dutch people and the headscarf becomes the key identifying feature that indicates the women are foreigners.

Islamophobia can thus be characterised by a cryptic articulation of the concepts of race and racism even though it appears at first to be a form of religious-based prejudice (Taras, 2013: 422) because Islamophobic discourses rely on a notion of civilisation and the belief that Islam engenders a world view that is fundamentally incompatible with and inferior to Western culture (Bunzl, 2007: 13). However, as previously mentioned, it is not possible to be racist towards a religion. If Muslimophobia is a separate concept, it is certainly the more appropriate term here. In Muslimophobia, we would see a similar discourse applied to Muslims as people: that Muslims are incapable of adapting to Western culture and that their cultural traits and behaviour are inferior to those of Western ones. In this sense, Muslimophobia overlaps with both the racism that links biology with cultural characteristics, and the racism in which cultural and behavioural traits or dress or lifestyle habits become essentialised and racialised.

Culturalist racism, choice and the possibility of change

It is sometimes argued that since ‘Muslim’, as a marker, is constitutive – at least theoretically – of a religious identity, discrimination against ‘Muslims’ functions differently from that of other groups whose identity marker is based upon physical appearance (e.g. ‘Blacks’), ethnicity (e.g. ‘Arab’, ‘Chinese’) or national identity (e.g. ‘British’, ‘Singaporean’). This is because anyone can be or become a Muslim regardless of their ‘race’, ethnicity or nationality, and, as some would argue, anyone can also choose to stop being a Muslim while people cannot simply choose to stop being Black, Arab or British.

However, as Meer and Modood (2009) point out, one does not choose to be born into a Muslim family. Roy (2009) incorrectly asserts that faith communities should be recognised on the basis of an individual and free choice because ‘faith is a choice’, while racial and ethnic identity are ascribed from the outside (pp. 8–9). It is doubtful that one can simply choose to stop being Muslim in the same way as it would be very difficult to simply stop being part of one’s family. This also begs the question of when religion really becomes a ‘choice’. After growing up in a Muslim family with Islamic traditions and festivities, at what point has one really chosen Islam? ³ Based on Roy’s argument, the celebration of Christmas would be purely an expression of one’s voluntary affiliation with Christianity rather than just participation in a cultural tradition one has grown up with. However, unless it is an active conversion, one’s religious background is often not a deliberate and conscious choice.

There is actually only a very fine line between a religious identity marker and racial, ethnic and national identity markers. Just as a Muslim could have any kind of physical appearance, ‘racial’ and ethnic identifiers are also not concrete determinants of physical appearance. For example, there are over 4.6 million White South Africans, even though someone who feels antipathy towards ‘Africans’ might believe that all Africans are dark-skinned. One might argue that this is simply an anomaly arising from South Africa’s colonial past. However, even without mass movements of people across the globe, it would be naive to think that all the inhabitants of one country somehow look the same. For instance, Indians from Northeast India can be mistaken for being ‘Chinese’ and experience racist assaults and harassment in other parts of their own country (Baruah, 2008[2005]) due to having more East Asian features. And just as anyone can become Muslim after fulfilling certain criteria, one can also become a citizen of another country through naturalisation ⁴ procedures: a Swiss citizen could be of any ‘race’, ethnicity or physical appearance. Therefore, to believe that a religious identity is different from national, racial or ethnic identity because anyone can convert to a religion while nationality, ‘race’ and ethnicity are concrete and pre-defined is a misconception.

It is thus blatantly incorrect to believe that a religious identity is not ascribed by others, as Roy (2009) argues. As discussed earlier, Muslims can be racialised as ‘Arabs’, ‘Turks’ and so on, so that people with Arab or Turkish sounding names or looks (whatever they may be in the eyes of the perpetrators) may experience discrimination or be attacked for being ‘Muslim’ even if they are not Muslims, because religion is linked to physical appearance or ethnicity as an identity marker. Sikhs, for instance, have been verbally abused and physically threatened by members of the public who mistake them for Muslims because of their beards and turbans (Jordan and Singh, 2011). These are clear cases of religious membership being defined by others, often erroneously.

Categorising and labelling people has always been about the exercise of power and the withholding of privileges and resources from those categorised as inferior and not about accuracy and reality. For example, ‘Blacks’ may not even look remotely ‘black’, but could be classified as such to prevent them from accessing certain resources. In the case of the ‘one-drop rule’ in the United States, which was enshrined in the laws of several states in the early 20th century, anyone with ‘one drop’ of African blood was legally classified as ‘colored’. Nowadays, labelling someone as ‘Muslim’ is a way to indicate that they are inferior in some way – usually not genetically, but culturally – and enact more levels of social and legal control over ‘Muslims’ and make more demands on them than on other people. ⁵ The minaret ban is a prime example of how Muslims are demonised to gain public approval for discriminatory legislation, while members of other faiths are still free to build towers on their places of worship – Muslims are portrayed as misogynist, violent and intolerant and therefore undeserving of equal treatment.

If we accept that ‘Muslim’ can be a category imposed from the outside, a second key question would be whether the so-called Islamic culture is essentialised in such a way that Muslims are not considered capable of changing their behaviour. In ‘old racism’, the reasons sought out as a pretext for discrimination were supposedly immutable factors such as skin colour or other aspects of physical appearance. For example, in Australia, the media depicted Aboriginal people as incapable of change, thereby absolving the government and police from responsibility in contributing to conflicts in Aboriginal communities – repeatedly linking problems in Indigenous communities to membership categories based on ‘race’ means that economic and social problems among Indigenous Australians are likely to remain unaddressed (Simmons and Lecouteur, 2008). However, can victims of culturalist racism change their cultural and religious practices, lifestyles and dress so as to no longer be victims of discrimination and hostility or improve their own situation? Or are cultural characteristics and behaviours considered to be somehow ‘natural’ like skin colour and unchangeable? In the case that change is possible, culture would not be essentialised but rather would become a mandatory code of behaviour and a vehicle for assimilation.

It is actually not so important whether the ‘other’ is considered capable or incapable of change or not, but rather the way those in power manipulate discourses around ‘change’. The mobilising of public opinion for discriminatory purposes means the ‘possibility of change’ argument can go either way in order to exclude. Culture can actually be both essentialised and de-essentialised for illiberal and oppressive purposes (Verkuyten, 2003). For example, Muslims can be considered responsible for the racism enacted against them because of their supposed refusal to integrate (Kundnani, 2007); that is, they are considered capable of ‘change’ but it is argued that they refuse to do so. Thus, while it appears that discriminated groups have the potential to adapt to local norms, and the local culture is not considered impenetrable, it is actually the fluidity of boundaries that becomes the problem.

Those in power who control the boundaries – be it physical, territorial boundaries or discursive or social boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – can always bring in (metaphorical) border controls against those they wish to exclude. For example, ‘national identity’ has had ‘master status’ in defining social inclusion in Australia, where ‘national identity’ is simply defined by another social construction of ‘Australian values’. ⁶ In this way, ‘“national identity” … widens the scope for imaginative dealings, and, while giving the appearance of openness, allows for distinct patterns of closure, to be adapted as the need arises’ (Harris and Williams, 2003: 216). The unfounded hostility towards Muslim minorities thus appears to work on two levels: first, calls for Muslims to integrate and adapt to local customs and lifestyles sound open and simple because all Muslims have to do is stop their allegedly ‘backward’ and misogynist practices such as wearing headscarves, yet those who wish to exclude Muslims could still use any other arbitrary reason to prevent their inclusion and acceptance.

This means that however open and accessible culture and behaviour seem to be, it is still possible for those at the top of the social hierarchy to continually exclude unwanted ‘others’ for reasons of their own choosing in order to perpetuate their own dominance. This also begs the question of whether people should have to give up beliefs and practices that are central to their identity purely to show their willingness to integrate. For instance, in countries where going to the pub to drink alcohol and gamble play an important role in socialising, locals may consider Muslim immigrants unwilling to integrate if they choose not to drink alcohol and gamble at the pub (Radford, 2014). However, should Muslims have to drink and gamble just to prove their willingness to integrate? De-essentialisation of culture might sound open-minded and liberal, but it is not the essentialisation or de-essentialisation of culture that forms the key problem, but rather both of them: the manipulation of culture for discriminatory purposes. While Hanson-Easey et al. (2014) argue that ‘covert ontological reasoning about cultural distinctiveness and incompabitility’ is used to justify segregation or illiberal policy interventions while simultaneously denying accusations of racism, cultural de-essentialism may be used for the exact same purposes. That is to say, one could simply argue that those in question were given a chance to integrate but were simply not willing or did not try hard enough, and for this reason, more hard-line measures are necessary.

Muslims in Switzerland

According to 2013 census data, there are 341,572 people aged 15 or over affiliated with the Islamic faith living in Switzerland, accounting for 5.1% of the Swiss population aged 15 years or older (Bundesamt fuer Statistik, 2015). They arrived in three general waves of migration: the first one beginning in the 1960s with mostly men from Turkey, Yugoslavia and Albania moving to Switzerland to work out of economic necessity; the second with the families of the male workers joining them in the 1970s under new family reunification laws; and the third group consisting of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution, wars and famines, starting from the 1960s and continuing up until today (Lathion, 2008).

Muslims are generally perceived in negative terms in Switzerland. ‘Muslim’ often denotes unfamiliar behaviour and values, and thus Swiss society has trouble dealing with different cultural traits such as the headscarf and halal food and different conceptions of personal relationships, and perceives these differences as a threat (Lathion, 2008). People from Muslim majority countries (Turkey and Arabic countries) are considered the least ‘likeable’ (sympathisich) by local Swiss people (Stolz, 2005). Muslims are also considered by some local Swiss people as a culturally distant group at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy (Stolz, 2005; Wimmer, 2004). Furthermore, among Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Swiss are the least accommodating in respect of state responses to Muslim claims, where Islam still lacks official recognition from Cantonal Governments.

‘Muslims’, as an identifier, can override national identities such as Turkish, Albanian or Bosnian and be assigned negative social characteristics associated with ‘disorder’ such as not being ‘decent’ or ‘adapted’ (Wimmer, 2004). Behloul (2007) argues that since 9/11 and subsequent acts of Islamic terrorism, there has been a rise of hostility in Western countries against Muslims as a community rather than, for example, national or ethnic identifiers such as ‘Turks’ or ‘Arabs’ (p. 29). Before 9/11, Bosnian immigrants in Switzerland were perceived only as ‘foreigners’ and not as ‘Muslims’ or ‘European Muslims’ as they are now (Behloul, 2007: 29). This changed drastically after 9/11, when religious affiliation became a key identity marker. In the public perception, migrants of Islamic background are reduced to a single factor of a non-European religion, and Islam is used as the only frame of reference for Muslims’ ability to conform to civil behaviour and mainstream integration (Behloul, 2007: 30).

According to the Swiss People’s Party ⁷ (SVP), Muslim immigrants are particularly incapable of integrating into Swiss society and their presence should be considered an obstacle to achieving immigrant integration in Switzerland (Skenderovic, 2007: 170). In contrast to Behloul (2007), Skenderovic (2007: 170) argues that even before 9/11, in the 1990s, the SVP and Federal Democratic Union (EDU) ⁸ became fierce opponents of Muslim immigration, emphasising the separate development of different cultures and arguing that Muslim immigrants should stay in their home countries or at least return as soon as possible.

Discrimination against Muslims in Switzerland is conspicuous in naturalisation decisions, where those from Christian and Western European backgrounds are often accepted for naturalisation while those from Muslim majority countries are rejected (Helbling, 2008). Religion seems to be a motivating factor in these rejections, since Catholics from Croatia are naturalised with less opposition (Helbling, 2008). The SVP was also particularly active in persuading the Swiss people to vote ‘no’ in a referendum designed to facilitate the naturalisation of second and third generation immigrants in 2004. Using provocative campaign posters that showed Osama Bin Laden with a Swiss identity card on one and hands in various skin shades grabbing at Swiss passports in another, the SVP believed that Muslims and dark-skinned immigrants would tear Switzerland apart and the country would disintegrate (Wessendorf, 2008). To justify their negative attitudes towards candidates for naturalisation from Muslim countries, the SVP argues that those persons are different from Swiss citizens, not used to Swiss customs and traditions and do not fit into the community (Helbling, 2008). The combination of this together with the dark-skinned hands constructs all Muslims as extremist ‘others’ who have no place in Switzerland.

The malignment of Muslims in Switzerland came to the fore on 29 November 2009 when 57.5% of Swiss voters in the Swiss Constitution in a national referendum voted in favour of prohibiting the building of minarets. As the required double majority was reached, both in the percentage of voters and number of cantons, the Swiss Constitution now reads under Article 72, Section 3 ‘The building of minarets is prohibited’.

The ‘yes’ vote was a culmination of efforts by the SVP and the EDU starting in 2007 to have any further erection of minarets banned. The controversy began when the Turkish Cultural Association applied to build a 6-m minaret in the town of Wangen bei Olten in 2006. At first, the application was rejected on building grounds, but the Environmental Court later overturned this decision. The minaret was completed in July 2009 and was the fourth – and possibly last – minaret constructed in Switzerland.

At first glance, the referendum and its result appear to be somewhat peculiar, especially considering the low number of minarets in Switzerland and the fact that no Islamic-motivated terrorist attacks have taken place on Swiss soil. Certainly, the ban was able to come about due to Switzerland’s unique system of participatory democracy. However, upon further investigation, the issues surrounding the ban do not seem unique to Switzerland at all. The ban was not about a building structure as such, but rather about the fear of encroaching Islam and Sharia Law and the perceived loss of democratic freedoms that these would bring. The minaret was thus a proxy for Islam, and the implemented ban a signal that Islam has no place in Swiss public space.

Data and methodology

The data investigated were Swiss federal parliamentary debates ⁹ on the popular initiative ‘Against the Construction of Minarets’ ¹⁰ which took place on 4 and 5 March 2009. The debates dealt with whether the initiative was considered valid in that it did not breach any international laws or treaties. Only after a majority of parliamentarians had voted ‘yes’ to the validity of the initiative could it be allowed to go to referendum for the Swiss public to vote on. This was the case, and the referendum took place on 29 November 2009.

This article aims to investigate whether political arguments for the minaret ban in Switzerland were Islamophobic, Muslimophobic, racist, a combination of all three or something else altogether. It may be possible that Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are interwoven and not always completely distinguishable from each other. However, the aim here is to ascertain whether there is such a thing as Muslimophobia that is not the same as Islamophobia, and if so, whether they can exist independently of each other or whether they must exist in tandem.

The ban provides an extremely conducive site in which to explore negative sentiments towards Islam and Muslims because proponents of the ban cannot hide the fact that they are targeting Islam. For example, attempts to ban the headscarf in public schools could come under the guise of simply ensuring state neutrality. Since the ban only targets Islamic places of worship and no other, the politicians cannot deny that they are singling out Islam and Muslims for negative attention.

To this end, the following questions were asked of the data:

The methodology for this study is based on the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) developed by Reisigl and Wodak (2001, 2009). As a strand of critical discourse analysis (CDA), DHA also focuses on critique, ideology and power with the following emphases that make it appropriate to this research. First, while DHA sees ideology as a vehicle for establishing and maintaining unequal power relations through discourse, one of DHA’s specific aims is to ‘‘demystify’ the hegemony of the specific discourses by deciphering the ideologies that establish, perpetuate or fight dominance’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 88). In addition, for the DHA, language is not powerful on its own, but rather is made powerful by powerful people. It therefore critically analyses the language use of those who have the power to change and improve conditions (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). For this reason, it is a useful and relevant method for a study on parliamentary discourses.

Analysis

The findings showed that, contrary to the literature, Islamophobia, as an unfounded hostility towards Islam as a religion, did exist and could be differentiated from Muslimophobia, an unfounded hostility towards Muslims as people. This differentiation enabled a deeper insight into what proponents of the ban on minarets thought was actually the problem with Islam and Muslims and how a minaret ban would help prevent or solve these problems. Negative talk about Islam, however, could have been used as a discursive mitigation strategy in order, for example, to avoid accusations of racism that may arise if one were to replace ‘Islam’ with ‘Muslims’. In this sense, while Islamophobia can be theoretically differentiated from Muslimophobia, it must co-exist with it in practice, since Islam cannot exist without Muslims as ‘carriers’ of the religion, and the alleged problems with Islam only occur if there are Muslims to practise the religion. Conversely, Muslimophobia can exist both independently and in tandem with Islamophobia, since hostility towards Muslims may have nothing or little to do with Islam itself.

Furthermore, the differentiation shows that Muslimophobic sentiments can be racist, but that Islamophobic sentiments can only be racist if Islam serves as a metonymy for Muslims, so that the politicians can talk about Muslims in a more abstract and politically correct manner. Otherwise, it is not possible for Islamophobic sentiments to be racist. While a strict differentiation between Muslimophobia and Islamophobia was not present in the politicians’ discourse, their speeches tended to be more explicitly one or the other, so that a theoretical demarcation could be made. In some Muslimophobic debates there was a clear demonstration of racism, whereby natural and cultural differences are clearly linked, as well as a manipulation of ‘cultural differences’, whereby ‘culture’ is appropriated in any which way to contrast a superior Swiss and Western culture against an inferior Islamic culture.

Muslimophobia

The debates with explicit Muslimophobic arguments emphasised that the problem lay with Muslims, as people. Furthermore, the alleged problem is not the existence of Muslims per se, but rather the presence of Muslims in Switzerland and other Western countries. That is to say, all Muslims in the West are considered to be foreigners and immigrants who must be tightly controlled and monitored lest their influence on ‘us’ be too great.

Islamophobia

One of the main findings from the data was that Islamophobia and Muslimophobia can be different phenomena. While the existing research points out that ‘Islamophobia’ in the more literal sense of the word is a misnomer and should be replaced by ‘Muslimophobia’, the analysis showed that they are not one and the same phenomenon. Some of the Swiss politicians speaking in favour of the minaret ban were clearly critical of Islam as a religion, and this criticism is different from their criticism of Muslims as people and their alleged cultural and behavioural traits. Meer and Modood (2009: 342) also argue that Halliday is not completely correct in his thesis that Islamophobia is actually Muslimophobia, but for the opposite reason: in street-level discrimination, it is impossible to differentiate appearing Muslim from appearing to be a follower of Islam, and thus Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are fused together. Political talk about Islam and Muslims in the context of the minaret ban, however, can at times be distinguishable between the two. Thus, there appears to be a difference between discursive discrimination in talking negatively about Muslims, and street-level discrimination, for example, in physical attacks on Muslims. One obvious reason for this is that while one can discursively attack Islam, it is not possible to physically attack Islam as such; one can only attack Muslims or symbols of Islam.

Whereas negative sentiments towards Islam as a religion often went hand in hand with negative sentiments towards Muslims’ supposed culture and lifestyle, at times the Swiss politicians predominantly criticised the (alleged) religious tenets of Islam. This is not a theological conflict with Islam pitted against Christianity in the sense of deciding which is the ‘true’ religion and which the false one, but rather, in Islamophobic discourses, there is a conflict in which both religions may exist at the same time, but where they are not equal and one is considered to be far superior to the other. According to these discourses, Islam, being the inferior religion, must take backstage to Christianity in Christian majority countries such as Switzerland, and Muslims must only practise aspects of Islam that are palatable to the majority. In this sense, explicit Islamophobia always entails an implicit Muslimophobia, since there must be Muslims to carry out the practices of the religion.

Conclusion

Discrimination, prejudice and hostility towards Muslims have required more conceptual clarity. This article has shed light on the many different shapes and forms of unfounded hostility towards Islam and Muslim. In political debates advocating a ban on the building of minarets, Muslimophobia can both exist independently and co-exist with Islamophobia, but Islamophobia can only co-exist with Muslimophobia. This would speak for the fact that Muslimophobia should not replace Islamophobia, but rather be considered as existing adjacent to it. However, this article has shown that even within Muslimophobic discourses there are different ways of expressing prejudice and hostility towards Muslims.

On one hand, Muslimophobic discourses can be racist if there is a link between Muslims’ skin colour and social attributes, for example, ‘willingness to integrate’. Here, Muslims are considered to be non-European and non-White and therefore present a threat to Switzerland if their numbers are allowed to increase, since they lack the willingness to integrate into ‘our’ culture. The essentialist framing of who Muslims are and who ‘we’ Europeans are through the use of skin colour, place of origin and culture makes this an obvious racist argument and one that is independent of Islamophobia, since one can correlate all Muslims with non-White immigrants and feel antipathy towards such people with little thought given to their actual religion.

On the other hand, the de-essentialisation of culture for oppressive purposes cannot be considered racist given that Muslims have the possibility of becoming integrated and like ‘us’, at least theoretically and discursively. That is to say, one could argue that Muslims just need to try harder to integrate if they want to be accepted as equals in society. Whether ‘integrated’ Muslims (whatever that may mean) are really fully accepted and treated as equals in practice remains questionable. However, judging by the Muslimophobic discourses presented here, it appears that the only Muslims who are considered ‘integrated’ are the ones who do not show any outward signs of actually being Muslim and have disassociated themselves from anything Islamic. Islamophobia is implicit here, as Islam is portrayed as having only undesirable beliefs and values, and these are considered to be the source of Muslims’ alleged backward and violent behaviour. These types of Muslimophobic discourses are not racist but just as discriminatory and oppressive nonetheless, or perhaps even more discriminatory and oppressive than direct racist arguments.

Challenging racist arguments may actually be easier in that it is then possible to pave the way for a non-discriminatory understanding of Swiss society, that is, arguing for a more inclusive concept of Swiss identity that is independent of people’s skin colour, cultural background, religion and so on. However, demanding cultural integration places the full responsibility on Muslims to shed all parts of themselves that may be considered ‘different’ from the norm or the majority. That is to say, the only way Muslims can avoid discrimination and hostility is not by demanding the perpetrators of the discrimination and hostility cease behaving in that way, but instead by removing or changing parts of themselves that the perpetrators choose to target. In this case, since the advocates of the minaret ban want to prevent any more minarets from being built in the future, Muslims who want to be considered well-integrated should support the ban too. Demanding that Muslims fulfil whatever conditions are set before them to prevent discrimination against themselves is surely a pathway to the oppressive, illiberal political culture that the politicians themselves criticise.

Islamophobia co-exists with Muslimophobia, but there are some discourses that are more explicitly Islamophobic in that they are hostile towards Islam, the religion. Within explicit Islamophobia, there is always an implicit Muslimophobia with Muslims as performers of the religion. However, in contrast to explicit Muslimophobic discourses, Muslims themselves are not depicted as violent and intolerant and lacking in cultural compatibility, but rather they ‘perform’ the alleged violence, intolerance and cultural backwardness of Islam.

In Islamophobic discourses, Islam is considered a religion with only troubling aspects that has caused problems in Western society or will cause problems in the future if not tightly restricted and prevented from ‘spreading’. In contrast to historical fears about an Islamic invasion, the anxiety here is not about Islam dominating Christianity or Christians being forced to convert to Islam, but rather about Islam dominating the political and legal order of Switzerland. The slippery slope argument becomes evident, as this situation is depicted as one in which Muslims will eventually impose Sharia Law on Switzerland and Switzerland will no longer be a liberal-democratic country.

Indeed the slippery slope fallacy is the defining argument in the entire pro-ban debates on the minaret initiative. What is particularly salient about the arguments for a ban on minarets is that there is no mention of existing problems caused by the three ¹⁷ other minarets in Switzerland. If minarets were really that controversial, surely the speakers would have highlighted the problems they are causing or have caused in the local communities where they are located. The only potential problem associated with minarets which is brought up is the mounting of loudspeakers on them, which is banned by environmental laws in any case. None of the other issues they mentioned are remotely related to minarets: Sharia law, halal food, forced marriages, honour killings, homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism cannot be eliminated or prevented by banning the building of minarets. However, these demands and transgressions are levelled at Muslims and Islam, as if all Muslims in Switzerland make or commit them, and used as a pretext to justify the ban.

The problem the pro-ban politicians had with minarets is the perceived threat that they could create: that Muslims would demand to build more and more minarets and Islam could therefore become more and more influential on Swiss society. In addition, the pro-ban politicians believed that once Muslims are allowed to build more minarets, Muslims would make increasing demands based on Sharia Law, which would then have more priority over the Swiss legal system. These exaggerated, unfounded and unrealistic claims form the basis of the Muslimophobic and Islamophobic arguments presented here.

Further research could investigate how the anti-ban politicians actually contest these Muslimophobic and Islamophobic discourses. If we understand Muslimophobia and Islamophobia as separate phenomena, this also changes how we perceive the challenges to these discriminatory discourses. Recognising the intricacies of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic rhetoric is only one half of the equation – how we combat these is equally, if not more, important.