Religious Intolerance or Simple Common Sense?

Before last Sunday's 'victory' in Switzerland, when the vote opposing the plan for a giant minaret carried the day, there was a sense in some quarters that this had little to do with religion per se and more the last cries of a far right organisation seeing the onward march of Islam as the intrusion of a backward culture on what is a very western democracy.

Now attention has switched to Germany, a country well versed in the extremes of politics but which has generally been evenly split with Protestant (32%) and Roman Catholic (31%) of the population, in the post war years before Die Wende, the Protestants accounted for more than 66% of the West German population,. These two groups account for almost two-thirds of the country's religious beliefs, next, with 3% of the total is Islam.

With the increase in the Muslim population in Germany, thanks almost entirely to the growth in the size of Turkish emigre families, comes the need for more places of worship, mosques. There's an irony here given that generally, the U.K being the exception, family sizes in multi-faith Islam countries (that's to say countries where the two factions of Islam exist) have been on the decline.

Anyway the drawing above is of what is described as a 'mega-Mosque' in the Cologne district of Ehrenfield. The two minarets are both 55 metres high, that's roughly the height of Nelson's Column, including the statue of the great man himself, and have been described by local people as being 'an affront to the district' and 'symbolic identity theft.'

The Germans have of course been here before, a Mosque in the city of Augsburg was built without a minaret, but it did come with a four metre high dome, in Berlin a campaign was launched against the building of a mosque in the Pankow-Heinersdorf district but in the end the building was completed.

The Swiss ban has divided politicians in both Germany and Switzerland, those against the ban have used the same language, accusing the Swiss of being Islamaphobic and it certainly doesn't sit easily with the Swiss history of belief in religious freedom. Certainly the opposition campaign appeared, to my eyes at least, to have its roots in a fear of what Islam stands for rather than the esoteric qualities of a huge building.

There is of course a weird sense of hypocrisy here, the most famous building in Cologne is this fine example, possibly the second finest example after Reims, of Gothic architecture. It's the poster church for the German Catholic church. It took over six hundred years to complete (work paused for a lunch break in 1473 and reconvened in 1842) and the twin spires, so beloved by the boys in the RAF, stand some 157 metres tall - that's three times the height of the planned minarets.

The Cathedral was built in another time, the break in its construction was ended would you believe because of the 19th Century obsession with all things connected with the middle ages. Now along comes a religion with its roots in the middle ages and asks for permission to build a place of worship.

In Switzerland there have been calls, not by a Swiss Muslim but by the grand mufti of Egypt, for the 400,000 Muslims to protest against the ban using peaceful means. In Germany there are already 206 Mosques and the Germans have their collective fingers crossed that the plans will be scaled down because under its constitution there cannot be a ban on a minaret and however well meaning that constitution is there is a sense that this will open the way for even bigger and grander buildings to be built in the name of Islam.

Footnote: Die Wende is what German people call the post 1989 re-unification process, translation is the turning point.