The news story that voters, by a bare majority, have banned construction of new minarets in Switzerland seems to have very strong legs. Western liberals are appalled at the bigotry. Muslims generally are taking offense. My first impulse, as one of those liberals, was to produce a satire, which I’ll stand by, but I’d like to pursue the matter more directly here.
Heated Rhetoric
Most Muslim countries are not nearly so restrictive as Saudi Arabia which forbids the importation of a single Bible for personal use. But, in or out of the Muslim world, attitudes toward minorities’ religious rights vary so enormously, information touching on tolerance and intolerance is so anecdotal, practice so often departs from noble constitutional language and rhetoric serves mainly to lob verbal missiles across walls of willful misunderstanding and naked impermeable hostility.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Sorting out this mishmash is well nigh impossible, so let’s start from scratch, again. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came into effect on December 10, 1948, contains the following language:Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
In many places today, constitutions written in consonance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights notwithstanding, there is in fact no freedom of religion or conscience. In other places, law and practice hew fairly close to Article 18. However, even in these very happy countries (from a liberal’s point of view), disputes arise over claims of unequal treatment. Given the degree to which diverse people migrate from country to country and belief communities hive off into new neighborhoods, it might be wise to call an interfaith, interdenominational conference to define more specifically what those universal rights entail, not only on paper, but in practice. As we all know, various sorts of red tape can and do frustrate many beautifully written, well meant laws.
Specifics, Please
Here are some of the subjects that need ironing out if religious freedom in demographically mixed countries is to become an uncontended reality:
1. Building and maintaining houses of worship and religious schools, including issues of appropriate zoning and size considerations.
2. Reconciling calls to prayer or church bells with reasonable regulation of noise levels and public nuisances.
3. Preaching, publishing and proselytizing
4. Freedom of conscience vs. inherited identity.
5. Treatment of heresy, apostasy and free thinking of various sorts
5. Appropriate display of religious dress, festivals, symbols.
7. Clashes between faith and general human rights, as with gender issues.
8. Reciprocal respect. (By reciprocity, I mean that if Muslim women are free to wear hijab in my country, then I should be free to walk the streets of Tehran or Riyadh without a head covering. If Eid can be openly celebrated in Iowa City, then Christmas should be openly celebrated in Peshawar. If you are free to convert my children, I must be free to convert your children. And so on.)
Finding common ground won’t be easy. All religions have their tolerant practitioners. All religions also have rabidly absolutist cohorts who make no room for dissent, disagreement or neighborliness of any kind. Thus, some of the most violent disagreements are intrareligious disputes. Today the Sunni and the Shi’a are at it again. Some centuries ago it was Catholics and Protestants at one another's throats, literally.
Right. Some 1500 years into the Christian Era, Europe was engulfed by wars of religion. Catholics and Protestants of various ilks massacred one another to gain control of Christian souls. The prophet Muhammad was born in 570. Now, some 1439 years later, Islam is beset by its own bloody wars of religion. The uneasy diversity of Islam today would need to be represented on any new religious rights council.
Is Cooperation Possible?
Another possible barrier to reaching general agreement on religions freedoms is the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam which dates to August 5, 1990. Observe the absence of the word “universal.” What’s more, there are these articles to consider:
Article 24: All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'ah.
Article 25: The Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the articles of this Declaration.
Yet even here things are not so simple. Just as warring Christians couldn’t and can’t agree on how the Bible or Canon law should be applied to the state, Muslims follow four schools of law and are not by any means in sync on how to interpret Shari’ah. And some would say that any agreement with infidels is invalid from the get go.
Perhaps it seems improbable that Islam could make the transition Christianity made after the religious wars, but the separation of church from state, though contested from time to time by zealots, brought an end to religious wars in Europe and kept them from the Americas. Given the murderous hostility between, for example, Sunni and Shi’a, including mosque shoot outs during Friday prayers, to say nothing of the persecution of smaller sects and the bloody-mindedness of the Taliban and the Shebaab, Islam might find that the European example worth investigating.
The Consequence of Failure
Be that as it may, and it’s not mine to adjudicate, the alternative to reaching across faith community barriers to evolve clearly understood actionable shared language on religious rights is continued ill will, dissension and violence. Does anyone really want that?.