The Swiss referendum that has prohibited the building of minarets is reminiscent of the promulgation of "norms of life" by the town council of Hérouxville, Que., in January, 2007. Both events show an urban-rural divide, with an inverse proportion between the presence of Muslim immigrants and the belief that they are a threat. In the large Swiss cities of Zurich, Geneva and Basel, the referendum was defeated; the most remote Swiss cantons voted strongly in favour.
One difference is that the Swiss referendum is binding, whereas the Hérouxville councillors had no power, for example, to prohibit the wearing of veils or, for that matter, to forbid actions that are crimes in any case, such as stoning women or burning them alive. But the proponents of both measures thought they were counteracting a potential introduction of sharia law. Adducing lines from a poem recited 12 years ago by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now the Prime Minister of Turkey, the Swiss agitators claimed that minarets symbolize bayonets.
Canada is fortunate that representative democracy cannot be overruled by citizen-initiated referendums, as in Switzerland, and that commissions and inquiries often defuse heated controversies. The government of Quebec appointed Gérard Bouchard, a sociologist, and Charles Taylor, a philosopher, to look into what is called the "reasonable accommodation" of ethnic and cultural minority. In particular, they showed that the incidents that had inflamed the issue had been exaggerated.
Switzerland is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights; though the Swiss government and parliament may not have the power to overrule the referendum result, the minaret ban may well be struck down by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland or by the European Court of Human Rights.
The Swiss minaret question arose partly out of some humble town-planning applications, in which minaret proposals may not have been reasonably accommodated, even before the referendum.
Building heights may be a real issue, but no tower or turret should be discriminated against by reason of religion.