Minareti e campanili

Alexandre Erler ha da dire alcune cose sensate a proposito del referendum svizzero sui minareti («Why the minaret ban?», Practical Ethics, 4 dicembre 2009):

The proponents of the initiative have argued that it did not infringe on religious freedom, as Muslims would still be able to practice their religion with or without minarets. But obviously this ignores the fact that the minaret ban restrains the capacity for Muslims to manifest their faith, in this case via the architectural arrangement of their places of worship, and the exercise of this capacity is partly what freedom of religion is meant to protect – which is why the compatibility of the initiative with international law has been called into question (see here and here).
Schlüer and his colleagues have made the absurd claim (in their contribution to the pre-election leaflet) that minarets “have no religious function”, but are only a symbol of a claim to political power. But obviously one main function of minarets is to serve as a visible sign for Muslims of the presence of a place of worship, as church steeples signal the presence of a Christian place of worship. (The other main function of minarets is to serve as a vantage point for the call to prayer by the muezzin, which admittedly might pose a problem from a secularist perspective, but one that could in principle have been solved without a ban.) One might as well argue that church steeples have no religious function, and that eradicating them would not in any way infringe on the right for Christians to practice their religion freely, as they could go on doing so even if churches went out of existence completely.

Da leggere anche il resto.