Religion, the public sphere, and identity politics: how a radical Muslim organization defies the populist right in Switzerland

The increasing visibility of Islam and the advance of right-wing anti-immigration politics in Switzerland have led to conflicts between assimilationists and Islamists. By focusing on two protagonists of this conflict – the populist right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) and the Islamist organization Islamic Central Council Switzerland (IZRS) – we deliver an analysis of their strategies and counter-strategies. We argue that the public visibility of Islam has become the main contested issue between both parties. Whereas the former strives for containing ‘the Islamic threat’ by pushing Islam out of the public sphere, the latter uses public visibility of Islam to establish this religion as an integral part of Swiss society. We further argue that both parties resort to well-developed boundary-making identity politics to either consolidate their collective identity (the IZRS) or to stigmatize the opponent (the SVP). We also show that both parties actively engage in constructing internally homogeneous and externally exclusive imagined communities.

Despite major advances in the social sciences in dismissing some premises of modernization theories and in reassessing the role of religion in the public sphere, the simplistic view of modernity prevailing in the modernization theories of post-World War II still dominates the collective identities of Western societies. As Nilufer Göle stated, ‘[r]eligious agency is the blind spot of public debate because modernity's doxa and cognitive system do not recognize it as legitimate’ (Göle 2013: 2). In Europe, the mismatch between social realities concerning the increasing presence of Islam in the public sphere and the collective self-image of European societies as secular have led to conflicts between the advocates of a strict public/private divide and the representatives of Muslims who insist on being free to observe their faith both in private and in public. In Switzerland, this conflict is mainly carried by two organizations. On the one hand, the populist right-wing Swiss People's Party, SVP (in German: Schweizerische Volkspartei) sees Islam as a threat to ‘Swiss values’ and tries to push it away from public life. On the other hand, the Islamist organization Islamic Central Council Switzerland, IZRS (in German: Islamischer Zentralrat Schweiz) struggles for the recognition of what they regard as an orthodox reading of Islam in the public sphere.¹ In this article, we shed light on the dynamics of this conflict by giving an account of the strategies and counter-strategies, as well as the identity politics of both parties. The research questions we are interested in can be summarized as follows: Which social dynamics underlie the identity politics of our protagonists? How do local and global dynamics play into these processes? What roles do the internal dynamics of the Muslim communities play in their construction of internal and external boundaries? And how are boundary-making strategies linked with societal macro-level processes and structures?

By addressing these questions, this study does not only contribute to a new field of research, it also addresses three issues that have been widely neglected in previous studies. Firstly, it sheds light on a new mode of religious boundary-making, which has a global orientation, and thus combines the construction of new religious identities with a deconstruction of ethnic, national, and cultural attachments. Secondly, it demonstrates the dialectical relationship between the identity politics of the SVP and the IZRS. Thirdly, it places this dialectical relationship in the context of the political culture and social structure of Swiss society.

As an analysis of the identity politics of the two parties requires a comparison of their political positions, one limitation on the terms of the comparison cannot be left unmentioned: The SVP is currently the biggest political party in Switzerland, while the IZRS is only one among hundreds of Muslim organizations – a difference which critically affects the power dynamics of the situation. The IZRS was chosen for the study, firstly because this organization has been more publicly visible and assertive since the very beginning of its existence than any other Muslim association in Switzerland (see e.g. Monnot 2015), and secondly because it advocates an Islamist ideology, that is at odds with the secularist stance shared by all political parties in Switzerland.

We start the paper with a theoretical discussion about identity politics. Then, we render a short account of the research on religiously articulated boundary-making and identity politics. Furthermore, we describe, on the one hand, the assimilationist politics of the populist right and their attempts to push back Islam from the public sphere, and, on the other hand, the rise of Islamism and the efforts of Islamists to keep and increase the public presence of Islam in this country. Based on the presented empirical material, we finally argue that both parties resort to boundary-making identity politics based on a sharp contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in order to construct internally homogeneous and externally exclusive imagined communities and thus to consolidate their collective identities.

Since Frederik Barth's (1969) path-breaking publication on the social construction of ethnic boundaries and cultural differences, the social sciences have witnessed the growth of a vast literature on the ways social groups construct and preserve their collective self-images. This surge of scholarly works was also due to a major shift in the social reality itself. Since the 1960s, social movements have increasingly focused on status and identity issues rather than on class-related questions. Thus, slogans such as ‘black is beautiful’ have overrun demands regarding the labor-capital antagonism. As Nancy Fraser (2004) has pointedly remarked, the discourse of social justice – long being focused on the questions of redistribution – was suddenly dominated by the ‘politics of recognition’, which sought for ‘a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect’ (Fraser 2004: 227). Zygmunt Bauman (2002: 140–41) also describes this shift from a right to redistribution to a right to recognition as a consequence of the shift of modernity from a ‘solid’ to a ‘liquid’ stage. Whereas in the solid stage, the ‘order-building endeavors’ (Bauman 2002: 141) were oriented toward final goals (such as a stable economy, a just society, etc.), in liquid modernity, characterized primarily by ‘continuous “disembedding” with little prospect of reliable “reembedding”’ (Bauman 2002: 140), social forces set out for an endless search of the next self-defined level of fulfillment. In such an environment, the quest for social justice becomes overshadowed by human rights issues, which are in turn ‘a standing invitation to register claims and to bid for the claims’ recognition’ (Bauman 2002: 141).

Sociologists have applied different theoretical approaches to determine what ‘politics of recognition’ or – as alternatively labeled – ‘identity politics’ are all about. In her review article, Mary Bernstein (2005) distinguishes the following three approaches: First, sociologists with a more or less neo-Marxist orientation view identity politics as a political practice that, in contrast to class politics, is rather preoccupied with ‘mental’ issues than with ‘primary and determining’ ones such as social structure (Bernstein 2005: 49). Second, the advocates of the new social movement theory regard identity politics as a typical characteristic of social movements in post-industrial societies, in which the quest for economic survival is increasingly being replaced by post-material values. And third, social constructionist/postmodernist/poststructuralist approaches view identity politics as essentialist political activism in the name of socially constructed status categories, and hence as movements that rather reify than alleviate social inequalities.

Disagreement among authors also concerns the definition of identity politics. Here, we suffice with juxtaposing two contrasting definitions. For Cressida Heyes (2016)

On the contrary, from a constructivist perspective, Nival Yuval-Davis (2011: 10) views ‘politics of belonging’ as ‘[…] specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectivity/collectivities which are themselves being constructed in these projects in very specific ways and in very specific boundaries’. The efforts of constructivists to avoid any essentializing approach to group boundaries and social categories have aroused some criticism. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000: 1), for instance, have argued that the constructivists’ attempt to ‘soften’ the term identity in order to do away with the charge of essentialism ‘leaves us without a rationale for talking about “identities” at all and ill-equipped to examine the “hard” dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics’.

One of the most salient identity categories in contemporary social movements is religion. Whereas in some movements, religion has been used for nationalist purposes (for instance in the Zionist movement, in Polish, Irish, Hindu, and Chechen nationalist movements, in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, etc.), in other cases, particularly in religious-fundamentalist movements, religion has been the core identity issue. In theoretical explorations of the relevance of religion for boundary work, Janine Dahinden and Tania Zittoun (2013: 185–187) have identified four major transformations of religion and religiosity in the contemporary world. Firstly, religious phenomena have become global or transnational. Secondly, European societies have evolved into multi-faith societies. Thirdly, religion has increasingly become privatized, while traditional religious institutions and authorities have lost much of their influence. Finally, religions in general and Islam in particular are being increasingly perceived as a threat – a phenomenon that in turn has generated the dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion in European and other multi-faith societies. Drawing on Andreas Wimmer's (2008) multi-level boundary-making model, Karen et al. (2013) propose a theoretical model, which postulates religious boundary-making as being enforced from the bottom up, through binding social ties (social closure) and shared cultural preferences (cultural maintenance) among the followers of a religious community.

To sum up, the presented studies show firstly, that religion is currently an important identity marker among Muslim minorities in Western countries; secondly, that identification with Islam is often associated with the dynamics of social closure in the respective societies; and thirdly, that identity politics based on religious affiliation consolidate the collective identity and boost the collective action of the respective minorities.

Research on the boundary-making of Muslim minorities is mostly concentrated on processes of identity construction, thus partly neglecting their collective identity politics. In the following, we discuss some examples of both research traditions. Even before 9/11, religion had become an important marker of identity among Muslims. For instance, research on young Muslims in Great Britain had shown that Muslim identity provides a positive role model and an alternative to the street and drug cultures. Hence, Muslim identity politics can support and encourage in-group integration. Katy Gardner and Abdus Shuker (1994) argued that Islam provides both a positive identity and an escape from being constantly identified in negative terms. Roger Ballard (1996) reported that second and subsequent generations of Pakistani migrants increasingly identify with Islam rather than with ethnic belonging, and that this identity change is a reaction to their perception of being rejected by the white majority. He also reported that Islam is a particularly useful tool for political mobilization. Following Pierre-Yves Brandt (2013) one could also argue that religion stabilizes the identity of those individuals by providing them with resources for coping with stigmatization, misrecognition, and discrimination.

Similar research has been done in other contexts too. Lori Peek (2005) analyzed the process of religious identity formation and the emergence of religion as the most salient source of personal and social identity with a group of second-generation Muslim Americans. She distinguished three stages of religious identity development: religion as ascribed identity, religion as chosen identity, and religion as declared identity. Underscoring the relevance of social and historical context for identity formation, she also argued that after 9/11, religion became a powerful base of personal identification, identity politics and collective boundary-making for these young Muslims.

In contemporary public debates over multiculturalism in Europe, the religiosity of Muslim minorities is very often seen as a barrier to their societal integration. From the perspective of Muslim minorities, in contrast, their religious identity is a highly valued source of cultural continuity and social support (Ysseldyk et al. 2010). Against this background, Muslim minorities in Europe have generally developed strong religious identities, which have been transmitted to the next generation (Voas and Fleischmann 2012). However, Borja Martinovic and Maykel Verkuyten (2014) reported that a dual ethno-national identity (e.g. Turkish-German or Turkish-Dutch) can discourage a strong identification with a religious in-group and therefore decrease the odds of religious political mobilization, especially if the religious in-group in question is not accepted by the wider society. Phalet et al. (2013) investigated the questions of when and how multicultural cities give rise to ‘strong and stable religion’ (Phalet et al. 2013: 123). Comparing several large-scale surveys of Muslim minorities, they concluded that ‘strong religion is “made in Europe” as institutional rigidities and social inequalities enforce religious boundary-making through social closure and community building’ (Phalet et al. 2013: 123). In sum, the salience of religious boundaries is related to the institutional and societal context in which Muslims are embedded.

As for the boundary-making practices of Muslims in Switzerland, there are only a few studies available. In their narrative interviews with converts to Islam, Petra Bleisch Bouzar and Susanne Leuenberger (2012) show how Muslims use social spaces, such as Muslim associations, to learn, negotiate and practice ‘body techniques’ (Bleisch Bouzar and Leuenberger 2012: 259) (such as the proper ways of interaction with the opposite sex or the proper Muslim clothing) in order to construct a ‘pious self’ (Bleisch Bouzar and Leuenberger 2012: 258). In a comparative study of the interconnectedness of clothing practices and identity construction among pious believers of six different religions in Zurich, Jacqueline Grigo (2013) cited, among others, a Muslim woman complaining about the prejudice (of non-Muslims) against the capabilities of Muslim women. The interviewee also said that she carries her hijab everywhere, even when she goes swimming, so that people see her and say, ‘Aha, that sort of people come here too’ (Grigo 2013: 105). In her case study of a public speech rendered by a Swiss convert to Islam, Leuenberger (2013) has shown how the speaker complains of being categorized by his co-citizens, all of a sudden, as a stranger simply because of his or her change of faith and despite his or her unchanged commitment to his homeland.

A few studies have discussed the boundary-making strategies of Muslim groups and associations in Switzerland and have, at least implicitly, shed light on the identity politics of these groups. In his ethnographic study about Muslim associations in the canton Vaud, Christophe Monnot (2015) has addressed the question of formal recognition of Muslim diasporic communities. As the author shows, the attempts of Muslim associations to reach an agreement with the cantonal authorities are jeopardized by the activities of ‘re-styled’ Wahhabists, who opt rather for a strong presence in the media in order to create an idealized homo islamicus. In an ethnographic study on visibility strategies of Muslims in the canton Vaud, Monika Salzbrunn and Mallory Schneuwly Purdie (2011) show how their associations use the annual event, ‘The Open Door of the Mosques', to attract the attention and trust of the general public and thus to pave the way to a formal recognition of Islam in that canton (for mosques in Switzerland, see also Monnot 2013; Tunger-Zanetti and Schneuwly Purdie 2014). Finally, in their mixed-method study with young adults, Janine Dahinden et al. (2012) have discussed the question of how individuals use and interpret public discursive constructions of ‘differences’ in daily life to define groups and the boundaries between them. Their qualitative interviews show that the youth in the Muslim minority develop strategies to cope with boundaries made by the established in-group. They either resort to an individual boundary-crossing strategy by stressing their similarities with the established in-group while demarcating themselves against their own group or a boundary-marking strategy by re-evaluating their cultural origins positively and presenting them as a source of cultural enrichment.

All these studies highlight that the European public often perceives Islam as a threat, at least since 9/11. Muslims respond by either secularizing themselves or by deliberately distancing themselves from the so-called mainstream society, cultivating in-group contacts, and trying to rectify the biased images of Islam in the public sphere. The intensity of these identity politics and the boundary-making practices, however, are highly dependent on the social context.

We applied a historical sociological approach in order to analyze the trajectory of the conflict between the populist right and the Islamists, using publicly available material such as official documents of Swiss authorities, statements of the representatives of the SVP and the IZRS including those published on their official homepages, and media reports and interviews. However, we very soon found an imbalance in the data, as the publicly available material was in the case of the SVP much more abundant than in the case of the IZRS. We therefore decided to compensate for this imbalance by drawing on the data we gathered in research on Muslim organizations in Switzerland between 2012 and 2015.² In the case of the IZRS, these data included four narrative-biographical interviews with active members of the association as well as participatory observation of the events of the association.

Both the interviews and the participatory observation³ were carried out by one of us who, due to his Muslim background, had easy access to Muslim associations. The interviews were carried out in (Swiss) German and translated into English. In order to ensure data protection, the names of the interviewees are anonymized.

The global Muslim insurgence and the rapid increase of Muslim migrants in Switzerland gave rise to a growing public anxiety (Behloul 2011) which fed into, and boosted, an already existing assimilationist tendency in Swiss politics (Schneuwly Purdie 2010; Gianni et al. 2015). Sensitive to any threat to ‘Swissness’, the SVP took advantage of the public fears to spearhead assimilationist demands on Muslim migrants. It therefore launched a series of anti-Islam campaigns such as those in federal referendums against eased naturalization in 2004 and 2008 and the initiative⁴ for a minaret ban in 2009.⁵

The SVP was founded in 1971 as a result of a fusion of the Farmers’, Merchants’, and Citizens’ Party (BGB) with the Democratic Party (DP). The moderate BGB had a long tradition as the Protestant alternative to the conservative Catholic ‘Christian Democratic Party’ (CVP). Its base consisted mainly of farmers and small entrepreneurs in protestant-dominated cantons such as Berne or Zurich. From 1929, the BGB was represented with one seat in the federal government. In 2003, the SVP was able to take over this representation and expand it to two seats.

Under the influence of the wealthy entrepreneur Christoph Blocher, the SVP has profoundly transformed its ideological stance over the past 20 years. Consequently, its shift to right-wing populism caused major internal tension, which, in 2007, led to the split of the party and the founding of a new, moderate-conservative party called BDP (Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei). In the Federal Council elections of the same year, the BDP won one seat at the cost of the SVP and Blocher was voted out of the government. In 2008, however, once again an SVP member was elected into the government. Under Blocher's leadership, the SVP turned from a traditional peasants’ party into a tightly managed, right-wing populist protest movement with a strong backing in rural cantons, as well as among the middle classes in the suburbs of large cities. The popularity of the SVP is due, on the one hand, to its costly publicity and its provocative campaigns and advertising, and, on the other hand, to the fears among large parts of the population of over-foreignization (in German: Überfremdung) (Skenderovic 2007) and of globalization.

Generally speaking, the SVP has a national-conservative orientation favoring a traditional societal model; it struggles for an unrestricted political sovereignty of Switzerland in the international arena; and it emphasizes the principle of individual responsibility while being critical of any expansion of state competencies. The SVP is currently the strongest party in Switzerland. At the last national parliamentary elections in 2011, it reached a voting share of 26.6% and won 54 of the 200 seats. However, in the Council of States (Ständerat), a kind of senate in which each canton has two seats, the SVP has only five seats out of 46.

Interestingly enough, the SVP was not originally of a national-conservative orientation. Rather, it represented the interests of mainly Protestant farmers, as well as small- and medium-sized companies. The dynamics of the ideological reconstitution of this party in the last two decades were not only related to its discovery of ‘Swissness’, but also to its distancing from the Protestant state-church, which is nowadays perceived by many voters of the SVP as being too left. However, in the current program of the SVP, the Christian roots of Switzerland are still emphasized: ‘The SVP is committed to the Western-Christian culture in Switzerland. This is the basis of our identity and our coexistence, and it is not surprising that our country bears a cross in the flag, and that our national anthem has the form of a prayer’ (SVP 2015: 90).

The agenda of the SVP also reflects these dynamics. Thus, it warns against religious extremism, which would be primarily promoted by Muslim migrants:

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the global Islamist resurgence, 9/11, increasing immigration from Muslim contexts, and religious claims and practices of Muslims in Switzerland brought Islam to the focus of the SVP. Having a self-image as the protector of ‘Swiss values’, the SVP started, from the mid-2000s on, to combat the ‘insidious Islamization’ of Switzerland. In 2006, legal disputes over the construction of Islamic centers with minarets in three Swiss cities – Wangen (canton Solothurn), Langenthal (canton Berne), and Wil (canton St. Gallen) – caught the attention of the public. Already involved in these disputes, the SVP lodged, in the same year, an official motion for a ban on minarets in the canton St. Gallen. As the cantonal authorities rejected the motion, the SVP decided to launch a national referendum for a ban on minarets. During the long campaign period, the SVP missed no opportunity to defame Islam. Thereby, it did not only resort to the mass media (Gonzalez 2015),⁶ but also distributed posters that strongly contrasted ‘bad Islam’ with ‘good Switzerland’. In the following, three of these banners are briefly sketched:

• In the 2007 national parliamentary elections, the SVP largely built its campaign on anti-Islam propaganda. In a famous whole-page newspaper advertisement, a bar chart colored in red showed the steady and sharp increase in the Muslim population in Switzerland between 1970 and 2000. Above the chart, in a stamp-like frame in red print, it read: ‘Muslim population + 449%’. The title of the advertisement started with the word ‘Islam’ in red print. This was followed – in black print – by the sentence: ‘This is how the SVP ensures that we do not feel as strangers in our own country: more Switzerland instead of Sharia’.

• In a communal election in the district Bremgarten (canton Aargau) in 2009, the SVP used a banner that showed, on one side, a smiling, young, blond woman, and on the other, a Muslim woman in a black Burka, whereby the holes on her face cover were depicted as prison bars. Underneath the graphic it read: ‘Rather Maria than Sharia’.

• The SVP banner for the minaret initiative campaign showed black vertical objects piercing through the Swiss map and a woman wearing a veil similar to a burka. The black objects resembled both minarets and rockets. The banner carried the word ‘Stopp’ (stop it) in big black characters, followed in the next line by the phrase ‘Ja zum Minaret-Verbot’ (‘yes to a minaret ban’). The SVP argued that Islam is an intolerant, women-unfriendly religion, and that Muslims are an integration-resistant minority. It further claimed that minarets symbolize the advance of political Islam and Muslims’ power in Switzerland. Therefore, a ban on minarets would not only stop political Islam, but also alert Muslims that they have to assimilate. The representatives of the SVP always underlined in their public statements and interviews that the minaret ban would have a ‘signal effect’ (Signalwirkung) on Muslims, warning them not to overstep their limits. Furthermore, the SVP eagerly quoted Recep T. Erdogan, who in 1997, as the mayor of Istanbul, had recited Ziya Gökalp's following poem⁷: ‘The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers’.⁸ On 29 November 2009 the initiative was adopted by 57.5%⁹ (for an analysis of the background, meaning, and societal impact of the minaret ban see Hänni and Lathion 2009; Mayer 2011; Rohrer 2013; Göle 2015).

Most Muslims we interviewed, blamed radical Muslims for having provoked the excessive, stigmatizing practices of the SVP, while denouncing the minaret ban as misguided. They also generally reassured us that Islam would be compatible with, or even supportive of, liberal values. However, there were also Muslims, especially those with Islamist tendencies,¹⁰ who saw in the ban one reason more why they had to stick to their faith, organize themselves and resist the assimilationist demands of the wider society.

Provoked by the anti-Islam campaign of the SVP and frustrated by the ‘inactiveness’ of Muslim associations, a group of young Muslims decided in 2009, to found a new organization that would more decisively and professionally defend the rights of Muslims in Switzerland. Thus, the IZRS came into existence. Distancing itself from the ‘accommodationist’ attitude and the ‘guest mentality’ of the first generation of migrants, the IZRS started to actively counter the anti-Islam propaganda of the populist right (see Schneuwly Purdie 2013). Most active members of the IZRS are either converts or reconverts, namely former nominal Muslims who have become devout Muslims after a radical change of mind. In both ideological and organizational terms, the IZRS is very similar to and interlinked with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It supports Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups; it is critical of any restriction on sharia, be it wearing hijab, daily prayers, fasting, circumcision of boys, etc., and it is based on Sunni¹¹ Islam and critical of sectarian divisions in the global umma.

The strong presence of the IZRS in the public soon rendered it a reputation that far exceeded its minority status in the larger Muslim community in Switzerland. In fact, the IZRS is only one among more than 300 Muslim associations. Moreover, for the following reasons, it does not resonate with all Muslims. Firstly, its image as a radical organization has deterred the majority of Muslims in Switzerland, who prefer a peaceful coexistence with the wider society. Secondly, its purist ideology and its intolerance towards some internal minorities, such as the Ahmadiyya Community or the Alevis, counteract its attempt to be acknowledged as credible representative of the whole Muslim community. Thirdly, many Muslims believe that the provocative actions and appearance of the IZRS activists exacerbate the stigmatization of Islam.

Because of its image as a Salafi¹² movement, with connections to other radical organizations abroad, the IZRS has faced many difficulties in getting permits to hold its public events in urban spaces. Here some examples:

• On 10 March 2014, the IZRS applied for a permit to run a one-day information counter in St. Margrethen, a town in the canton St. Gallen. The town authorities rejected the application, arguing that the planned event would be inappropriate, as they were involved in a court case regarding two young female Muslims who had insisted on wearing a headscarf at school (the girls enjoyed legal assistance from the IZRS). In the planned information counter with the slogan ‘Muslima, proud and free’, veiled Muslim women would explain to the interested public that they carried their headscarves voluntarily and that they took pride in it (St. Galler Tagblatt, 15 April 2015).

• On 10 June 2014, the IZRS applied once again for the permit. The authorities also rejected the second application, arguing first that the IZRS divides the Muslim population of the town, and secondly that in a secular state, preserving peaceful religious coexistence has priority over freedom of speech. However, the cantonal Ministry of Security and Justice rejected the decision of St. Margrethen, ruling that similar future applications were to be complied with. The IZRS welcomed the decision, but gave up the project, arguing that it would be perceived as too provocative (20 Minuten Ostschweiz, 15 April 2014).

• The IZRS also had major difficulties in getting a permit for its yearly conference in 2012. To start with, it signed a contract with the authorities of Bülach (a town in the canton Zurich) to hold its gathering at the town hall (Stadthalle) on 25 February 2012. However, the authorities nullified the contract and forbade the IZRS to hold its reunion. The mayor declared in an interview that IZRS was an extremist group, and that it was therefore not welcome in his town. On 1 November 2012, the IZRS lodged a complaint against the town authorities (NZZ, 12 January 2012). At the same time, it managed to sign a contract with Spreitenbach (a town in the canton Aargau) to put up a conference tent somewhere in its territory. However, the municipal authorities nullified the contract, arguing that the IZRS had deceived them by giving ‘training’ instead of ‘conference’ as the purpose of its gathering (TV show ‘Schweiz aktuell’, SRF, 14 February 2012). Finally, the IZRS was able to get a permit to hold its conference in Granges-Paccot (a town in the canton Fribourg).

Having had good experiences with the canton Fribourg, in 2014, the IZRS asked once again for a permit to hold its annual conference in Granges-Paccot. This time, however, the authorities rejected the application, arguing firstly that the list of guest speakers had been constantly changing, and secondly that there were some security considerations (Freiburger Nachrichten, 12 November 2014; Radio SRF, 11 November 2014). Finally, the IZRS integrated its annual conference into a permitted outdoor gathering of one of its sub-organizations. As the change was made on short notice, only about 200 people showed up at the four-hour long event, which was held in the city of Fribourg in a public square called Place Georges Python. Unexpectedly cold weather, street noise and a lack of seating opportunities hampered the gathering. Furthermore, a small group of counter-demonstrators – apparently Kurdish migrants – chanted the slogan ‘ISIS, terrorist’. Being frustrated by these circumstances, the IZRS filed a lawsuit in Swiss Federal Court against the local authorities of Fribourg – and won the case.¹³

Criticizing the first generation of migrants for being too passive and accommodationist, as well as for having a ‘guest mentality’, the IZRS urges Muslims not to hide their faith in public. As Thomas (30), a Swiss convert to Islam, told us in an interview:

Sara (22), the daughter of a migrant blue-collar family of Kosovo-Albanian origin, brought a similar argument to criticize the passivity of mainstream Muslims in Switzerland: Taking this critical stance as a starting point, the IZRS has developed a remarkable identity politics, the cornerstones of which could be differentiated as follows:

• The IZRS tries to persuade Muslims to be proud of their religion. Muslims should live their faith both in their appearance and in their conduct. The above-mentioned planned information counter with the slogan ‘Muslima, proud and free’ is but an example of this policy. Indeed, active members of the IZRS cherish an orthodox public appearance. Thus, the male individuals usually have a beard and wear a Muslim cap as well as the traditional clothes of devout Arab or Turkish/Balkan male Muslims. As for female activists, they wear a strict hijab and traditional clothes of devout Arab or Turkish/Balkan female Muslims. Emphasis on an orthodox appearance is best demonstrated by a Swiss convert and a board member of the IZRS, who consistently wears a niqab (face cover).

The IZRS members not only take pride in living up to a conservative interpretation of Islam, but also regard the public anxiety about their association as a proof of their impact. Mehmet (36), the son of a Turkish labor migrant family and an active member of the IZRS, illustrated this notion as follows:

• (b) 

  The IZRS emphasizes that Islam is not about kinship, ethnicity, denomination or nationalism, but a unitary religion that surmounts all divisions between Muslims. Therefore, it deliberately avoids any involvement in sectarian debates. This attitude is not only expressed again and again in the public statements of active IZRS members,¹⁴ but also well demonstrated by the multi-ethnic composition of its board.

Accordingly, the IZRS presents itself as an umbrella organization for all practicing Muslims, no matter how they perceive and live Islam – as an organization that protects the rights of Muslims wherever they are and whatever religious discrimination they are faced with. In order to live up to these claims, the IZRS gets vocal wherever Muslims are prohibited from, or insulted for, observing their faith in the public. This self-image is not only expressed in the positions the IZRS members usually take in public debates, but also declared on the homepage of the association, as the following statement shows:

• (c) 

  The IZRS wants to establish Islam as a ‘normal’ religion equal to the Christian and Jewish communities. Andreas (29), a Swiss convert, who has been instrumental in the founding of the IZRS, formulated this endeavor as follows:

  We try to protect the paths [of life] and rights of Muslims. Not only to protect them, but, in the long run, also to establish that Muslims – no matter if they are practicing Muslims or not – are [accepted as being] totally normal; and that a Muslim is not [regarded as] abnormal and that he is not regarded as odd.

To achieve this goal, IZRS tries to convince Muslims that practicing Islam is compatible with a modern life. Hence, it organizes – in cooperation with other Islamic organizations it is tightly linked to – programs like sport (both for men and for women), swimming, and sauna for Muslim women, Muslim shops and fashion shows, Muslim music (nasheed) and so on. It also renders diverse services such as where to buy halal food, how to teach Islam to children, how to marry/divorce/bury according to the sharia, how to convert to Islam, and how to take a pilgrimage trip to Mecca (hajj). It also strives for a formal recognition of Islam in Switzerland. For instance, Thomas told us in the interview:

• (d) 

  The IZRS struggles for the maximal freedom of Muslims to live up to their religious norms. While abiding with the law, it rejects accommodating Islam to the demands of the assimilationists. This attitude was expressed by Thomas:

  I really want to practice my faith consistently and don't want it to be pushed into a corner again and again through argument and discussion about the centrality of Western modernity. If something has to be at the center, then, conversely, I want religion, faith in God, and religious rituals to be at the center and the world to be organized around them.

• (e) 

  The IZRS strives for an active public presence, for example through participation in public debates (including TV debate shows), holding annual public congresses in major cities, organizing demonstrations, and running information counters in urban centers. The IZRS is also present in virtual media, and its active members are very skilled in handling devices such as video addresses, Facebook accounts, websites, SMS news services, online newsletters, and Muslim applications for smart phones.

The public activities of the IZRS did not go unnoticed by the SVP. On the contrary, they provoked it to exert even more restrictions on Muslims in general and on the IZRS in particular. To name but one example, on 11 February 2015, two representatives of the SVP, declared in a media conference in St.Gallen, that they had worked out a package of measures to contain ‘Islamic extremism’, and that the package would include a ban on the IZRS (St. Galler Tagblatt, 11 February 2015).

Our findings demonstrate, taking the example of the SVP–IZRS comparison, the public uncertainty and even anxiety caused by the entrance of Islam into the public sphere of a European society. What lessons can be learned for sociological research on majority–minority relations in general, and on faith related conflicts in particular? In the following, we highlight a few points.

To begin with, the ban on minarets reflects the relevance of power relations to the public visibility of religious symbols. Mosques are the ‘representational space’ (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]) of a minority which is seen by the SVP as a threat to ‘Swiss values’. Cutting into the traditional shape of the mosques by banning its minarets serves two purposes. Firstly, it imprints a sign of subjugation on one of the symbols of the Muslim minority as a constant reminder that the minority should beware of its ‘limits’. Secondly, it underscores that the Swiss Volk (people) is ready to tolerate mosques, provided they are ‘tempered’ to its requirements. In other words, the minaret ban asserts hegemony over the Muslim minority without disrupting the self-image of the Swiss as a tolerant people. The minaret ban can also be seen as a special mode of implementation of Euro-Islam, understood as an Islam adapted to the expectations of the host society. The minaret ban and other restrictions on the public presence of Muslims also reveals a fundamental dilemma practicing Muslims are faced with: If they opt for remaining at the margins of the urban areas, they suffer under spatial segregation and are accused of building parallel societies, lacking citizenship responsibility, and unwilling or incapable of integrating into Swiss society. If they move to the urban centers, as the IZRS did with its information counters and yearly conferences, they are perceived as disruptive to the habitual life patterns of the ‘Volk’ (Göle 2013: 9).

Furthermore, as our analyses have shown, the (in)visibility of Islam in the public space seems to be of major significance for the self-perception of both SVP and IZRS, and lies therefore at the core of their identity politics. The IZRS is strongly oriented towards boundary-making and demarcation against the non-Muslim Swiss society. It therefore resonates with two main groups: (1) converts, whose adoption of Islam implies a radical detachment from their old normative orientations – a state of mind which Monika Wohlrab-Sahr (1999) calls symbolic battle – and (2) reconverts, namely former nominal Muslims who have developed a strong Muslim identity after experiencing a radical change of mind. Having gone through a ‘spiritual transformation’ (Paloutzian 2005), both groups show a deep desire for both public visibility of their new identity and recognition of their otherness by the dominant, non-Muslim population.¹⁶ In this context, religion functions, as Wohlrab-Sahr (1999: 361) has remarked, as ‘a means for the public dramatization of problems of social disintegration and distinction’. Consequently, the IZRS has developed multifaceted identity politics, some of which are analyzed in the following:

First and foremost, the IZRS strives for what has been called an ‘inversion of the stigma’ (Wieviorka 2001, Cesari 2004). Believing in the superiority of Islam, it persuades Muslims to publicly celebrate their faith. At the same time, the IZRS rejects any kind of isolationism and embraces any possibility to appear in well-visited public spaces to promote a normalization of Islam in Switzerland. With such a strategy of ‘production of normality’ – to use Jürgen Link's (1997) terminology – the IZRS pursues two goals. On the one hand, it tries to facilitate a pious life in a modern, heterogeneous world. On the other hand, it struggles for the establishment of Islam as an integral part of Swiss society. To achieve the latter goal, it counters the hegemonic integration/assimilation discourse in Switzerland by a multiculturalist, libertarian equality of rights discourse as suggested by Chandran Kukathas (2003; see also Nollert and Sheikhzadegan 2015). By opting for a strong public presence – be it in urban spaces or in the electronic media, the IZRS promotes both a celebration of difference and a production of normality.

Furthermore, recognizing that the existing fragmentation of the Muslim community prevents the emergence of a community of believers, the IZRS attempts to overcome the predominantly ethno-national collective identities of Muslim communities by promoting a unitary, post-ethnic and post-national Muslim identity of the global umma. In such a worldview, different Muslim communities are envisaged as concentric, instead of crosscutting, social circles – to use Georg Simmel's (1908) terminology – centered on Islam as their core identification category. By promoting Islam as the salient identity of Muslims, the IZRS attempts to create what has been described as an idealized ‘homo islamicus’ (Behloul 2011; Monnot 2015). Thus, both the populist right and the IZRS tend to reduce the Muslims and the Swiss to homogeneous categories. There seems, therefore, to be a convergence between the essentializing of Islam and Swissness both by the IZRS and by the populist right.

Regarding the SVP, the following features of its identity politics are highlighted: The SVP draws on a very successful record of exploiting public fears of over-foreignization (Skenderovic 2007) for its populist agenda, with the initiative of 9 February 2014 against ‘massive migration’ being its last success story. Furthermore, the SVP uses some media (e.g. the weekly Weltwoche) as well as its remarkable financial resources, to shape public opinion in a dichotomous, bad-versus-good manner. Whereas the ‘good’ is always the SVP as the protector of ‘sublime Swiss values’, such as loving nature, freedom, traditions, autonomy, neutrality, and Christianity, the ‘bad’ are either migrants and refugees, the left, the bureaucracy, the poor, the foreigners, the social scientists, or foreign countries and institutions. Against this background, Islam is depicted as an alien culture that distorts the ‘Swissness’ of social life and morphology of the country as a violent and inhumane religion, and as a growing burden to the welfare system. With such an image, Islam perfectly serves the SVP as the ideal scapegoat for much that goes wrong in the country.

All in all, our findings show the relevance of macro-level structures for boundary-making practices. Following Nilufer Göle's (2013) suggestion for a shift of perspective from the vertical dimension (state–society relations) to ‘the horizontal dynamics of current interactions and confrontations between citizens of different religious denominations with different ways of life and cultural values’ (Göle 2013: 1), we argue that the long tradition of direct democracy in Switzerland prompts public anxieties to much more easily translate into politics, and even into legislation, than in other democratic systems. In other words, the bottom-up referendum system (the so-called initiative) enables even very small political groups to launch a referendum on a local, cantonal or even national level.

In this article, we have demonstrated how the social dynamics of an increasing public presence of Islam and the rise of the populist right in Switzerland have given rise to emotional public debates. These debates have been marked by conflicts between defenders of ‘Swissness’ and advocates of far-reaching religious freedom, and have contributed to the interdependent construction of boundaries between groups. In this way, the two main protagonists of the conflict, the SVP and the IZRS, resort to well-developed identity politics to consolidate their social position in Swiss society. Furthermore, both parties have been actively engaged in constructing imagined communities, with one consisting of all ‘proper’ Muslims, the other devoid of any ‘alien’ culture. The conflict over the visibility of Islam implies therefore, a clash of the two imagined communities – both being assumed to be internally homogeneous while externally exclusive. Moreover, both require the ‘bad other’ for boundary-making purposes and self-identification. Furthermore, the identity politics of both organizations reflect the impact of globalization. Whereas the SVP views the ‘unique character of Switzerland’ as jeopardized by the overall weakening of the Swiss state in controlling its economic, political, demographic and cultural matters, the IZRS rejoices at the reawakening of Islamic consciousness in so many edges of the world, viewing it as beams of a rising global umma.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Amir Sheikhzadegan, PhD in sociology from the University of Zurich, is a senior researcher at the Swiss Center for Islam and Society at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He has been a visiting fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin as well as at the Religion and Society Research Center of the Western Sydney University (Australia). His research and publications focus on Islam in Switzerland, Islam and modernity, civil society, spiritual transformation, narrative identity, and societal change in Iran.

Michael Nollert is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He studied sociology, political science and mass media research at the University of Zurich. He worked for many years at the Sociological Institute in Zurich, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Trier, Germany. His research and publications focus on social policy, social conflicts, social inequalities, social networks, economic sociology, and labour markets. Current research projects focus on Muslims in Switzerland and conversion to Islam.