 A number of Swiss Muslim activists voiced reservations about the launch of a new forum aimed at making the "moderate" voice of Muslims heard, fearing it could split the community.
| "Who sez any of us want to be 'moderate,' anyway?" |
They warned, in interviews with IslamOnline.net, that the new forum would be exploited by the media as a pretext to target any Swiss Muslim adhering to his/her religion, label them as "extremists" and even call for their deportation. The forum's chairwoman, Tunisian-born Saida Keller-Messahli, told swissinfo on Friday, December 3, that the forum will have no taboos with respect to issues put for debate and will "criticize in an intellectual fashion."
| "Only after the opinions have been presented will we start killing each other and our neighbors. We've learned to be very orderly, living in Switzerland, y'know..." |
"We want to show that Islam can be interpreted in a way that is compatible with human rights." With a debate already taking place in Switzerland about whether Imams should be trained at Swiss institutes, Keller-Messahli argued that people were making too much fuss about nothing. "Any person who can read Arabic can interpret the Qur'an, [although] we accept that we are not all Qur'anic scholars," she told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's website. Muslim activists in Switzerland showed deep concerns about a proposal put forward by major Swiss Christian groups on the need for a government-supervised institute to educate imams on the "liberal" lifestyle in western societies. The proposal raised some fears within the community that the institute would be a platform for imposing a European Islam, sidelining the Shari`ah and dealing with the Noble Qur'an as an out-dated historical heritage. |