The Moor Next Door

By John Ballard

Nouri Lumendifi prefers to be called Kal but I have a hard time making that adjustment because he first got my attention with a book report he posted at the age of seventeen that impressed me more than the book. That was only three and a half years ago so he's now just turned twenty. But make no mistake, this young man is someone to watch. He has insights and analytical gifts equal to anyone writing today. His observations are keen, consistent, clear and provocative. 

His essay on Switzerland's attempted (perhaps succesful?) ban on minarets illustrates Kal's skillful writing as well as a deep and troubling resovoir of cultural ignorance and bigotry in Switzerland that makes our own teabaggers look like a breath of fresh air.

One should register no surprise that the continent which produced the Inquisition, anti-Semitism, the Crusades and the Holocaust would give rise to a sentiment that would lead 57% of Swiss voters to ban the construction of minarets. It should be even less surprising that this would come round in a country where the largest party in parliament made itself so by posting up images of white sheep bucking black ones off of the national flag. Proponents of the Swiss ban on the construction of minarets say they fear the imposition of sharia law; that the towers rising off of mosques illustrate Muslim dominance over their society. They go on that Muslims, unlike Christians or Jews, make �political and legal demands.� To preserve Swiss culture and law, no more minarets ought to go up. Some feminists, representing the most assuredly misguided sect yet to speak, added that the minaret is a phallic symbol, representing male oppression of women. Casting minarets from the skyline would, in their minds, take a stand against misogyny. �If we give them a minaret, they�ll have us all wearing burqas,� as one put it. The Muslims don�t believe women to have any worth and we ought to convince them otherwise by keeping them from building vertically, to paraphrase another. We should be eager to catch a flier compelling us to a rally urging a ban on the construction of bell towers and spires, of slender and high reaching sculptures. Such a hope would only yield disappointment, though. For even if we would like to assume the good and honest intentions of the ban � to accept the line of one parliamentarian that the trouble isn�t Muslims as people, but merely the legal implications of their religion � we would be stupid, foolish and criminally gullible to do so. It would be disingenuous to call the majority decision on the matter anything but an expression of popular and growing racism and bigotry in Swiss society. Worst of all is that we may not say that a wretched government is responsible for this violation of religious freedom. It was the Swiss people � though it is better to say the unenlightened among them.

That's just the first paragraph and he's just getting warmed up.He follows up with a survey of editorial opinion and book reviews from the US and UK reflecting a range of views that appear shallow in light of Kal's analysis. Prose like this is too rich to appear in everyday newspapers.

The discourse around the subject has centered not around a desire to stem the �tide� of Islamic fundamentalism but around power. The minaret, for its opponents, symbolizes Islam�s �arrival� in the Alps. It stands to proclaim the Muslim presence above other faiths and peoples. Banning it, then, is to ban a symbol of Muslim power and existence. These people who have come to Switzerland as workers, doing the quiet and dirty work the Swiss work culture deems beneath the native, ought to stay in their place, their heads down and their superstitions out of sight. It signals an acceptance of the principle and mentality of �white power� more than of women�s rights, the preservation of liberalism or any other fuzzy notion it purports to defend. The aesthetics of identity, and therefore power, are what the drive is really about. It is a way for a people in doubt to affirm and define their confused identity by rejecting that of the newcomer�s.

I don't think Kal "into" tweeting but if he were I would be a follower. When he speaks, smart people should pay attention. At his age we can expect him to be here long after most of us are gone. His is a voice of the future. I wish there were more like his.