Over the weekend in Switzerland, there was a public referendum that came up. The subject was.....should the practice of Islamic women wearing facial coverings be continued? They aren't talking about the headdress....this is the covering to prevent any part of their face being seen.
The final vote? Roughly 51-percent in halting the practice.
Naturally, journalists and intellectuals hyped down the vote....that this would have to come up again in a couple of years, and this was displaying a very negative side of the Swiss public.
The general problem with this discussion....no one could state a quantity of Islamic women who wore the facial coverings. It might be just 100, or possibly 1,000, or even 10,000.
Back two years ago (before Covid entered our lives), I went and spent a week traveling around the country (to be honest, the urban centers of Lucerne, Zurich, and Bern).
In these urban areas, you might see thirty-odd Muslim women a day, but the bulk of them simply wore a head covering only, and maybe only ten-percent wore the facial covering.
In the lesser urbanized areas? Unknown, but I would suspect that it's a very low percentage of Muslims who live in rural mountain villages or smaller towns.
My suspicion is if you took the vote count, and broke it up....it was pretty overwhelming in rural regions for the ban, and probably around 50 to 60 percent in urbanized areas against the ban.
What'll happen now? No one says much over the individual choices here? You might see dedicated couples just make the decision that the wife stays at home entirely, and never goes out in public. You might have some who make the decision to move into Germany.
Settling things? I'm not sure about that.
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