Islam in Switzerland - History

History

In the 10th century, Arabs and Berbers from their Mediterranean Fraxinet base settled in the Valais for a few decades. They occupied the Great St. Bernard Pass and even managed to reach as far as St. Gallen to the north and Raetia in the east.

Islam was virtually absent from Switzerland until the 20th century. It appeared with the beginning of significant immigration to Europe, after World War II. A first mosque was built in Zürich in 1963 by the Ahmadiyya community. Muslim presence during the 1950s and 1960s was mostly due to the presence of international diplomats and rich Saudi tourists in Geneva.

Substantial Muslim immigration began in the 1970s, and accelerated dramatically over the 1980s to 1990s. In 1980, there were 56,600 Muslims in Switzerland (0.9% of total population). This ratio quintupled over the following thirty years, notably due to the immigration from Former Yugoslavia during the 1990s Yugoslav War. While the Muslim demographics is still growing rapidly, the rate of growth has decreased after the early 1990s. The growth rate corresponded to a factor of 2.7 over the 1980s (10% per annum), a factor of 2.0 over the 1990s (7% p.a.), and a factor of about 1.6 over the 2000s (5% p.a.).