Few nations keep their vows when it comes to religious freedom.
Churches are attacked on Christmas in India and Egypt. Religious believers in North Korea are tortured in prison camps. Hindus and Sikhs are harassed in Afghanistan.
"Despite routine constitutional promises to the contrary, religious freedoms are denied around the globe and violent persecution is pervasive," Brian Grim of the Pew Research Center and Roger Finke of Pennsylvania State University report in a new book.
Yet even amid this widespread disregard for religious freedom, one group of countries stands out: Muslim-majority nations.
"Religious persecution is not only more prevalent among Muslim-majority countries, but it also generally occurs at more severe levels," Grim and Finke write in The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.
More restrictions, more violence
Writing about Islam in today's politically charged climate is difficult, Grim and Finke admit. Many commentators, they say, tend to be either overly critical or timidly uncritical.
"We attempt to avoid either extreme by staying very close to our data," say Grim and Finke, who also is the director of the Association of Religion Data Archives.
The data, from an analysis of U.S. State Department religious freedom reports, is clear: "Religious persecution is more likely to occur in Muslim-majority countries than in other countries."
Among the researchers' findings:
• Seventy-eight percent of Muslim-majority countries, compared with 10 percent of Christian-majority countries and 43 percent of other nations, had high levels of government restrictions on religion.
• Violent religious persecution is present in every country with a Muslim majority with a population of more than 2 million.
• Sixty-two percent of Muslim-majority countries had at least moderate levels of persecution, with more than 200 people persecuted. In comparison, 28 percent of Christian-majority nations and 60 percent of other countries had similar levels of abuse.
• At the highest levels of persecution, 45 percent of Muslim-majority countries -- more than four times the percentage of Christian-majority countries -- were found to have more than a thousand people abused or displaced because of religion.
There are regional variations. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, only one of eight Muslim-majority countries had a moderate or high level of religious persecution.
However, one need only consider the role religion played in the Sudanese civil war or what Grim and Finke refer to as the "religious cleansing" of neighborhoods in Iraq based on Shiite-Sunni differences to understand the deadly toll religious persecution is exacting in Muslim-majority nations. Explore religious freedom in individual countries.
Promoting religious freedom
History plays a role in the debate over religious freedom in Muslim-majority nations, most of which by the early 20th century were administered by European nations.
In their relatively new experience in independence, many Muslim-majority nations today see sharia (Islamic) law as a way to safeguard society from corruption, social ills and colonial influences. Even a nation such as Turkey, which chose a secular form of government, is under increasing pressure from religious parties.
In their study, Grim and Finke found two-thirds of movements seeking the adoption of religious law were in Muslim-majority nations. Only 4 percent of such movements were in Christian-majority nations.
The issue moving forward, according to many observers, is how these nations will balance the right to religious freedom with competing political, cultural and religious movements.
There are signs of hope.
Most Muslim believers want religious principles and democratic values to coexist, John Esposito, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, said in a paper for the Association of Religion Data Archives. Esposito explored Gallup Poll data from 2001-2007, encompassing a survey sample including more than 90 percent of the world's Muslims.
Significant majorities of Muslims in many countries said religious leaders should play no direct role in legislation, foreign policy or restricting freedom of the press. Citizens in countries in which Muslims are a majority said they want greater political freedoms and rule of law, Esposito said.
What Grim and Finke have done in their book is provide a compelling argument that religious freedom serves to reduce conflict, while restricting religious freedom is a path to religious persecution and violence. The more severe the levels of religious restriction, the greater the risk of violent persecution.
One irony for Muslim-majority nations, many of whom defend legal restrictions under the premise of protecting the faith, is that the harshest religious persecution is often directed at other Muslims, such as the Ahmadiyya sect in Pakistan and Indonesia, Grim and Finke note. Their study also found governments in more than seven in 10 Muslim-majority countries harass Muslims, while Muslims are harassed in only three of 10 Christian-majority nations.
The message for all nations: Each act of religious persecution -- whether it is pressuring Muslims not to build mosques in America, laws imposing the death penalty for religious conversion in Afghanistan or the 2007 Christmas Day attack on Christian churches in Orissa, India -- can have far-reaching consequences.
Each of these countries, and most others throughout the world, have made promises to protect religious freedom. The Price of Freedom Denied demonstrates how high a stake all of us have in making sure those promises are kept.
David Briggs writes the Ahead of the Trend column for the Association of Religion Data Archives.
Follow David Briggs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ReligionData
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Of course, there have always been and will continue to be incidents in which those with power and influence use religion to get people worked up. The general tone in the United States today and this article specifically are great examples of that! People get defensive when they feel their way of life is being threatened. Instead of continuing to perpetuate the threat by invading and pillaging, maybe we should understand our role in the creation of the intolerance.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ne5JZYf-dlkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+al+qaeda+reader&source=bl&ots=TstRs4jatu&sig=ylkfSRJf8xepbQwAZlcuMFJIl_k&hl=en&ei=0AczTZDHOsbngQfsgvy8Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f
A short review of the book:
http://www.meforum.org/2143/the-al-qaeda-reader
In many countries where you see religious persecution, you also see political and economic instability. The government may participate in making targets out of minority groups in order to distract the populace from its other excesses, as in Pakistan.
Many states that practice active religious persecution or that deny freedom of religion are in developing parts of the world, where powerful outsiders have often backed brutal strongmen, military juntas, and oligarchies to the detriment of modernization. Saddam's brutality toward the Kurds and Shi'a was remarkable, but it did not cost him his American backing until near the end of his regime.
My point is that there are a number of factors at work here, not just the identity of the majority religion. We can't say that the correlation comes from religious identity alone.
A more telling comparison would be between Muslims and others within the SAME country. Are muslim-americans any less tolerant of other religions that americans who are not muslim? Those results would mean a great deal more.
Quran. 9:29
Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth , (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
We comprehend but it is a thing of the past. Come to 21st century.
The world's fastest growing religion.
You do the math.
It would be Islamophobia if it was just our imaginations. But it's not.
Once again, within 20 years' time, we will witness the most horrible human conditions in our very countries. Slavery will return with a vengeance and liberty of thought will be crushed..let alone anything else that we value under freedom.
To whom will we turn when the whole world will be under this onerous ideology?
However, that is not an Islamic teaching, or virtue.
Qur'an 24:55 should not even be misunderstood by an illiterate. Did you read any other verse related to that verse at all? No, you just copied and pasted without verifying.
The Hadith referenced was right after 30,000 troops from the Byzantine army swooped on the Muslims, and instead of take them as prisoners of war, gave them freedom to continue with their ways of worship without infringing upon Islamic life. The popular option would have been to keep them as prisoners of war, and truly denying them any freedom.
That's putting it rather mildly (not to mention obviously).
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The dirty little secret of the Ummah. They are not one indivisable group. There is not one Islam. They loathe each other. With a vengeance.
The "writer" of this piece ignores a basic fact - the "West" went through the "enlightenment", we abandoned taking religion seriously in our daily life. We don't burn witches, have Crusades, or carry out Inquisitions.
We're "modern", much of the Islamic world is still "traditional".
The writer is implying that Christianity is more tolerant, but this has nothing to do with "Christianity vs. Islam", it's about "Modern" vs. "Traditional".
Annoyingly, this post will never make it up, because the writer cannot stand anybody disagreeing with him.
This has been true through most of the history of Islam.
The "writer" of this piece ignores a basic fact - the "West" went through the "enlightenment", we abandoned taking religion seriously in our daily life. We don't burn witches, have Crusades, or carry out Inquisitions.
We're "modern", much of the Islamic world is still "traditional".
The writer is implying that Christianity is more tolerant, but this has nothing to do with "Christianity vs. Islam", it's about "Modern" vs. "Traditional".
Annoyingly, this post will never make it up, because the writer cannot stand anybody disagreeing with him.
Even countries like Bangladesh who pretend to be democratic are really dictatorship.
They are operating under their version of democracy rather then ours.
I once had a conversaion with someone from the Middle East who thought that North Korea and the USA shared the same form of government. So....