Abstract
This essay intervenes in a cultural war that has taken place in the West between “Islamopluralists” and “Islamoskeptics.” It looks at the forty-seven Muslim-majority countries in the world and assesses the condition of religious freedom there. These countries in the aggregate do not appear very free. A closer look, though, reveals more complexity. Eleven countries are religiously free while those that are unfree are divided between secular repressive and religiously repressive. This profile of the world’s Muslim-majority states yields both honesty, which requires admitting that the Muslim world is less free than the rest of the world, and hope, which arises from the religiously free Muslim-majority states and from the fact that Islam is not solely responsible for unfreedom in the Muslim world.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay is based on Philpott, Religious Freedom In Islam.
- 2.
The phrase Muslim Question is a riff on the historic “Jewish Question,” which pertained to the status of Jews as citizens in European countries in the nineteenth century. For a similar use of the term, see Norton, On the Muslim Question.
- 3.
For a defense of the universality of the human right of religious freedom and an engagement with critics, see my Religious Freedom in Islam, 16–44.
- 4.
The first of the Pew Reports was “Global Restrictions” Pew has published at least five updates of the scores since then. Here, I use the data from the 2009 report since it was published prior to the Arab Uprisings of 2011, which changed, which countries belonged to the patterns documented here. I then note in the text instances where these uprisings influenced politics. Religious Freedom in Islam contains an entire chapter on the Arab Uprisings, see 149–176. The Pew Research Center is not responsible for the analysis and interpretation of the data in this chapter.
- 5.
Grim and Finke, Price of Freedom Denied, 169–71.
- 6.
The Religion and State Dataset can be found at http://www.thearda.com/ras/. The analysis here is my own, conducted on forty-seven Muslim-majority countries. The list differs slightly from the list that appears in this book. It includes Guinea-Bissau and omits Kazakhstan, whereas this book includes Kazakhstan, which is a Muslim-majority country, and leaves out Guinea-Bissau, which is not.
- 7.
Fox , Unfree Exercise of Religion, 122–24. Fox elaborates on his finding by pointing out the strong level of regional diversity within the Muslim-majority world, noting Sub-Saharan Africa as a region where discrimination is low and compares favorably with Christian majority-states in some regions. This broad finding about the Muslim-majority world—high in discrimination in the aggregate yet diverse in the particular—closely parallels the argument of this chapter.
- 8.
In a previous piece, I identified nine meanings of secular. See Philpott, “Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion?,” 185.
- 9.
Stepan , “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the Twin Tolerations” For an argument for positive secularism that is rooted in Islamic thought and history and applied to the Muslim world, see; Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy Pope Benedict XVI was another proponent of positive secularism, as described in; Allen, Jr., “Benedict Makes a Case for ‘Healthy Secularism’ | National Catholic Reporter” The pope’s distinction is similar to political scientist Ahmet Kuru’s distinction between passive secularism and assertive secularism in; Secularism and State Policies as well as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s distinction between the laicist tradition of secularism and the Judeo-Christian tradition of secularism in; The Politics of Secularism in International Relations.
- 10.
“Tolerance and Tension,” 25, 27; “The World’s Muslim,” 40.
- 11.
Diouf , “Stateness, Democracy, and Respect,” 212, 216, 227; Sanneh, West African Christianity, 212–13, 216–22, 242–51; Azumah, “Christian-Muslim Encounters”; Dovlo, “African Christian and Islam,” 85–102; LeVine, “Mali,” 79; Sanneh, Beyond Jihad.
- 12.
My interpretation of Turkey is indebted to Kuru, Secularism and State Policies, 161–235.
- 13.
Here I have relied on the interpretation of Hibbard, Religious Politics and Secular States, 49–114.
- 14.
See Nasr, “Rise of `Muslim Democracy’.”
- 15.
See, for instance, Kurzman and Naqvi, “Islamic Political Parties and Parliamentary Elections.”
- 16.
See, for instance, the report, “Indonesia: Pluralism in Peril.”
- 17.
See Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxii–xxvii; Lilla, The Stillborn God, 55–103.
- 18.
Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” 222–23.
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Philpott, D. (2020). Religious Liberty and the Muslim Question. In: Karpov, V., Svensson, M. (eds) Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54046-3_11
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