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 Islam and Religious Freedom
The right to worship is rarely accorded to non-Muslims in Islamic countries.

The US State Department, in its most recent annual report to Congress on the status of religious freedom around the world, ranked one Islamic nation—Afghanistan—among the seven worst offenders against the rights of conscience. (The other six most repressive nations were Cuba and the totalitarian Asian regimes: Burma, China, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.) Each of these countries, the State Department found, “attempts to control religious belief or practice” among its citizens.

Only slightly less repressive, the State Department reported, were seven other countries in which the government demonstrated “hostility toward non-approved or minority religions.” All of the countries in this category were Islamic: Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Next on the list were four countries where, the State Department found, the government has a policy of “neglect of the problem of discrimination against, or persecution of, minority religions.” This list included two traditionally Islamic nations, Egypt and Indonesia, along with Nigeria: a land where the recent efforts to impose Sharia law have provoked violent confrontations. (India was the last country in this category.)

Freedom House—a Washington-based think-tank that appraises the condition of political and religious liberty—offers a similarly bleak summary of the condition of religious freedom in the Muslim world. On its global “Map of Religious Freedom,” Freedom House shows most of northern Africa and the Middle East in red: the color assigned to nations that are classified as “not free.” Many prominent Islamic nations (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan) are placed in this most restrictive category. Only a few Islamic lands—Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, and Turkey—merit the somewhat higher rating of “partly free.”

Not a single Islamic nation is classified by Freedom House as “free” in its approach to religious liberty. By contrast, not a single nation of Europe or the Western Hemisphere is categorized as “not free.”

Freedom House also takes note of the three countries in which Christians are threatened by sustained campaigns of large-scale religious violence: Sudan, Indonesia, and Nigeria. In each case, the problem can be attributed to militant Islam.

Back to Catholic World Report January 2002 Table of Contents