Today the Religious Freedom Institute launches its Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team in Washington, D.C. As a Senior Associate Scholar at RFI, I’ve seen first hand the Institute’s unfolding of a vision since its founding in 2016, one of the most impressive dimensions of which is the establishment of action teams of activists and scholars to promote religious freedom in various spheres – a South and South Asia team, and ones for the Middle East, the United States, International Religious Freedom Policy . . . and now Islam. Heading up the Islam team is Jennifer Bryson, an ArcU contributor, no less.
Here at Arc of the Universe, much attention is given to the persecution of Christians around the world. It is critical to stress that religious freedom is a human right for all human beings and to shine the spotlight as well on other religions, regions, and contexts in which widespread and egregious violations of religious freedom take place. One is Islam. Muslims number 1.8 billion adherents and are 24% of the population (that’s from the Pew Research Center in 2015), form a majority of the population in 47 countries (give or take a few depending on how you count) and have large populations elsewhere (consider India, where Muslims are 14% of the population and number 172 million – nearly 10% of the world’s population of Muslims!).
Most importantly, religious freedom issues are rife among Muslim populations. A piece in The Spectator dated this past Saturday, March 31, expresses valence of these issues in its title, “When Will the West Take A Stand on the Persecution of Muslims?” Critics in the West routinely tar Muslims as violators of religious freedom, overlooking that they are, in large numbers, among the violated.
The piece opens:
Anti-Christian persecution, for so long a great untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But the suffering of Christian communities, from Syria to Nigeria to China, is part of an even broader phenomenon. Religious conflict is on the rise across the globe, with ancient tensions being raised by new political methods. And in many countries — Sri Lanka, India, the Central African Republic and elsewhere — it’s Muslims who have the most reason to fear violence. In Burma, they may even have been victims of genocide.
That, at any rate, is what UN officials are trying to investigate after a wave of brutality which has forced 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the coastal region of Rakhine State since last August. Burmese soldiers, police and armed civilians carried out a campaign of diabolical violence, in which hundreds of villages were burned to the ground and helpless civilians were machine-gunned and dumped in mass graves.
There were warning signs — in 2012, 200 Rohingyas were killed and more than 100,000 displaced — but Western observers missed them. Sanctions were lifted, foreign investment surged, Aung San Suu Kyi was hailed as her country’s saviour. As the human rights campaigner Benedict Rogers observes, the international community was ‘too quick to embrace positive signs. It was almost inconvenient to be confronted with what was happening to the Rohingyas and others’.
The scene in India is eye-opening, too:
In India, too, ancient tensions have been emphasised by new movements, in this case Hindu ones. The RSS, a volunteer network of millions, sees India as a ‘Hindu nation’ and runs programmes to convert Christians and Muslims. This tradition has its extremists — some of whom are close to power.
Officials from the ruling BJP party, an offshoot of the RSS, have rewritten school textbooks to bring them closer to the nationalist story. (For example, the fact that Gandhi’s killer was a Hindu fanatic goes unmentioned in some classrooms.) One of the party’s star campaigners is the firebrand Hindu priest Yogi Adityanath, who once told an audience: ‘If they kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.’
Every few months someone is killed by a lynch mob on suspicion of possessing beef. Hindi has recently gained a new word, gautankwad, which literally translates as ‘cow terrorism’. A spokesman for Minority Rights Group International tells me that there are ‘degrees of state complicity’ in these incidents. And when the authorities tighten legislation against cow slaughter and on ‘forced conversions’, it can ‘provide a cloak of legitimacy to anti-minority violence and discrimination’. Yet, the plight of India’s Muslims — four million of them in the province of Kashmir, where the Indian army stands accused of countless human rights abuses — goes un-remarked by western leaders uncomfortably aware of India’s economic clout.
Of course, “the Muslim Question” also must be asked of Muslim countries, factions, and schools of thought that are unfriendly to religious freedom. Mustafa Akyol, who writes regularly for The New York Times, is a pioneer for religious freedom in Islam, and is a dissident who has suffered for his stands, including being detained in Malaysia last year, penned a piece in the Times a week ago Sunday arguing that religious repression causes Muslims to leave the faith — and, conversely, that a regime and atmosphere of freedom promotes a vital faith:
As a Muslim who is not happy to see my coreligionists leave the faith, I have a great idea to share with the Iranian authorities:
If they want to avert more apostasy from Islam, they should consider oppressing their people less, rather than more, for their very oppression is itself the source of the escape from Islam.
That truth is clear in stories told by former Muslims, some of which I have heard personally over the years. Of course, as in every human affair, motivations for losing faith in Islam are complex and vary from individual to individual. But suffering from the oppression or violence perpetrated in the name of religion is cited very often.
A final plug: My interest in the Muslim Question is strong, having just completed a book manuscript on the issue that Oxford University Press will be publishing, tentatively titled, Religious Freedom in Islam? Intervening in a Public Controversy. I wrote the book under the auspices of what has now become the Religious Freedom Institute. More to come on this.
Today, my congratulations and best wishes go to Jennifer Bryson and the new Islam & Religious Freedom Action Team at RFI.