Open Doors compiles a global "persecution index." North Korea, where tens of thousands of Christians are serving time in work camps, has topped the list for many years. North Korea is followed, though, by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the Maldives and Afghanistan. Of the first 10 countries on the list, eight are Islamic, and almost all have Islam as their state religion.
From HERE.
3 comments:
This article brings up one interesting point that I've mentioned numerous times on my own blog (such as here) but don't see much talk about elsewhere: the Ottoman millet system, whereby non-Muslim groups were at least allowed existence, more than they get from Islamicists in the MENA today.
And at the end we have this flourish:
"One of the contradictions of the Islamic world is that the best chances for Christians seem to crop up precisely where a major player actually comes from the political Islam camp. In Turkey it is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former Islamist and now the country's prime minister, who has promised Turkey's few remaining Christians more rights. He points to the history of the Ottoman Empire, in which Christians and Jews long had to pay a special tax, but in exchange, were granted freedom of religion and lived as respected fellow citizens.
A more relaxed attitude to its minorities would certainly signify progress for Turkey."
I'm not sure about the progress element, but that puts an interesting twist to Turkey's drift towards an Islamic state. Are they trying to follow the route shown by the Islamicists to their south and east? Or is their real objective to bring back the Ottoman Empire?
The Arabs better think about that...
Hi Don, but I think the Arab world is becoming more and more homogenous, just as the West is exploding with diversity, for better and worse. A city like alexandria used to be very diverse--Jews, Greek Egyptians, Armenians, lots of Copts. It was called Paris on the Nile. And look at it today, crowded and dirty and run down.
I agree with that's the way the Arab world has gone. Your description of Alexandria is, in some ways, the way the Ottomans left it when they retreated to their Anatolian fastness (with a British interlude.) They could deal with many groups in one place; the Arabs can't.
What was interesting to me was the idea that the Turks are even thinking about reviving the millet system in some form. That goes against what's going on in most of MENA today. I'm not sure how far they intend to carry that--or even if they know--but it's interesting.
It's also important to note that the Turkish retreat in the Balkans led to the explosive ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing we've seen there since before World War I. In that respect, the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990's and what's going on in Iraq and the Palestinian areas are two sides of the same phenomenon.
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