Religious Freedom in the Islamic World

It is popularly believed that religious freedom does not exist in the Islamic world and that all people in all Islamic countries are strictly forbidden from practicing any religion other than Islam. This is not an entirely correct perception. It is true that, in many Islamic countries, religious freedom is greatly restricted. Nonetheless, religious freedom does exist to varying degrees in different Islamic countries around the world and there are a few Muslim-majority countries in which citizens have complete religious freedom.

The Quran and apostasy

In most Islamic countries, it is legal for people who were born into a religion other than Islam to practice their religion, but it is illegal for anyone to convert to any religion other than Islam and it is illegal for non-Muslims to proselytize. These laws are based in part on the Quran, which contains numerous verses condemning apostasy in the strongest possible terms. For instance, the Quran 16:106 reads as follows, as translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali:

“Any one who, after accepting faith in Allah, utters Unbelief,—except under compulsion, his heart remaining firm in Faith—but such as open their breast to Unbelief, on them is Wrath from Allah, and theirs will be a dreadful Penalty.”

This verse and others like it have been interpreted in different ways, but many Muslims believe that they require apostates from Islam to be severely punished.

Religions other than Islam in Saudi Arabia: pretty much totally illegal

When most people think of laws pertaining to freedom of religion in Islamic countries, they usually think of Saudi Arabia, which is one of the strictest of all Islamic countries. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy and in which Wahhabism, a particularly fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam, is the official state religion.

In Saudi Arabia, it is illegal to practice any religion other than Islam in public, use any building as a house of worship for any religion other than Islam, or own any kind of religious objects associated with any religion other than Islam. All citizens of Saudi Arabia are legally considered Muslims and it is illegal for any non-Muslim to gain Saudi Arabian citizenship. Converting from Islam to any other religion is a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment.

Non-Muslims are allowed to visit Saudi Arabia, but they are not permitted to practice their religions openly while they are in the country and there are restrictions about where they are allowed to travel and what they are allowed to do while they are there. Saudi Arabian officials generally allow them to practice their religions, but only if they only do so in complete privacy.

Islamic countries where some non-Muslim religions are legal, but persecuted

Most Muslim countries are somewhat more tolerant of non-Muslims than Saudi Arabia is. For instance, in Iran, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians are legally permitted to practice their religions openly and have their own houses of worship. These are freedoms that they could never hope for in Saudi Arabia.

Nonetheless, non-Muslims in Iran often face discrimination, their rights are severely limited, and there is definitely strong encouragement for them to convert to Islam. It is illegal for non-Muslims to attempt to convert others to their faith and it is illegal for anyone to convert to any religion other than Islam. Converting to a religion other than Islam is punishable by death.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Tehran Times of Zoroastrians celebrating the Sadeh festival in Tehran on 29 January 2017

Non-Muslims only make up a tiny fraction of the total population of Iran, but there are other Islamic countries with very large non-Muslim minorities. For instance, as I talk about in this article from May 2020, Coptic Christians make up somewhere around 10% of the population of Egypt. Although they often face discrimination and their rights are severely limited, their religion itself is not illegal; they can legally practice their religion and have their own places of worship.

In Egypt, the official penalty for abandoning Islam is a lengthy prison sentence and loss of marriage and child custody. Although this penalty is not always enforced, there is strong social pressure for people to stay in the religion they were born into.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church in Cairo

Islamic countries in which it is legal to convert to another religion

There are a few Islamic countries where it is legal to convert to a religion other than Islam. Notably, in Tunisia, it is technically legal for a person to convert from Islam to another religion. Nonetheless, there is extremely strong social pressure for people to remain faithful to Islam and non-Muslims are often discriminated against. Under the Tunisian constitution, it is illegal for a non-Muslim to become president.

In 2017, five men were arrested in Tunisia for eating in public during the day during the month of Ramadan. They were convicted of committing “a provocative act of public indecency” and sentenced to one month in prison, sparking considerable public outrage around the world.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, it is technically legal for a person to convert from Islam to another religion, but, once again, non-Muslims are often discriminated against and there is strong social pressure for people to remain Muslim. These issues have become more pronounced in recent years due to the increasingly Islamist stance of the Turkish government under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Church of Saint Mary of the Mongols, the only Byzantine church in İstanbul that has remained in continuous use as a church since Byzantine times and has never been converted into a mosque

Indonesia

Indonesia has a reputation as one of the most tolerant Muslim-majority countries, but this reputation for tolerance can sometimes be overstated. While Indonesia is undoubtedly far more tolerant than Saudi Arabia, it is far from the paragon of religious freedom that it is sometimes made out to be.

The Indonesian government only officially recognizes six religions as legal: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. According to the CIA World Factbook, 87.2% of Indonesians identify as Muslim, 7% identify as Protestant, 2.9% identify as Roman Catholic, 1.7% identify as Hindu, and 0.9% identify as practitioners of some other religion.

Practitioners of the legally recognized religions are free to profess and practice their faith openly. People are allowed to freely convert from Islam to any of the other legally-recognized religions. It is, however, illegal to attempt to convert someone from Islam to another religion.

Each of the legal religions has an official national council that determines which beliefs and practices are orthodox. Anyone who deviates from the beliefs and practices defined by the national council can be sentenced to up to five years in prison under article 156a of Indonesia’s criminal code, as can anyone who criticizes the tenets of any legally recognized religion.

Minority religious groups are persecuted. In particular, Shīʿah and Aḥmadīya Muslims often face mistreatment and persecution by the Sunni majority. The Majelis Ulema Indonesia, a semi-government authority, has declared them “deviants” who are not true Muslims. In December 2011, an armed mob attacked Shīʿah homes, a boarding school, and a musholla in Nangkrenang village, forcing the Shīʿah inhabitants to flee. Only one man was charged for the attack and, when he was convicted, he was only sentenced to three months in prison.

The next year, Tajul Muluk, the Shīʿah religious leader who ran the boarding school that was burned down, was arrested, convicted of blasphemy for allegedly not conforming to orthodox Islamic teachings, and thrown in prison. His community was attacked by another armed mob in August 2012. This time, one man was killed and another hospitalized.

People can be thrown in prison for making even the slightest remarks. For instance, in 2017, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian of Chinese descent who was serving at the time as the governor of Jakarta, made an offhand remark about his political opponents misusing a verse from the Quran to persuade Muslims not to vote for him. For this remark, he was indicted and convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to two years in prison.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Hindu family at Pura Ulun Danu Bratan in Bali, Indonesia

West African Muslim countries

Make no mistake, though; there are Muslim-majority countries where true freedom of religion exists. A large number of these countries are clustered in West Africa: Senegal, Mali, Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia.

Here is an assessment of religious freedom in these seven West African countries by Daniel Philpott:

“In most of these countries, Muslim majorities live side-by-side with Christian minorities. Some of these countries contain Shias and Ahmadis, whose beliefs diverge from those of mainstream Sunni Islam. Elsewhere they are persecuted, but not here. Tiny communities of Hindus, Baha’is, Jews, and other religions live in these countries as well.”

“Religious freedom is articulated boldly in these countries’ constitutions. They prescribe religious freedom explicitly and do not dilute it into a more generalized freedom of conscience or belief. These states give their citizens wide legal latitude to educate their children in their faith and are generally free of the kinds of restrictions that unfree Muslim states impose. There are no ‘religious tests’ requiring one to be a Muslim to hold a certain political office. Generally, these states lack laws that prohibit blasphemy, defamation, or conversion away from Islam, or that restrict broadcasting, newspapers, or other forms of public speech.”

European Muslim countries

There are only three Muslim-majority countries that are entirely located on the European continent: Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. All three of these countries have both complete religious freedom and separation of church and state.

According to the CIA World Factbook, roughly 95.6% of Kosovars identify as Muslims. Many Kosovar Muslims, however, are non-practicing. According to the CIA World Factbook, roughly 50.7% of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina identifies as Muslim. Once again, many of these Muslims are non-practicing.

Albania is unusual among Muslim-majority countries because, from 1967 until 1990, all religion was illegal in Albania and the communist government brutally enforced atheism on the population. The government did not tolerate any form of religious belief. Students were instructed to report on their own family members if they observed any form of religion at home. After religion was legalized again in 1990, though, people quickly began practicing it again—which indicates that the state maybe didn’t do as thorough of a job at eliminating religion as it had hoped.

In the 2011 Albanian census, 56.7% of Albanians identified as Muslims, 10.03% identified as Roman Catholics, 6.75% identified as Eastern Orthodox Christians, 0.14% identified as other Christians, 2.09% identified as Bektashi, 5.49% identified as unaffiliated, 2.5% identified as atheists, and 13.79% did not declare their religious affiliation.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Mirahori Mosque in Korçë, Albania