I would like to confine myself to reflecting on the problems of religious minorities, particularly Muslim minorities who are facing xenophobia and related forms of intolerance today in an atmosphere of widespread Islamophobia. We Muslims are also complaining of an attempt to encourage Islamophobia. The French ban on veils and Swiss ban on minarets has further vitiated the atmosphere. We do not know for sure how much of this is deliberate as a sort of anti-Islam crusade as we Muslims allege and how much is a paranoid reaction to growing radicalism, extremism and exclusivism in Islamic societies.
But I find a note of introspection on the part of us Muslims and Muslim governments completely missing in the continuing debate. I intend to do precisely that today. While we Muslims demand, and rightly so, the freedom to freely practise and propagate our religion in the non-Muslim majority countries, we do not seem to worry about the plight of religious minorities living in Muslim-majority lands.
That Muslim societies in general have radicalised over the last decades cannot be denied. This has been a direct result of tens of billions of petrodollars having been spent in promoting a rigid, obscurantist, desiccated version of Islam, shorn of all its beauty and bounty. Preachers of what I can only call “petrodollar Islam” have gone around the world asking Muslims to develop a separate identity that distinguishes them not only in the practice of Islamic prayer rituals but also looks and apparel. The phenomenal rise in Muslim women wearing hijab and an assortment of veils or men growing what is called an Islamic beard is no accident.
Discrimination against religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries has grown. Anti-blasphemy laws, for instance, have been routinely used to harass and commit acts of violence against religious minorities. The Report of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Asma Jahangir, mentioned the case of Christians and the minority Muslim sect of Ahmadis who are continually harassed on baseless allegations of blasphemy in Pakistan despite the government’s stated commitment to fulfil its international obligations. One almost routinely comes across in the media these days headlines like the following emanating from Muslim-majority countries: