Is it true that Islam is uniquely unreceptive to religious freedom? Comparative political science can offer some helpful perspective. An aggregate, satellite view does indeed show a dearth of religious freedom in Islam. A comparison between the world’s 47 or so Muslim-majority countries and the rest of the world – derived from measurements developed by sociologists Brian Grim and Roger Finke and undergirding the Pew Forum’srankings on religious freedom – shows that Islam clearly has considerably lower levels of religious freedom than the rest of the world and Christian-majority countries. In their 2011 book published on the same data – The Price of Religious Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century – Grim and Finke show that 78 percent of Muslim-majority countries have high levels of government restrictions on religious freedom, compared with 43 percent of all other countries and 10 percent of Christian countries.

Read the article “Are Muslim Countries Really Unreceptive to Religious Freedom?” on washingtonpost.com.