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Jeffrey Guhin, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, by SABA MAHMOOD, Sociology of Religion, Volume 78, Issue 3, Autumn 2017, Pages 372–374, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srx038
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Religious minorities have a hard time in the Muslim Middle East. Everyone knows this (or should know this). But then, religious minorities struggle in many regions, and under many majority religions: look at the treatment of Palestinian Christians and Muslims in Israel, the Falun Gong in China, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia. Look at a rise in religious nationalism in India, Myanmar, France, Hungary, and in the United States. So, this is not a uniquely Middle Eastern—or Muslim—problem by any means. Yet Christians and other religious minorities do keep getting killed, and even when their lives are not in danger, their livelihoods often are. What’s going on?
The most common answer is the simplest one, even though it is also wrong: Islam. A more sophisticated critic might acknowledge that Islam is a complex and diverse religion: it is a hard thing to define, let alone to blame for contemporary persecutions. Nonetheless, such a critic might say things would be a lot better if everyone were a bit more secular.
