Too often when people think about Islamic countries they think of those involved in war. Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

In all these countries, they have religious rulers. Religion rules the state.

Europe used to have this too. We burned witches and heretics. We burned, tortured, punished and cleansed.

But through things like the French revolution and the slow desire to stop the internal bloodshed, Europe separated religion from the state and protected the freedom of religion through the state instead. This didn’t stop all wars, but it eroded the unnecessary burning and torturing of individuals.

Islam has a fundamental belief in the freedom of religion. That anyone is free to believe their own religion and people can only be converted to Islam through reason not through force.

So secularism and Islam actually fits very well. It just happens that about the only secular Muslim country Europeans know about is Turkey but it would seem that Muslims and Christians view Turkey with equal amounts of distrust.

21 out of the 51 Muslim majority countries are secular. That alone should be note worthy. That so many countries within the Muslim world have already chosen to be secular.

• Albania
• Azerbaijan
• Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Burkina Faso
• Chad
• Guinea
• Guinea-Bissau
• Indonesia
• Kazakhstan
• Kosovo
• Kyrgyzstan
• Mali
• Niger
• Nigeria
• Senegal
• Sierra Leone
• Sudan
• Tajikistan
• Turkey
• Turkmenistan
• Uzbekistan

I suspect that most Europeans know very little about these countries, but also that they have no where near the levels of persecution seen in countries with a religious state.

Indonesia is seen as persecuting its civilians with its sex ban law in 2022, but I see some of this as problems from coming out from under Dutch, politicians are generally bad, and the problems that Indonesia is having is Islamic fundamentalists meddling in politics. Also note that Hungary, Poland and Russia are all finding similar ways to persecute Gay rights. The path to increased freedoms for all is messy.