Religious Minorities Archive

The one-year anniversary of an alarming episode of anti-Muslim violence in Nepal focused attention on the community’s continued struggle to assert itself. Despite recent progress in promoting religious pluralism, many Muslims remain marginalized, neglected in politics and invisible in conceptions of national identity. The villages of Narainapur Rural Municipality, in Nepal’s lowland Terai plains, are poor, even by the standards of one of the poorest countries in South Asia. The area does not yet have electricity, and electrical poles installed by the government stand unused. On a typical day, the main road is quiet, with just a handful of vehicles […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about religious minorities in various countries around the world. On Jan. 9, Greek lawmakers voted to limit the power of Islamic courts operating in the country’s Western Thrace region, on its border with Turkey. The new law upends a system of maintaining separate legal rules for the region’s 100,000-strong Muslim minority that stretches back nearly a century. In an email interview, Effie Fokas, a senior research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy and a research associate at the London School of Economics’ Hellenic Observatory, discusses what […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about religious minorities in various countries around the world. Last week, authorities in China demolished a prominent Christian megachurch in Linfen, an industrial city in one of China’s poorest regions. State police used dynamite and excavators to raze the church, which had a congregation of more than 50,000. It was the latest sign of a growing state backlash against religion in China, where the Communist Party is officially atheist and the practice of organized religion is tightly controlled. In an email interview, Yang Fenggang, a professor of sociology and director […]