There are fears that online rumours and misinformation could reignite a wave of extremism across Bangladesh. In fact, there are worrying signs that it is already starting. In early November, houses belonging to Bangladeshi Hindus were vandalized and torched after one of their occupants was accused of supporting France and defaming Islam on social media.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb.
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Church adherents pose no inherent threat to liberal democracy. The problem in the US is that people in the highest positions of authority, Catholic and Protestant alike, are pushing at the barriers between church and state, erected so carefully by America’s founders to ensure that the people, not God, would govern.
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The imminent establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and two Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is part of an on-going process of security cooperation going back many years. While that robs the event of some drama, it also increases its significance. It means that the process of ending the era of Arab-Israeli confrontation will continue, culminating perhaps in a political upheaval in Iran. That is the road that the Middle East may now be on.
Read Here | The National Interest
In 2016, Mormons rejected Donald Trump in numbers unheard of for a Republican nominee — viewing the thrice-married, immigrant-bashing Republican as an affront to their values. In 2020, the president is going all-out to change their minds — a little-noticed effort that could make or break him in Arizona and Nevada, home to more than a half-million Latter-day Saints combined. Joe Biden’s campaign, sensing an unlikely opening for a Democrat, is also targeting Mormons in the pair of Western swing states.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has extended this belligerent approach to the Mediterranean, sending soldiers to war-torn Libya and tipping the scales in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Government of National Accord (GNA), which is fighting the Egypt and UAE-backed Libyan National Army.
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The recent diplomatic spat between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia provides a glimpse of how mixing religious beliefs and historic relations can prove costly for nations that are either incapable of devising a balanced foreign policy or are dependent on global powers, and instead of having a free and dynamic foreign policy prefers to be dictated.
Modern Arab societies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia have long struggled to reconcile the claims of state and religion. For some autocrats in the Middle East, religion offers a source of legitimacy. But religious authority also competes with state authority and can give courage and structure to opposition movements in these states. COVID-19 has highlighted this conflict by momentarily concentrating state power over religious institutions in the name of public health.
The Modi government’s active diplomatic outreach to the Gulf states and the increasing acknowledgment of India’s growing economic opportunities had, until recently, shielded India from official criticism over the discriminatory nature of India’s new citizenship law, as well as mounting reports of anti-Muslim violence following Modi’s reelection in May 2019.
Despite the obvious public health benefits of suspending the umrah and hajj, Saudi Arabia will pay a heavy cost for its prudence. Pilgrims bring in billions of dollars to the country every year, so the Saudi economy will suffer as long as the crisis lasts. Another loss is less quantifiable, but just as significant: pilgrimage remains one of the kingdom’s most important soft-power instruments after two decades during which its public image has deteriorated.
