The right to blaspheme is fundamental—and it’s under attack.
In as many as 33 Muslim-majority countries today, most of which have Islam as their state religion, daring simply to speak out against religious customs, express one’s lack of belief, or otherwise say anything deemed offensive by religious authorities is enough to brand one a criminal. If victims are lucky, they might live in purportedly “lenient” countries and get off with a fine and a brief prison sentence. If they are unlucky, they may live in one of the roughly dozen countries in which either blasphemy or apostasy (leaving Islam) is a capital offense. That is, if violent fundamentalist militants don’t find them before the state does.
But even outside the Muslim world, intolerance for those who speak freely about Islamic doctrine is endemic. While apostates can be put to physical death in several Muslim-majority countries, they can face social death in the West, frequently cut off from friends and family and even sometimes subject to abuse.
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In this week's Unbelief Brief: Iran is taking a dangerous turn by proposing "hijab clinics" to institutionalize women who defy its dress codes under the guise of psychological treatment. In the U.S., Texas public schools face pressure to adopt a curriculum favoring Christian teachings, blurring the line between church and state. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s arrest of a transgender influencer for alleged blasphemy highlights the country’s growing crackdown on religious dissent.
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Welcome back. This week our Unbelief Brief brings up an issue of hate speech persecuted as blasphemy, along with staggering new statistics on blasphemy-related arrests and imprisonments in Pakistan.
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This week’s Unbelief Brief looks at an Iranian student’s protest of hijab enforcement with a powerful act of civil disobedience, France faces UN backlash over its hijab ban in sports, and the UK debates removing Church seats from the House of Lords in a push toward greater secularism.
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This week’s Unbelief Brief discusses Pakistan being taken to task by the UN Human Rights Committee, the declining health of an imprisoned Iranian human rights activist and an overview of anti-blasphemy laws in the US.
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This week’s Unbelief Brief provides updates on Islamism and Islamic intolerance in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.
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This week’s Unbelief Brief examines a rare resolution to a new blasphemy case in Pakistan and the ever increasing paranoia of the Taliban
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This week’s Unbelief Brief examines the rescue of a Yazidi woman trafficked to Gaza, Bibles in Oklahoma public schools and atheists outnumbering theists in the UK.
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This week's Unbelief Brief looks at an attack on secularism in India, how a Pakistani cleric gets a taste of his own medicine and examines yet another police killing of a suspected blasphemer in Pakistan.
