64 countries have religious symbols on their national flags
Of the 64 countries in this category, about half have Christian symbols (48%) and about a third include Islamic religious symbols (33%).
A third of the 198 countries studied had a high or very high level of social hostilities involving religion in 2012. About three-in-ten countries had a high or very high level of government restrictions on religion, roughly the same as in 2011.
On Nov. 20, a Pakistani court ordered blasphemy charges dropped against a Christian teenager who had been accused of burning pages from the Quran. A new Pew Forum analysis finds that as of 2011 nearly half the countries and territories in the world have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation.
by Robert Ruby, Senior Editor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life By nominating an observant Muslim for the Turkish presidency, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan inadvertently highlighted deep-rooted tensions about the role of religion in the nation’s political life. These tensions were already evident in recent Pew Global Attitudes surveys that found growing doubts […]
Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2007 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Ray Takeyh, a leading expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, shed light on the complex and diffuse […]
Washington, D.C. Recent violence between Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim guerrilla group, and Israel; sectarian conflict in Iraq and escalating tensions around Iran’s nuclear ambitions have drawn urgent attention to the resurgence and politicization of Shiite Islam and its relationship to Sunni Islam. The Pew Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations invited Vali Nasr, author […]
Washington, D.C. The Pew Forum interviewed Dr. Vali Nasr following a roundtable on Islam and democracy co-sponsored by the Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Nasr is a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on the politics of the Middle East and South […]
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