jonnybmk said: I have a question for the people in here that have really good backgrounds on this stuff: Are Muslims nations/societies free? Free in the way that we think of being "free"? |
Some. Turkey arguably tilts more in the opposite direction, where Turkish society has elements that try to repress Islam more than a Muslim group oppressing others. The United Arab Emirates is fairly tolerant (they would have to be: 75% of their society is immigrants, and they have large Christian and Hindu populations, though still majority Muslim). Indonesia has done pretty good since they got rid of Suharto, and Malaysia's making strides.
Forewardness or backwardness really has nothing to do with a country's religious background. Germany, the birthplace of protestant Christianity, had militant monarchism and then, of course, Nazism. Most of Catholic Europe embraced Fascism, and Orthodoxy has been perceived to have an "anti-democratic" tradition. It's all about economic development: the more developed you are, the more tolerant and free you are. There's a reason that the rise of democracy in Western Europe coincides with the post-Columbus era, when Europe really began to pull ahead of the rest of the world. One can look at the Russian Empire, which was given a chance at democracy and fell to Communism, while their second chance at democracy is (sort of) sticking
Of course, we see the Muslim world "abuse" the freedom of democracy, by voting in the restrictions of Islam, but that happened all over the world as well. The French Revolution of 1848 was defeated by the fact that the freshly-enfranchised peasants, totally under the sway of the Catholic Church, voted themselves back into monarchism (a la Louis Napoleon III)
In time, freedom will grow there as well. Part of the problem is much of the wealth in the Middle East is plundered by the upper class (the nature of an extraction-based economy).