In the Islamic world, Bosnians have the most personal freedom; Syrians the least
IN HIS WRITINGS Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish-born author and columnist, has argued there is no logical reason why Islam should not thrive in conditions of personal liberty. After all, in a much-debated verse, the Koran insists that “there is no compulsion in religion”. But the reality of the Islamic world is drearily repressive, and has in some ways been getting worse, according tohe has just published for the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC.
Only 60m of the world’s 1.9bn Muslims live in countries where the general level of personal freedom is greater than the global mean, while more than 1.8bn live in places where liberty levels are clearly below average, he finds. To reach this conclusion he uses the Human Freedom Index, which his think-tank has developed in collaboration with two others. It measures a range of entitlements, including freedom of movement, expression, identity, recourse to law and of course, religion.
The 60m total is based on aggregating, to 30m, the smallish populations of the handful of Muslim countries which score fairly well on freedom—Albania, Bosnia, Burkina Faso and Kyrgyzstan—and then adding the 30m or so Muslims who live in Western democracies. Far down the other end of the scale are authoritarian states, like Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, and countries which have been convulsed by internal conflict: Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Mr Akyol laments the “dramatic deterioration” in all kinds of liberty over the past decade in Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Turkey. He finds a more nuanced, and less depressing, picture when it comes to economic freedom: the right to offer goods and services without excessive state interference. On this measure, monarchies do better than the global mean, whereas republics established in a burst of republican zeal, such as Algeria and Egypt, score dismally.
Whether their regimes are traditional or secular, Muslim countries in the Middle East and north Africa are generally less free than those in say, central Asia or parts of west Africa. All this adds poignancy to the last article written by the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, entitled “What the Arab world needs most is free expression.” It was published posthumously in the
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