A View From (and For) the North Atlantic

Abstract

A View From (and For) the North Atlantic Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im (bio) Ani Sarkissian, The Varieties of Religious Repression: Why Governments Restrict Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), ISBN 9780199348091, 245 pages, including two Appendices, Notes, Bibliography and Index. The term “human rights” is incidentally mentioned a few times throughout this book, but the subject of human rights does not seem to be within the focus of this political science study of political regimes and their patterns of behavior—regarding religion in this case. Ani Sarkissian states early in her book that the “central question of this book is why some countries choose to repress religion while others do not.” Additional questions she raises and attempts to answer include: “What type of policies do states use to repress religious groups? How do political leaders decide which religious groups to repress? Why do some states target small seemingly nonthreatening religious groups with repression?”1 In the author’s view, “few [studies] delve into why states vary in their policies and why they choose to target specific groups. This book aims to fill this gap.”2 This focus is elaborated in the author’s view of religion, rights, and repression in Chapter 1. Using quantitative data, the author finds that religious repression occurs at high levels across the range of nondemocratic regime types. She suggests that variations in religious repression depend on the interaction of the level of political competition in a state with the structure of religious divisions in society. To begin with, it is remarkable that Sarkissian claims to gather and re-organize quantitative data to represent the varieties of religious restrictions by level of political competition in 101 countries around the entire world, despite multiple and complex diversity among and within religions and regions. It is therefore not surprising that such an approach yields problematic outcomes. For instance, five sets of countries, namely, Laos and Libya, Nigeria and Thailand, Rwanda and Venezuela, Ghana, Lesotho and Paraguay, Albania and South Africa, share the same ranking,3 despite the extreme and complex diversities among and within the relevant religions and cultures, long term history, pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial experiences, and present geo-political contexts of these countries. The overreach and reductionist view of complex concepts and experiences persists throughout this book, even when the author attempts to apply some corrective measures. Sarkissian seeks to complement the quantitative measurements she used by presenting comparative case-studies of the historical and structural characteristics of sixteen states and societies which are implicated in some type of religious [End Page 217] repression. The author divides the following chapters into levels of repression and discusses how the included countries fall within a particular category. Under the rubric of “repression of all religious groups,” Chapter 3 discusses two sets of cases: Iran and Saudi Arabia, and China and Azerbaijan. In Chapter 4, the author discusses states that “repress most religious groups by favoring one,”4 which happens to be the title of that chapter and include states such as Russia, Georgia, Indonesia, and Turkey. Chapter 5 compares Kyrgyzstan, Bahrain, Nigeria, and Singapore, as states that practice “selective repression of religious groups.” Albania, Cambodia, Senegal, and Peru are joined in Chapter 6 as states which do not repress any religion. Whatever comparative value that may be claimed from the wide range of spatial, religious, and cultural variations of those cases is lost in the hegemony of the Christian/North Atlantic paradigm of this book as a whole. The ways in which the author chooses sets of countries to compare are vague, not well defined, and very broad in scope. For instance, the themes under which these four sets of countries are compared are incoherent even if we assume the same definition and significance of these themes in all four countries.5 This assumption is conceded here for only the sake of argument because it is difficult to justify or explain the meaning and significance of clerical appointments, religious education, and religious political parties for imperial Orthodox Christianity in Russia and the imperial province of Georgia with imperial Hanafi Sunni Ottoman Turkey and more than 3000 inhabited islands of the imperial province of Indonesia which came...