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There are places in the world where violence does not need religion.
And then there are places where religion makes it sharper.
Recent reports of attacks on Christian communities in parts of Africa—especially in Nigeria—have circulated widely. The language online is immediate and absolute: slaughter, persecution, genocide. Some of those claims oversimplify a complicated reality. The violence there is not one thing. It is insurgency, land conflict, criminality, and state weakness layered together in unstable ways.
But that is not the same as saying religion is irrelevant.
It is not.
In conflicts where identity is already strained, religion does something specific. It does not always cause the violence. It clarifies it. It names the sides. It tells participants who they are, who the enemy is, and—critically—why the conflict matters beyond survival or territory.
That shift matters.
A dispute over land can end in compromise. A struggle over resources can be negotiated, delayed, or abandoned. But when a conflict is framed in religious terms, it acquires a different gravity. The stakes move from material to moral. Victory is no longer just advantage. It becomes justification.
Religion does not create the blade. It tells you where to aim it.
This is why the same region can produce multiple kinds of violence at once. Armed groups with explicitly Islamist aims may target Christians as Christians. Local conflicts between herders and farmers may fall along religious lines and then harden under that framing. Criminal actors may adopt the language of faith because it organizes fear and loyalty more efficiently than profit alone.
The result is not a single, unified campaign. It is something less coherent and, in some ways, more dangerous: a landscape where violence can be justified in more than one register at once.
This is where outside observers often get it wrong.
To say “this is purely religious persecution” is to miss the structural drivers that sustain the conflict. To say “religion has nothing to do with it” is to ignore how meaning is assigned once violence begins. Both errors flatten the reality into something easier to argue about and harder to understand.
Religion, at its most potent, is a system for organizing meaning. In peaceful conditions, that can produce cohesion, charity, and restraint. In unstable conditions, it can do the opposite. It can elevate conflict, sanctify grievance, and make compromise feel like betrayal.
That is not unique to any one faith tradition. It is a property of belief when it becomes fused with identity under pressure.
The violence does not need religion to begin.
But once religion enters the frame, it changes what the violence is for.
And that is when it becomes harder to end.
There are sermons that call men to humility, mercy, and repentance. Then there are sermons like this one: small, cruel, and drunk on power.In August 2025, a sermon by Taliban cleric Mahmood Zakeri circulated widely online. In it, he declared that a woman has no right to walk outside with both eyes open, and that if one eye remains uncovered it may be used only to watch the path, not to look around. He also reaffirmed the rule that women must leave home only with a male guardian.
That is not holiness. It is not modesty. It is the religious language of domination.
The point is not simply to cover women. It is to reduce them. A woman may see, but not look. She may move, but not appear. She may exist, but only under supervision. This is what tyranny looks like when it becomes intimate. It does not stop at law or force. It enters the body, the face, the eyes, and the terms of ordinary presence.
The Taliban’s rule over women has followed this logic from the start. Women and girls have been pushed out of school, work, and public life. They have been made dependent, restricted, and vulnerable by design. This sermon matters because it states the regime’s purpose with unusual bluntness. The goal is not public morality. The goal is female submission.
And this is where religion is being degraded along with women.
Islam is being used here not as a path to righteousness, but as a warrant for male control. Scripture and clerical authority are being conscripted to make domination sound sacred. That is one of the oldest abuses of religion: to take what should humble the strong and turn it into a weapon against the weak.
No serious moral society should accept that disguise. A woman is not a source of pollution to be hidden, escorted, monitored, and diminished. She is not male property. She is not a household object under external management. She is a human being. Any system that denies that is evil, whatever language it wraps around itself.
There is something especially repellent in the pettiness of it. Afghanistan has been battered by poverty, war, loss, and instability. Women there have already lost freedom, education, work, and legal protection. Faced with all that suffering, this cleric’s great moral concern is whether a woman may use both eyes.
That is not spiritual seriousness. It is sadism dressed as virtue.
When religion rots into ideology, this is what happens. The faith is no longer used to discipline pride or protect the vulnerable. It is used to flatter male authority and train women into fear. It becomes less a way to honor God than a system for breaking human beings into obedience.
A healthy religion reminds men that they are not God. The Taliban uses religion to tell them they may act like gods over women.
If you missed what I’m talking about please look at the post from this Sunday’s The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Why Classical Islam and Western Liberalism Face Deep Tensions.
1) “You’re Confusing Islam with Islamism. The Problem Is Politics, Not the Religion.”
Steelman: Islamism is a modern political project. The ugly stuff is authoritarianism in religious costume. Islam as faith is diverse and reformable. Reformers exist. So don’t blame the religion for the politics.
My answer: The distinction is real. It just doesn’t rescue the claim.
Modern Islamism didn’t invent the collision with liberalism. It accelerated it. The collision is older, because it sits inside a legal tradition that treats divine law as public law, not private devotion.
Start with the liberal baseline: your right to change your beliefs without state punishment. The ICCPR treats freedom of thought, conscience, and religion as including the freedom “to have or to adopt” a religion of one’s choice, and bars coercion that impairs that freedom.[1] Yet apostasy laws still exist as state law in a chunk of the world. Pew counted apostasy laws in 22 countries in 2019.[2] That’s not “Islamism only.” That’s a standing fact about legal systems and what they’re willing to criminalize.
Then there are the asymmetries that aren’t modern inventions at all. The Qur’an’s inheritance rule that the male share is “twice that of the female” is explicit.[3] So is the debt-contract witness standard that requires one man and two women in that context.[4] You can contextualize these. You can argue for limited scope. You can try to reinterpret. But you can’t pretend the hard edges arrived in the 20th century.
So yes: reform is possible. But the obstacle is not merely “bad regimes.” It’s the weight of inherited jurisprudence plus institutions that treat that inheritance as binding.
If you want a clean test, use this: Is conscience sovereign? Including the right to leave the faith without legal penalty. Where the answer is no, liberalism exists on permission, not principle.
2) “Western Civilization Has Its Own History of Religious Violence and Oppression.”
Steelman: Christianity did crusades, inquisitions, heresy executions, and legal oppression. Liberalism took centuries. So singling out Islam is selective and hypocritical. Islam may simply be earlier in the same process.
My answer: Fair comparison. Now use it properly.
The West didn’t become liberal because Christians became nicer. It became liberal because religious authority was structurally pushed out of sovereignty over law and conscience. That’s the real lesson.
If “Islam can modernize” is your claim, then define modernization. It means a public order in which equal citizenship is non-negotiable and the right to belief and exit is protected in law.[1] You don’t get there by vibes. You get there by institutions.
Tunisia’s 2014 constitution is a useful example precisely because it shows the tension in plain language. It says the state is “guardian of religion,” while also guaranteeing “freedom of conscience and belief.”[5] That’s the struggle in one paragraph: which sovereignty rules when the two conflict?
Morocco’s family-law reforms are another example of the same dynamic. Over time, reforms have expanded women’s rights in areas like guardianship and divorce.[6] But even current reform proposals acknowledge a hard limit: inheritance rules grounded in Islamic law remain, with workarounds proposed through gifts and wills rather than direct replacement.[7] Again, that’s not a moral condemnation. It’s the mechanism. Reform runs into inherited authority.
So yes: the Western analogy shows change is possible. It also shows change is not automatic. It is conflict, choices, and enforcement.
3) “You’re Ignoring Diversity in the Muslim World and Overgeneralizing.”
Steelman: Nearly two billion adherents across many cultures and legal systems. Outcomes vary widely. Some Muslim-majority societies are relatively pluralistic. Sweeping statements are unfair.
My answer: Diversity is real. It just doesn’t settle the core question.
Different outcomes prove the future isn’t predetermined. They don’t prove the underlying tension disappears. In practice, “moderation” usually correlates with one thing: how far the state limits religious jurisdiction over public law.
Indonesia is the standard example. Its founding philosophy, Pancasila, is explicitly framed as a unifying civic ideology with principles including belief in one God, deliberative democracy, and social justice.[8] That civic framing matters. It can restrain sectarian rule. But it doesn’t end the conflict.
Indonesia’s newer criminal code debates show how quickly “public morality” and “religious insult” can become tools against liberty. Reuters’ explainer on the code flagged concerns over provisions related to blasphemy and other speech constraints.[9] Human Rights Watch argued the updated code expanded blasphemy provisions and warned about harms to rights, including religious freedom.[10] Reuters has also reported concrete blasphemy prosecutions, including a comedian jailed for jokes about the name Muhammad.[11]
So yes: diversity exists. Outcomes differ. But the recurring fault line remains: whether the state treats conscience and equal citizenship as the top rule, or treats religious law as a superior jurisdiction that liberalism must negotiate with.
Closing
The best objections don’t erase the problem. They refine it.
The conflict is not “Muslims are bad.” That’s a cheap and stupid sentence. The conflict is structural: a comprehensive religious-legal tradition claiming public authority collides with a political order grounded in sovereignty of individual conscience.[1]
You don’t solve that conflict by saying “it’s just politics.” You don’t solve it by reciting Western sins as a deflection. You don’t solve it by pointing to diversity and declaring victory.
A liberal society survives by enforcing liberal public order: one civil law for all, equal rights as the baseline, and no religious veto over belief, speech, or exit.[1] If you refuse to name that clearly, you don’t get “coexistence.” You get drift. And drift always has a direction.
References (URLs)
[1] OHCHR — International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 18
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights
[2] Pew Research Center — Four in ten countries… had blasphemy laws in 2019 (includes apostasy law count) (Jan 25, 2022)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/25/four-in-ten-countries-and-territories-worldwide-had-blasphemy-laws-in-2019-2/
[3] Qur’an 4:11 (inheritance shares) — Quran.com
https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/11-14
[4] Qur’an 2:282 (witness standard in debt contracts) — Quran.com
https://quran.com/en/al-baqarah/282
[5] Tunisia 2014 Constitution, Article 6 — Constitute Project
https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Tunisia_2014
[6] Carnegie Endowment — Morocco Family Law (Moudawana) Reform: Governance in the Kingdom (Jul 28, 2025)
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/07/morocco-family-law-moudawana-reform-governance?lang=en
[7] Reuters — Morocco proposes family law reforms to improve women’s rights (Dec 24, 2024)
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/morocco-proposes-family-law-reforms-improve-womens-rights-2024-12-24/
[8] Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pancasila
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pancasila
[9] Reuters — Explainer: Why is Indonesia’s new criminal code so controversial? (Dec 6, 2022)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/why-is-indonesias-new-criminal-code-so-controversial-2022-12-06/
[10] Human Rights Watch — Indonesia: New Criminal Code Disastrous for Rights (Dec 8, 2022)
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/08/indonesia-new-criminal-code-disastrous-rights
[11] Reuters — Indonesian court jails comedian for joking about the name Muhammad (Jun 11, 2024)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/indonesian-court-jails-comedian-joking-about-name-muhammad-2024-06-11/
Western civilization, in its liberal form, rests on a remarkable set of principles: that religious belief should be voluntary, that individual conscience is sovereign, and that the rights of the person take precedence over both state and religious authority. These ideas are not universal human defaults; they are hard-won cultural and philosophical achievements, shaped by the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and centuries of political struggle. They are not shared equally by all religious or ideological systems.
Classical Islam, in its orthodox jurisprudential tradition, is not solely a private spiritual faith. It is also a comprehensive legal and political system (sharia) that historically integrated religious authority with governance. From its earliest centuries, Islam expanded through a combination of military conquest, trade, persuasion, and migration. While conquest played a significant role in some regions, conversion in others—such as Southeast Asia—was often gradual and voluntary. The fusion of religious and political authority remains influential in many interpretations, though its application varies widely across the Muslim world today.
One area of tension concerns apostasy. In traditional interpretations of several major schools of Islamic law, leaving the faith has been treated as a serious offense, sometimes punishable by death. This stands in contrast to the Western commitment to absolute freedom of belief and conscience. However, enforcement differs greatly: many Muslim-majority countries no longer prescribe capital punishment for apostasy alone, and reformist scholars argue that the Qur’an itself emphasizes no compulsion in religion (2:256) and that punishment should be deferred to the afterlife.Religious pluralism presents another challenge. Historical Islamic polities often extended protected status to Jews, Christians, and sometimes others (“People of the Book”), allowing communal autonomy in exchange for taxation (jizya) and certain restrictions. This system offered more tolerance than many contemporary societies of the time, yet it was hierarchical rather than egalitarian. Full equality before the law—a core Western principle—has not always been realized in states governed by traditional sharia interpretations, though modern reforms in countries such as Tunisia, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates have moved toward greater legal equality.
The status of women reveals further differences. In some countries applying strict interpretations of sharia, women face legal and social restrictions on dress, travel, marriage, inheritance, and testimony. Recent examples include compulsory veiling enforcement in Iran and severe restrictions under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. These practices draw from certain classical readings of Qur’anic verses and hadith. At the same time, it is worth noting that seventh-century Islamic law granted women rights to inheritance, divorce, and property ownership that were progressive compared to many pre-modern societies. Today, women’s rights vary enormously across the Muslim world—from relatively egalitarian frameworks in Indonesia and Tunisia to highly restrictive ones elsewhere—and Muslim feminist scholars actively work to reinterpret texts in light of contemporary values of equality.These differences are not simply “extremist misinterpretations.” Many stem from longstanding and mainstream interpretations of sacred texts and tradition.
Yet Islam is not monolithic: it encompasses a spectrum of thought, from rigid literalism to progressive reformism, and interpretations evolve over time and place.None of this is an indictment of Muslims as individuals. Millions of Muslims live peacefully and prosperously in Western societies, often embracing liberal values while maintaining their faith. Their successful integration is made possible precisely because Western secular frameworks limit the political reach of any religion—protecting both believers and non-believers alike.Recognizing the genuine tensions between certain traditional interpretations of Islam and core principles of Western liberalism is not intolerance; it is intellectual honesty.
At the same time, acknowledging Islam’s internal diversity, historical context, and capacity for reform prevents sweeping generalizations. A mature conversation requires holding both truths: deep differences exist, yet dialogue, mutual accommodation, and individual freedom remain possible. A civilization that clearly understands its own founding principles—without either naivety or hostility—is best equipped to preserve them while extending hospitality to those who share its public square.
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