The Islamic Human Rights Deficit: Region, Not Religion, Is the Driver

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarly research, journalistic accounts, and popular discourses often portray Islam as detrimental to human rights. Governments in Muslim-majority countries are considered especially prone to violating bodily integrity protections, curtailing civil and political liberties, repressing women and LGBT people, and restricting religious freedoms. Using cross-national time-series data for a majority of the world’s countries, this article demonstrates that Islam per se is not responsible for human rights deficits in any of these domains. Simply being a Muslim-majority country is not associated with increased rights violations. Rather, human rights gaps are confined to Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa region and, in some cases, to Arab countries. Additional research to explain these patterns is warranted.