The promise and threat of religious freedom

"In America, where we have a legal protection of equality under the law and it's already enshrined in the law that the government is not going to choose one religion over the other, I welcome religious actors in the public sphere," Jennifer Bryson, director of the Witherspoon Institute's Institute on Islam and Religious Freedom, remarked to a room full of lawyers, journalists and academics. 

The group had spent the morning listening to Georgtown University's Thomas F. Farr unpack different notions of religious freedom, including his own definition of the concept.

But Bryson's concern was very practical. Is it possible, she wondered, to encourage religious freedom in societies lacking well developed constitutional, legal protections without a single group coming to dominate the public square?

Professor Farr replied that you can't just - "Boom!" - have religious freedom.  The way forward, he believes, is to ask citizens themselves about the interests of the country involved.

"What do they see themselves wanting?" Farr asked. "I talked about that with Egypt.  We know…the Egyptians have said what they want.  What do the Saudis want? What does the Royal Family want but what do the Saudi people want?  What's realistic and try to work within that.  Religious freedom won't just emerge like a flower."

Featured lecturer Abdullah Saeed, who recently wrote about the impact of this year's Arab "spring" on freedom in Muslim-majority countries, believes that as the call for freedom advances, there is reason to be optimistic that religious freedom will increase as well. 

When asked why he feels what happened in Egypt will bode well for religious freedom Saeed remarked, "If you have a lot of political freedom, intellectual freedom, that is naturally going to have an impact on religious freedom because religion is also very closely connected to these.  If I have more personal freedom, that means my personal freedom covers freedom to believe in political issues, things, ideas, as well as religious things, ideas...I don't think you can actually separate them."

When asked about discrimination against Coptic Christians, Saeed replied he hopes the democratization process and freedoms it will usher in will result in those kinds of discrimination "going away."

"Coptic Christians are part of Egyptian society, and they're part of the revolution, too," said Saeed.  "You cannot really ignore a very large part of Egyptian society as you move toward the next level of your freedom.  So I hope this revolution brings a much greater sense of equality among Egyptian people, whether you're Christian or Muslim, not discriminated against because of your faith and I hope that that would be an essential part of their democratization agenda."

Saeed, when asked to assess Egypt's repression of religious freedom prior to the revolution, remarked, "Egypt is not like China, for instance. It's not like North Korea."