Slovakia adopts law to effectively block Islam from becoming an official state religion. The Parliament in Bratislava has approved a bill that effectively will prevent Islam from being registered as a recognized religion. The small central European country’s population is 5.4 million, 62 percent of which is declared Roman Catholic.
IB Times President-elect Donald Trump may have raised eyebrows when he called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., but he isn’t alone when it comes to politicians targeting Islam in an effort to limit religious freedoms. The parliament of predominantly anti-migrant Slovakia passed a law on Wednesday making it difficult for Islam to qualify as a recognized religion in the former Communist state, Reuters reported.
The law raised the number of adherents to a particular religion to 50,000 from 20,000 in order for the sect to receive state funding, operate its own schools and be considered an official religion by the Slovakian government. There are approximately 2,000 Muslims in Slovakia, where Prime Minister Robert Fico has said “Islam has no place” in the country.
With Wednesday’s legislation, passed easily by a two-thirds majority, Slovakia joined several other nations in attempting to impose limits on religious freedom. Neighboring Hungary, another reluctant European Union recipient of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, recently faced criticism from a prominent national Muslim group when a southern town banned mosque construction at the end of November.
A little more than a year earlier, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban received backlash after writing in an op-ed in a German newspaper that Muslims must be kept out of the country as a way to “keep Europe Christian.” In a more direct plea shortly after the editorial was published, Orban said at a news conference that Hungary has “a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country.”
Hungarian leader rebuked for saying Muslim migrants must be blocked ‘to keep Europe Christian.’ nyti.ms/1OfAlL7
Further east, the oppressed Muslim minority of Myanmar, known as the Rohingya, have dealt with not only a lack of official recognition of their religion, but, for the most part, a lack of citizenship as well. Myanmar Buddhists, who got fed up with their monks being slaughtered and their women being raped by Muslims are now trying to rid the country of the Rohingya Muslim population.
Like that of Slovakia, the government of Angola also does not formally recognize the Muslim religion. The majority Catholic southeast African nation has closed and even demolished several mosques over the past couple of years that it claimed were built without permission amid reports of violence and intimidation against women who wear the veil.
Nestled in the South Pacific — far from the refugee crisis stirring anti-Islam sentiment in much of Europe — predominantly-Christian Samoa’s National Council of Churches called on the prime minister in May to reevaluate the country’s constitutional religious freedom laws and potentially ban the Muslim faith. Muhammad Yahya, the leader of Samoa’s Muslim League said he didn’t expect his government to make such a move, as it would place Samoa’s prime minister in the same extremist league as Donald Trump. Fear of Islam drives proposal to change Samoa’s constitution
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