Originally Posted by
sycld
Well, you're acting as though democracy and liberalism are only restricted to Western nations. The fact is that nowadays the movement towards democracy and liberalism is a global movement. Nearly every nation on Earth has been pressured to at least give lip service to these ideals, and nations as diverse and far-flung as India, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, and Mali have either achieved very democratic and liberal government or are truly striving to do so.
The Middle East is the only region of the world with such uniformly strong resistance to modern ideals and such strong and cohesive movements to retain the archaic institutions and values that oppose liberalism and democracy. All this is because of the embrace of fundamentalist Islam.
As a matter of comparison, let's look at India versus Pakistan. Until 1947, India was a unified colony under the British. Thanks to that bastard Jinnah and Gandhi's willingness to bend to his demands, Pakistan became a separate republic from India especially for all of the subcontinent's Muslims. Most of India's Muslims moved up to Pakistan, and most of Pakistan's non-Muslims moved to India. It involved the displacement of 17.9 million people, the largest and fastest transfer of people in human history.
Now let's see how each of these states evolved. India is strongly democratic and strongly secular, with a great deal of respect for human rights, though of course there are large human rights problems that still persist. Nonetheless, even villagers have a sense of empowerment and use the political leverage afforded to them by the government to benefit themselves and their community. In addition, liberal thought and tolerance is radiating out from the urban centers and finding its way into the more rural parts of India. And, as always, people of all religions, both Hindu and non-Hindu alike, more or less live next to each other in peace.
On the other hand, Pakistan's movement for democracy has never really gotten off the ground. The central government cannot really exercise control over the population, much of which is militant and fundamentalist, and the western part of the state has become a safe haven for the Taliban. The central courts routinely and unselfconsciously make audacious decisions that flagrantly violate human rights with little or no explanation given except that it is what is demanded of Islam (according to them, anyways.)
Why is Pakistan, which is ~97% Muslim, so different from India, which is ~80.5% Hindu?
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