Author: Hannah Wallace

The beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen-born teenager hit France particularly hard and, again, brought to the fore the long-running debate on “French values” and the place of Muslims in the French Republic. An attack several weeks later on a church in Nice, in which three people were killed, further inflamed tensions in …

At the end of 2018, a majority of Ireland’s population voted to remove the country’s blasphemy law from its constitution. The debate around the issue provided a very public reminder that such laws still exist in Europe. According to a 2017 report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), seventy-one countries have blasphemy …

The God Delusion is big in Saudi Arabia. Three million copies of Richard Dawkins’s bible of atheism were downloaded in the kingdom—one of twelve Muslim-majority states where the statute books prescribe the death penalty for apostasy. It is difficult to gain an accurate estimate of the number of atheists in Saudi. According to a 2012 …

Turkey’s secular education system is under threat. According to a 2018 Washington Post article, an education official called for all school children to be taken to local mosques for morning prayers before lessons. While it may be a seemingly incongruous demand in a country known for its secular constitution, it represents growing confidence on the …