{"id":37716,"date":"2011-02-15T12:27:11","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T20:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=9937"},"modified":"2011-02-23T10:33:36","modified_gmt":"2011-02-23T18:33:36","slug":"culture-differences-matter-even-within-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/15\/culture-differences-matter-even-within-islam\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture differences matter (even within Islam)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been keeping track of events in the Arab world only from a distance. There&#8217;s been a lot of excitement on <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/02\/culture-differences-matter-even-within-islam\/twitter.com\">twitter<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/\">Facebook<\/a>. Since I&#8217;m not an unalloyed enthusiast for democracy I&#8217;ve not joined in in the exultation. But I&#8217;m very concerned at what I perceive are unrealistic assumptions and false correspondences. This is a big issue because the public is <strong>very<\/strong> ignorant of world history and geography. For example, I was listening to a radio show where <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Roger_Cohen\">Roger Cohen<\/a> was a guest. Cohen covers the Middle East, so he is familiar with many of the issues to a much greater depth than is feasible for the &#8220;Average Joe.&#8221;  In response to a caller who was an ethnic Egyptian American and a Coptic Christian who was concerned about possible persecution of religious minorities Cohen pointed to Turkey, which is ruled by Islamists, and has &#8220;many&#8221; Christians. His tone was of dismissal and frustration. And that was that.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look more closely. About 5-10% of Egyptians are <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Demographics_of_Egypt#Religions\"> Christian<\/a>, with most estimates being closer to 10 than 5. In contrast, the non-Muslim minority in Turkey numbers <em>at most<\/em> a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Religion_in_Turkey\">few percent<\/a>, with ~1% often given as &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been keeping track of events in the Arab world only from a distance. There&#8217;s been a lot of excitement on twitter and Facebook. Since I&#8217;m not an unalloyed enthusiast for democracy I&#8217;ve not joined in in the exultation. But I&amp;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,447,406,14,11,13,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democracy","category-egypt","category-international-affairs","category-islam","category-politics","category-religion","category-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37716"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38000,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37716\/revisions\/38000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}