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In many contexts today it is clear that religious minorities will face escalating discrimination and persecution. The reason is simple: threatened political elites often seek support or attempt to demobilize opposition by reframing secular conflicts as religious conflicts in a process of religious outbidding. Religious outbidding has led not only to intensified discrimination in employment, worship, and education, but to large-scale violence, including civil war. In Muslim-majority countries, elites are increasing relying on two options to bolster their credibility: 1) introducing and intensifying shari'a law; and then (2) scapegoating those they deemed as threats to their vision of the role of religion in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the contemporary political conflicts in Muslim-majority countries are said to pit modern secularists against the “backward” Islamists. However an important stream of contemporary Muslim thought—critical-progressive Muslim thought—refuses to accept either a hegemony of Western secularism or a hegemony of Islamist fundamentalism. Critical-progressive Muslim scholar-activists are reinterpreting the normative teachings of the Muslim worldview and developing a distinctive third-way approach. There are several key political and policy ramifications of this stream of thought, including a robust commitment to religious freedom, but within Islamic terms, not terms dictated by non-Muslim Westerners preoccupied with their own security interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the word, issues of religion-state relations have long loomed large, in part because of zig-zag shifts in this country's politics and associated challenges for religious tolerance, social freedoms, and citizenship. Although it is only in the past decade that research on Indonesia has been explicitly reframed in relation to religious freedom, issues directly relevant to the topic have long figured in studies of Indonesian politics, constitutionalism, and religious violence. The significance of this research lies in the way in which it shows that research must take into account competing models of human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]