A Muslim cleric has been arrested on charges of blasphemy and hate speech in Indonesia after his decision to allow women to preach and pray beside men sparked a backlash in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.
A Muslim cleric has been arrested on charges of blasphemy and hate speech in Indonesia after his decision to allow women to preach and pray beside men sparked a backlash in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.
It’s got a fascinating history, over 300 million Muslims and also home to over 300 religions. They have a long history of coexistence.
Islam spread to indonesia by trade and missionaries. They outnumber Arabs but still many people falsely assume all Muslims are Arab.
300 million Muslims? I still haven’t made it to Indonesia, I usually do my research on site when I travel. By “They outnumber Arabs”, do you mean that the 300 million Muslims in Indonesia number all Arab Muslims? Aren’t there like a billion?
Only 10% of Muslims are Arab, and there’s nearly 2 billion Muslims worldwide. It’s a common misconception.
Wow. Okay. So Islam started in the Middle East… I’ve never studied the demographics, so I’m just trying to put this together now with Indonesia being the largest majority Muslim country, so Islam started in the middle east but then it just exploded and it’s everywhere sort of distributed equally around the world?
Did that happen with other major religions? Cuz with Christianity, we have Italy, Europe, US, and then with Judaism we have Israel, Western Europe, US.
But with Judaism and Christianity the largest proportion of followers still follow a track from the area where the religion started, right?
Is that the same with Islam?
Well the Middle East has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the world (Saudi Arabia is 90% Muslim) but most Muslims are outside the Middle East, in Asia and Africa. (China has twice as many Muslims as Saudi.) The religion grew mainly through trade and missionaries.
That’s really interesting. I guess I just didn’t realize until now that the population of Indonesia was almost 8 times the size of Saudi Arabia. The more you know.