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Pakistan, as a (nominally) democratic nation, is probably not the best example of your average Islamic nation (most of which do not possess democratic forms of government).

In any case, my familiarity with non-Western cultures is rather limited, and therefore I didn't want to unintentionally comment on any others in my initial post.




When you say "islamic nation," are you referring to one with majority islamic citizens, in the same way that britain, america or sweden are "christian nations," or are you referring to islamic theocracies?

It seems you are referring to the latter, but you should be careful bandying around such terms. There are highly secular democracies with muslim populations, such as turkey.


Since I considered Pakistan to be an Islamic nation (as I stated in my previous post), I was clearly using the former definition.

And while it is not impossible for Muslim-majority nations to be secular and/or democratic, it's highly unusual. Moreover, going back to the origin of this discussion, even in secular Turkey, the recent conservative movement there resulted in the banning of pornography in 2004. If you know Turkish, you can read the law yourself here: http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/kanunlar/k5237.html


It's not unusual for a Muslim-majority nation to be secular and/or democratic. It seems odd to go just be the number of countries and disregard the population size. Population-wise, the largest of those countries are Indonesia (pop. 228m, 86% Muslim), Pakistan (172m, 97%) and Bangladesh (162m, 89%). Even if you do go by the numbers and give Bahrain (1m) the same weight as the large countries, the word "secular" pops up often in the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim-majority_countri...




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