The world is living with a dangerous moral contradiction. In Europe, governments rush to condemn Islamophobia—often rightly—while in Asia and Africa, Muslim-majority states or Islamist movements persecute religious minorities with near impunity. The global conversation on religious freedom is deeply uneven: outrage when Muslims are targeted in Paris, silence when Hindus in Bangladesh or Christians in Sudan are hunted for their faith.

In September, nine mosques across greater Paris were defiled, each with a severed pig’s head placed at its door. France’s leaders called the acts “absolutely unacceptable,” insisting that no faith should live in fear. That moral clarity was right—and overdue. Yet the same principle rarely extends beyond Europe’s borders. When Hindus are driven from their homes in Bangladesh or churches are bombed in Sudan, few leaders raise their voices.

The contradiction isn’t merely rhetorical; it’s structural. It reveals how Western democracies, and often the international system they dominate, treat persecution as a domestic moral issue only when it suits their political geography.

The pattern is stark in Bangladesh. When Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted on August 5, 2024, her fall was supposed to open the way for democracy and accountability. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus formed an interim government that promised reform and calm. Instead, his rule has coincided with new waves of religious and political violence.

From August 2024 to mid-2025, at least 878 attacks on journalists were recorded, with 28 reporters arrested. The media climate mirrors the broader erosion of civic space. Islamist organizations such as Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh and Indifada Bangladesh have reemerged, staging rallies in Dhaka and Chattogram demanding a nationwide ban on the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), denouncing it as an “extremist Hindutva organization.”

What began as street agitation has turned deadly. Temples have been burned, ISKCON centers looted, and Hindu neighborhoods attacked. Violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in September followed a grim pattern: after a Bengali settler was killed, mobs torched Indigenous Jumma homes while security forces opened fire on protesters, killing at least four. Independent journalists remain barred from the region, leaving the truth buried with the victims.

Official gestures toward accountability have rung hollow. On October 9, Human Rights Watch noted that authorities had charged 28 people with torture and enforced disappearances—calling it “a step toward justice.” Yet weeks later, Hasina, now in exile, urged a boycott of national elections after her Awami League was banned. Her charge—that Bangladesh merely traded one authoritarianism for another—appears difficult to refute.

New laws have only deepened fear. The 2025 Cybersecurity Act criminalizes “offending religious sentiments” and has been weaponized against minorities. BUET student Shrinath Roy, arrested for Reddit comments, now stands as a symbol of how the judicial system itself has become a tool of intimidation.

The data are devastating. Since August 2024, 637 people have been lynched, 281 injured, and more than 2,400 attacks have been recorded against Hindus and Christians. The first two weeks after Hasina’s ouster alone saw 1,090 assaults on religious minorities. Such violence thrives not because of chaos, but because perpetrators trust that the state will look away.

Thousands of miles away, Sudan tells a parallel story. The persecution of Christians long predates the current civil war, but it has intensified since fighting broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the SAF, has leaned on Islamist factions once loyal to dictator Omar al-Bashir. Churches have been bombed in Khartoum and Bahri; worshippers killed in Wad Madani; congregations harassed in Shamaliya. Constitutional protections that briefly existed after Bashir’s fall have disappeared. Pastors are detained, churches shuttered, and Christians again forced to meet in secret.

Militias such as the Al-Bara’ ibn Malik Battalion and Sudan Shield Forces, many tied to Muslim Brotherhood networks, now operate with jihadist rhetoric and impunity. In the Nuba Mountains, there are reports of rape, child abductions, and campaigns of terror against Christian families. Humanitarian groups like the ICRC have been attacked, and aid routes cut off, leaving civilians trapped between famine and fear.

Darfur remains the darkest chapter. When the RSF seized El Fasher in October, fighters unleashed executions and filmed them for social media—elderly men shot dead, teenagers tortured in hospitals, families massacred in schools. It was cruelty performed for an audience, proof of conquest in a country where law has ceased to exist. No international body, and no faction of the Sudanese state, has meaningfully intervened.

Bangladesh and Sudan share no geography, yet their trajectories rhyme. Both are shaped by majoritarian politics that turn faith into a weapon and identity into a test of belonging. In Bangladesh, Islamist populism fills the vacuum of failed governance; in Sudan, a militarized Islamism seeks to sanctify war. In each, minorities—Hindus, Christians, Indigenous peoples—have become symbols of disloyalty and convenient scapegoats for national frustration.

The world’s selective outrage only reinforces the pattern. Western governments mobilize swiftly to denounce anti-Muslim hate crimes at home, but hesitate when the perpetrators are fellow Muslims or strategic partners abroad. The double standard fractures the moral foundation of global human rights: it suggests that persecution matters only when the victims fit within a Western frame of empathy.

This hierarchy of compassion fuels extremism. Islamist movements point to it as evidence that the West’s concern for human rights is political, not principled. Meanwhile, victims in Asia and Africa learn a bitter truth: international law offers no real sanctuary.

Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That warning echoes across Dhaka and Khartoum today. The persecution of minorities is not a side issue—it is a measure of whether societies emerging from conflict or corruption can build inclusive futures.

Defending the right to worship freely must not end at Europe’s borders. Condemning Islamophobia in Paris while ignoring anti-Hindu pogroms in Bangladesh or the bombing of churches in Sudan sends one message: some faiths deserve protection, others endurance.

True universality demands consistency. If the world believes in freedom of religion, it must defend it for all. Silence, as both Bangladesh and Sudan have shown, is not neutrality—it is permission.