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The boundaries between secularism, democracy, pluralism, and religious diversity cannot easily be demarcated. Bringing democratic and secular values together with religious pluralism, accommodating different religious communities, and acknowledging individual rights is a great challenge for many societies. In parallel, religious education (RE) in state schools has been a controversial and unresolved issue. On both sides of Cyprus, RE is organized in a mono-confessional way: while the Christian Orthodox content of RE is linked with Greek national identity in the Greek Cypriot South, Sunni Islamic RE is linked with the Turkish national identity in the Turkish Cypriot North. On both sides of the island, the compulsory and mono-confessional characters of RE, as well as the national curricula and textbooks that are used, are a source of conflict. Within this context, this article explores the way RE (Orthodox Christian, Sunni Islamic) is organized in Cyprus and to what extent this may lead to an infringement of the freedom of religion and freedom of education.

The classical liberal concern for freedom of religion today intersects with concerns of equality and respect for minorities, of what might be loosely termed 'multiculturalism'. When these minorities were primarily understood in terms of ethno-racial identities, multiculturalism and freedom of religion were seen at that time as quite separate policy and legal fields. As ethno-religious identities have become central to multiculturalism (and to rejections of multiculturalism), specifically in Western Europe in relation to its growing Muslim settlements, not only have the two fields intersected, new approaches to religion and equality have emerged. We consider the relationship between freedom of religion and ethno-religious equality, or alternatively, religion as faith or conscience and religion as group identity. We argue that the normative challenges raised by multicultural equality and integration cannot be met by individualist understandings of religion and freedom, by the idea of state neutrality, nor by laicist understandings of citizenship and equality. Hence, a re-thinking of the place of religion in public life and of religion as a public good and a re-configuring of political secularism in the context of religious diversity is necessary. We explore a number of pro-diversity approaches that suggest what a respectful and inclusive egalitarian governance of religious diversity might look like, and consider what might be usefully learnt from other countries, as Europe struggles with a deeper diversity than it has known for a long time. The moderate secularism that has historically evolved in Western Europe is potentially accommodative of religious diversity, just as it came to be of Christian churches, but it has to be 'multiculturalised'.

Supreme Court decisions of 1963 (Sherbert v. Verner) & 1972 (Wisconsin v. Yoder) expanded the scope of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment further than ever before in US judicial history. Civil authorities may now intervene in religious activities only when compelling state interests are threatened. Examined are areas of health in which religious attitudes have conflicted with state interests. Included are the handling of poisonous snakes & drinking of poison in religious worship, the use of prohibited drugs in worship, compulsory blood transfusions for those who object to them on theological grounds, & the application of public health laws where medicine is rejected by theology. These instances suggest that religious liberty in the US can never be unfettered, even though it is exalted. Still, governmental intervention in religious practices must be exceptional & not customary. Modified HA.

The Council of the European Union recently released its Strategic Framework on Human Rights and Democracy, which included freedom of religion or belief in a list of 36 desired outcomes. The timing is good, as countries around the world are grappling with religion/state questions and the role of religious freedom for minority religious communities and dissenting members of the majority faith. Freedom of religion or belief stands at the crux of these issues, yet the Strategic Framework risks losing the religious freedom among the list of other worthy issues. By learning from the experience of the United States in its decade of religious freedom work, the European Union can jump start its efforts and ensure they have impact during this time of global transition.

The 2011 "Arab Spring" arouses, in Western societies, expectations that often do not take into account the real context of the Islamic countries. As a matter of fact, the Western Secular tradition frequently obstructs the understanding of the strong religious feeling that pervades the social reality of the Islamic world, even if in a non-uniform way: the modernists, traditionalists and fundamentalists' school of thoughts have a different idea of the modern Islamic State. In order to clarify this diversity, the history of the relationships between State and Islam, the inter-relationship (in a degree that is unthinkable in Western culture) between State, religion and law and the consequent different perception of single individual behaviours have to be examined. This encounter-conflict with the Western political perspective became real in the Islamic States through the imposition of the Western law during the colonial period and – in the opposite direction – is taking place, today, in Europe through the increasing immigration of Islamic believers. The provision of concordats (a potential solution with other monotheistic religions) is not possible with the Islamic communities, because Islam does not take into consideration a hierarchically organized ecclesiastical structure and, therefore, the Western States cannot find a single and official interlocutor. This way, within each individual Western State, a frequently difficult coexistence between Western and Islamic States is growing, a coexistence that is leading to new forms of legal pluralism. On an international relations level, the economic difference between the Western States and those who took part in the "Arab Spring" make it difficult for these last countries to promptly build up a modern State. The potential models range from Iranian theocracy to Turkish Secularism, with innumerous intermediate solutions. Today, the tendency seems to go towards an Islamic State, as the Pakistani constitutional evolution shows: but any prediction is questionable, because the transformation process that started with the Arab Spring is just beginning. Finally, the Western constitution model struggles with the rigor of the Islamic religion that does not admit Muslim conversion to another religion. Whoever abandons Islam commits the crime of apostasy that the Coranic law punishes with death. The fundamental right of freedom of religion becomes, this way, an insurmountable obstacle for the introduction of a Western-style constitution in a State whose population is mainly Islamic.

n world media the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has been reported most in the recent past regarding the news relating slow moving peace process and discrimination with religious minorities. They are facing problems regarding the protection of their rights and policies formulated for them but did not implement in right way. Majority of the population is based upon Muslims but numbers of non-Muslims are also the citizens of Pakistan. Constitution of Pakistan guarantees of equal rights for all citizens regardless of their religion, race, language, gender and area. The research explores the worth of minorities by ideology of Pakistan. It discusses the proportion of minorities in Pakistan and their issues. It attempts to diagnose the hindrances in the way of religious minorities and factors associated with them. It elaborates the amendments and policies for protection of their rights passed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan whether they are applied in real sense or not. To what extent, Religious minorities in Pakistan enjoy the freedom to put into practice their religion and follow their cultural traditions and customs