Amidst mass protests in Istanbul last week, Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan accused demonstrators of stoking sectarian violence by attacking a woman who was wearing a headscarf and tearing it away. The share of countries where harassment of women over religious dress has more than doubled in recent years. Read more.

Weekly Numbers are typically drawn from Pew Research reports on the extent to which governments and societies around the world impinge on religious beliefs and practices. Any opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Pew Research Center or its funders. - Brian J. Grim

This 10-question Weekly Number quiz tests your knowledge about international religious freedom and its measurement against the facts. Take the quiz!

The entry of Lebanon's Hezbollah into the Syrian civil war is a fresh example of how religious hostilities cross borders.

But Hezbollah's activities reach far beyond its own neighborhood. The BBC reports that an armory belonging to Hezbollah was discovered this past week in northern Nigeria. Read more.

Muslim public opinion varies significantly on how free people of other religions are to practice their faiths when a country's level of government restrictions on religion is considered.

In countries with high government restrictions on religion, substantially fewer Muslims reported that people of other religions were very free to practice their faiths. Read more.

In São Paulo, Brazil - the western hemisphere's most populous city at 20 million - government, business, legal and academic institutions examined international religious freedom.

The festival noted that three quarters of the world's people live in countries with high restrictions on religion. Read more.

Restrictions on religious freedom in North Korea - which external observers rate as among the world's most severe - cannot be rated by the Pew Research Center because independent, on-the-ground observers are kept out of Kim Jong-un's secretive regime. Read the details.

Rising From the Dead
(June 10, 2013)

A passer-by overheard the uproar
over a strange occurrence the other day. She said the commotion was due to the healing of a young lad who is now at play. ... read more.

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings reportedly has  indicated that his older brother was the mastermind of the attack. CNN reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators that his brother, Tamerlan, was motivated by jihadist thought and the idea that Islam is under attack. Read the details.

Several Egyptians including 4 Christians and a Muslim were killed in sectarian clashes just outside of Cairo on Saturday, April 6, 2013. Such confrontations reportedly have increased in Egypt since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Read the details.

Commenting on last week's election of Pope Francis, the Economist states that the Holy See stubbornly defends religious freedom. In fact, religious freedom was formally spelled out as a Catholic doctrine when Pope Paul VI promulgated the declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, in 1965.*

My recent TEDx Talk notes that the religiously unaffiliated account for about one-in-six (16%) people worldwide.

What I did not mention was that 76% of the religiously unaffiliated are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region (see map). The remainder are in Europe (12%), North America (5%), Latin America-Caribbean (4%), sub-Saharan Africa (2%), and the Middle East-North Africa (less than 1%). Read more.

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf arrived in Karachi yesterday - where he faces Taliban death threats - saying he has "come to save Pakistan." A recent Pew Research study finds that Pakistan has the highest level of social hostilities involving religion of any country. Read the details.

As Chinese New Year begins on Feb. 10, 2013, some 640 million people of all ages are affiliated with religion in China. Just three decades ago, few researchers even within mainland China knew whether religion had survived the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) initiated by Chairman Mao Zedong. It is clear now, however, that religion not only survived but that hundreds of millions of Chinese today have some religious faith. Read more.

A series of bombings struck Baghdad and towns south of the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing and wounding scores in areas that are home to mostly Muslim Shiites. (In the AP photo, a victim of a bomb lies wounded at a hospital in Baghdad, Friday, March 1, 2013). Read more, including summary of the extent of sectarian violence worldwide.

Three-quarters of the world’s people live in countries with high government restrictions on religion or high social hostilities involving religion, according to the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Incidents in 2012 have drawn international attention to laws and policies prohibiting blasphemy and apostasy. Read more.

A recent study by the Pew Forum found that regulations on the wearing of religious symbols increased globally between mid-2007 and mid-2010. In mid-2010, religious attire and other symbols were regulated in 57 countries (29%), up from 21 countries (11%) in mid-2007. Read more.

Check out maps created as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. 

In one-in-three countries worldwide (34%), some level of government limits proselytizing - sharing about one's faith in an attempt to get another person to join the faith.

Religion-related terrorism increased globally between mid-2007 and mid-2010. In mid-2010, religion-related terrorist groups operated in 73 countries (37%), up from 60 countries (30%) in mid-2007. Read more.

The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the 21st Century shows that, contrary to popular opinion, ensuring religious freedom for all reduces violent religious persecution and conflict. Read more ...

"The Price of Freedom Denied [has] ... the technical sophistication of a NASA camera photographing Earth." -  The Times Literary Supplement

Read more Reviews of The Price of Freedom Denied

- One day the kitchen decided to leave the house ...
- Cause for alarm ...
- We'll die without pizza! ...
- I long for the days when I grew wild and free ...
- What word, what art, what song conveys the contents of a sigh ...

* My poetry sprouted in China, grew in Siberia and matured in Saudi Arabia. But why does it rhyme?!

Religious Persecution in Cross-National Context

Worldwide, 84% of people identify with a religious group, according to a new demographic study by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life.