Home›The Near East and Egypt›Modern AreaBrowse ByModern AreaThis page groups sacred regions by the present-day country or countries they actually fall inside. Wikipedia notes that the Holy Land "today ... chiefly overlaps with the combined areas of Israel and parts of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Palestine." Browsing by modern-area lets a visitor find every sacred region that falls inside the same present-day country.FactsModern AreaSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Modern AreaFilter Results5 entriesApostasy or Blasphemy LawAllApostasy carries no article of its own in Iran's 2013 Islamic Penal Code. Article 220 of the Code instead directs judges to Article 167 of the Constitution, which requires a ruling drawn from authoritative Islamic sources and fatwa wherever the Code is silent. Because most fatwas hold that apostasy is punishable by death, this uncodified route lets a court impose a death sentence for apostasy despite no written statute naming the offense. (1)Iraq's 1969 Penal Code, still in force, punishes publicly insulting a religion's rituals or inciting contempt for it under Article 372, with a maximum sentence of three years' imprisonment or a fine, increased where the act involves repetition, public dissemination or mass media. Iraq has no codified apostasy law: a Muslim who converts away from Islam faces no criminal charge under the penal code, though Iraq's Islamic-law-based personal status code can affect a convert's inheritance and custody rights, and family or tribal retaliation is a documented risk the criminal law does not address. Enforcement of Article 372 and adjacent "immoral content" provisions has intensified since the early 2020s, with courts and security agencies pursuing dozens of prosecutions against social media users, actors and journalists accused of insulting Islam or Shia religious authorities, a pattern rights monitors describe as a de facto expansion of blasphemy enforcement beyond the statute's original scope. (1)Penal Code Article 98(f), added by a 1981 amendment after the Al Zawya Al Hamra sectarian violence and itself amended by Law 147 of 2006, criminalizes exploiting religion to spread extremist ideas or to hold in contempt any of the three heavenly religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, or a sect belonging to one of them. It carries six months to five years imprisonment or a fine of 500 to 1,000 Egyptian pounds, and has been used against religious minorities, minority Muslim sects and atheists. (1)Saudi Arabia has no single codified penal statute for apostasy; it is treated as a hudud offense under uncodified Hanbali fiqh as applied by the courts, traditionally carrying the death penalty, though U.S. State Department reporting records no confirmed state execution for apostasy alone in recent years. Blasphemy and insulting Islam, the monarchy or the state are separately criminalized, including under the 2014 Law on Combating Terrorism Crimes and Financing (which has been used to prosecute speech offenses) and under general Sharia-based criminal practice, with penalties ranging from lengthy imprisonment and flogging to, in the most severe interpretations, death. (1)Turkey criminalizes blasphemy through Article 216, paragraph 3 of the Penal Code (Law No. 5237), which punishes a person who openly insults the religious values of a section of the public with six months to one year of imprisonment where the act is capable of disturbing the public peace. The provision names no specific religion, but the Venice Commission finds it applied in practice to protect the state-recognized Sunni religious establishment rather than religion in general. Turkey has no apostasy law; leaving Islam carries no criminal penalty. Article 216(3) is frequently charged alongside Article 299 (insulting the president) against musicians, actors and government critics accused of mocking Islam or state-sanctioned religious symbols, and USCIRF has tracked a rise in such prosecutions since the mid-2010s as politically motivated rather than confined to genuine public-order concerns. (1)Ban or Official WatchlistAllEgypt has banned the Baha'i Faith since Presidential Decree 263 of 1960, which ordered every Baha'i center and forum closed and its property confiscated, none of which has been restored; the same year a Ministry of Social Affairs decree deregistered the local Watch Tower Society branch, ending the legal activity of the Jehovah's Witnesses nationwide and confiscating their property as well. Both bans remain in force more than six decades later. (1)Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council Law 105 of 1970, enacted under the Ba'athist government, bans the practice of the Baha'i Faith outright and prescribes up to ten years' imprisonment for adherents. The ban remains on the national books today, having reduced Iraq's Baha'i community to an estimated 2,000 people, though the Kurdistan Regional Government does not enforce it and recognizes the Baha'i Faith within its territory. (1)The Baha'i Faith is not legally recognized in Iran, and its adherents face systematic legal, educational and economic restriction; Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian minorities, by contrast, hold reserved seats in parliament. (1)The Secretary of State designated Saudi Arabia a Country of Particular Concern on 29 December 2023, one of twelve states named in that round, under the International Religious Freedom Act for having engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom. (1)Turkey does not recognize cemevis, the houses of worship of the Alevi community, as places of worship, and treats Alevism itself as a cultural tradition within Sunni Islam rather than a distinct faith; the government also obstructs the registration of Alevi, Protestant and Jehovah's Witness houses of worship and the residence of their foreign clergy. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has recommended the State Department place Turkey on its Special Watch List for these violations. (1)CapitalAllAnkara (1)Baghdad (1)Cairo (1)Riyadh (1)Tehran (1)Concordat BasisAllEgypt has no concordat with the Holy See. Its instrument runs domestically: Law No. 80 of 2016, the Law on the Construction and Renovation of Churches, passed by the House of Representatives on 30 August 2016 and ratified by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, replaced the 1856 Ottoman-era Hamayouni Decree's requirement of a presidential permit for every church repair with a streamlined governor-level licensing process and a path to legalize churches already built without one. Coptic legislators and rights groups judged the reform limited in practice: governors have often neither approved nor rejected applications within the law's own four-month window, leaving petitions in indefinite limbo. (1)Iran has no concordat with the Holy See and no diplomatic relations with it at all. Its constitutional instrument runs the other way: Article 13 of the 1979 Constitution, revised 1989, names Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian Iranians the country's only recognized religious minorities, free within the limits of the law to perform their own rites and to follow their own canon in personal-status matters and religious education, with a reserved total of five seats in the Majlis. The recognition is narrow rather than general: Baha'is, Iran's largest non-Muslim minority, fall outside it entirely and are not recognized under the constitution at all. (1)Iraq has no concordat with the Holy See. Article 2 of the 2005 Constitution instead declares Islam the official religion of the State and a foundation source of legislation, barring any law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam, while separately guaranteeing the full religious rights of non-Muslim Iraqis including Christians, Yazidis and Mandaeans. (1)Saudi Arabia has no concordat with the Holy See and no diplomatic relations with it at all. Article 1 of the Basic Law of Governance, promulgated by Royal Decree No. A/90 on 1 March 1992, declares the Kingdom's religion Islam and names the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet its constitution, functioning as the country's written constitutional framework in place of a separate charter. (1)Turkey has no concordat with the Holy See. Representation dates to the Apostolic Delegation to Constantinople, established in 1868 under the Ottoman Empire, renamed the Apostolic Delegation to Turkey in 1930 as the republic's secularizing reforms dismantled the Ottoman millet system that had protected Christian minorities, then raised to an Apostolic Internunciature in 1960 and a full Apostolic Nunciature in 1966. Turkey's constitutional secularism runs its own religious affairs through the state Diyanet rather than through any bilateral instrument with Rome, and Catholic bishops still lack straightforward legal recognition under Turkish law. (1)Established YearAll1922 (1)1923 (1)1932 (2)1979 (1)Establishment StatusAllDeclared Not Established (1)Established (3)Secular State Declared (1)Government TypeAllabsolute monarchy (1)federal parliamentary republic (1)presidential republic (2)theocratic republic (1)Legal StatusAllConstitution (Article 2) names Islam the state religion and the principles of Islamic sharia the main source of legislation; a 2016 law eased historic restrictions on church construction that had previously required presidential approval for each building. (1)Constitution establishes Twelver Shia Islam as state religion under the doctrine of velayat-e faqih; Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian minorities hold reserved parliamentary seats, while the Baha'i Faith is not legally recognized and its adherents face systematic persecution. (1)Constitutionally laicist since 1924; Sunni Islam is administered through the state Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), which does not extend equivalent recognition or funding to Alevi cemevi worship houses. (1)Post-2003 constitution establishes Islam as a foundation source of legislation and allocates top state offices among Shia Arab, Sunni Arab and Kurdish communities under an informal sectarian power-sharing arrangement. (1)State religion is Sunni Islam of the Hanbali/Wahhabi tradition; no legal provision for public non-Muslim worship; the monarch has held the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques since 1986. (1)Registration or Recognition RegimeAllA 2016 law eased Egypt's historic restrictions on church construction, which had previously required presidential approval for each individual building. (1)Article 13 of the constitution recognizes exactly three religious minorities, Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians, who are free within the limits of the law to perform their own rites and to follow their own canon in personal-status matters, and who hold reserved seats in parliament. Sunni Islam is practiced but is not separately registered as a minority faith alongside Shia Islam, the state religion. The Baha'i Faith holds no constitutional recognition at all; it has no right to legal existence, its institutions are banned, and its adherents face systematic exclusion from education and employment and continued prosecution. Even recognized minorities answer to restrictions unrecognized elsewhere, including a bar on proselytizing Muslims and close state monitoring of converts from Islam. (1)Sunni Muslim religious life runs through the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), established in 1924, which regulates the country's registered mosques and employs local and provincial imams as civil servants. Non-Muslim minority communities cannot hold property or bring legal claims as a recognized body at all, because the state does not recognize structures such as the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate, the Ecumenical Patriarchate or the Chief Rabbinate as legal entities; their institutions instead hold property through independently organized foundations known as vakiflar, overseen by the General Directorate for Foundations, which was established the same year as the Diyanet. (1)The Basic Law of Governance contains no legal recognition or protection of freedom of religion; the country's official religion is Islam, and the Quran and Sunna serve as the constitution. The law prohibits public non-Islamic worship, the public display of non-Islamic religious symbols and proselytizing by a non-Muslim, and it forbids all non-Muslim houses of worship, so there is no mechanism by which a non-Muslim religious group could register or be recognized. The United States has designated Saudi Arabia a Country of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act every year since 2004. (1)Three endowment diwans under the Prime Minister's office, the Sunni Endowment, the Shia Endowment, and the Endowment of the Christian, Yezidi and Sabaean-Mandaean Religions, administer state funds and legal recognition for the religious groups the law names: Islam, several Chaldean, Assyrian and other Eastern Christian churches, the Armenian and Roman churches, Protestant and Adventist congregations, the Yezidi faith, the Sabaean-Mandaean faith and Judaism. Recognition lets a group appoint a legal representative and hold and transact property. Outside the Kurdistan region the law provides no mechanism for a new religious group to gain recognition, and an unrecognized group's contracts are not considered legal or admissible as evidence in court. (1)Religious CompositionAllAbout 55-60% Shia Muslim, 35-40% Sunni Muslim; Christian, Yazidi and Mandaean minorities have shrunk sharply since 2003 (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 90% Sunni Muslim; roughly 10% Christian, chiefly Coptic Orthodox, one of the world's oldest Christian communities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 90-95% Twelver Shia Muslim; Sunni Muslim minorities among Kurds, Baluchis and Turkmen; small recognized Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian communities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 93% Sunni Muslim and 5-6% Shia Muslim (concentrated in the Eastern Province); non-Muslim public worship is not permitted (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 96-99% Muslim, Sunni Hanafi majority with a substantial Alevi minority (estimates commonly range 10-20%) (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)Sovereignty StatusAllSovereign UN member state (5)State Funding MechanismAllEgypt pays the salaries of its Sunni Muslim religious establishment directly from the state budget. The Ministry of Awqaf licenses mosques, appoints and pays the salaries of the imams who lead prayer in them, and pays bonuses to imams who deliver the Friday sermons the Ministry itself writes and distributes; an unlicensed imam is barred from preaching and an unlicensed mosque from holding Friday prayers at all. Al-Azhar, Egypt's centuries-old center of Sunni religious learning and the state's own reference authority on Islamic doctrine, likewise depends on the state budget for the great majority of its funding despite formal claims to institutional independence. The Coptic Orthodox Church and Egypt's other recognized Christian communities fund their own clergy and receive no equivalent state salary. (1)Iran funds Shia religious institutions through its bonyads, tax-exempt, state-subsidized foundations that channel public resources to religious and revolutionary causes, most prominently the Astan-e Qods-e Razavi foundation that administers the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad, alongside the older Awqaf system of religious endowments that directly funds mosques and religious schools. (1)Iraq funds religious institutions through the Sunni and Shiite Endowment Diwans, created by the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 after the fall of the unified Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs; each confessional office administers and funds mosques, religious schools and endowed property for its own sect rather than a single unified state religious authority. (1)Saudi Arabia funds mosque life through its Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Dawah and Guidance, which pays imams and muezzins from the state budget across the kingdom's mosques, terming the payment a disbursement from the Beit Maal Al-Muslimeen, the treasury of the Muslims, rather than an ordinary civil salary. Custodianship of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet's Mosque now sits with an independent supervisory body created in 2023, and the General Authority for Awqaf separately invested more than 2.5 billion Saudi riyals in development projects in 2024, funding religious and charitable infrastructure outside the ministry's own budget line. (1)Turkey funds Sunni Islamic religious life directly through the state budget of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet, which pays every imam's salary as a civil servant and builds and maintains mosques nationwide. Its 2023 budget of 35.91 billion lira, about 1.2 billion dollars, had already been outspent by nine months in, surpassing the nine-month spending of 26 other public institutions including the interior, energy, trade and foreign affairs ministries, and its 2024 budget rose to 91.83 billion lira, about 3.18 billion dollars, a roughly 156 percent increase, of which 77.6 billion lira was earmarked for personnel. Alevi and non-Sunni minority worship receives no comparable state funding. (1)BrowseCompareEgyptModern Area1 entryIranModern Area1 entryIraqModern Area2 entriesSaudi ArabiaModern Area1 entryTurkeyModern Area2 entriesSources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.