Describe the religion as the basis of nationhood?
Answers
Answer:
In my view Islamic countries are the most guilty in this respect. Problem also applies to Israel.
So, here is the issue to be discussed.
Religious belief is essentially unverifiable. You would never be able to differentiate a true believer from a sham artist.
From what I understand, there are a growing number of ex-Muslims who continue to live in "Islamic" countries hiding their true belief for fear of reprisal. Publicly they may proclaim their Muslimness, but privately they have apostasized. Additionally, if a country is declared to be "Islamic", it naturally puts a restraint on religious freedom. Saudi Arabia, for instance, cannot become 51% Christian can it? Even if 51% of the Saudi population embraced Christianity, they would keep it under cover for fear of the penalty for apostasy in Islam.
Likewise, what if 51% of Jews convert to, say, Jainism. What happens to Israel then? Does Israel split into two - the Jain republic of Israel and the Jewish republic of Israel?
What are the mechanisms in place in Israel now to prevent 51% of Israelis from converting to Jainism? What are the mechanisms in place in Saudi Arabia now to prevent 51% of Saudis from converting to Christianity?
A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
A nation is more overtly political than an ethnic group;[1][2] it has been described as "a fully mobilized or institutionalized ethnic group".[3] Some nations are ethnic groups (see ethnic nationalism) and some are not (see civic nationalism and multiculturalism).[3]
It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests.[4]
Benedict Anderson has characterised a nation as an "imagined community"[5] and Paul James sees it as an "abstract community".[6] A nation is an imagined community in the sense that the material conditions exist for imagining extended and shared connections. It is an abstract community in the sense that it is objectively impersonal, even if each individual in the nation experiences him or herself as subjectively part of an embodied unity with others. For the most part, members of a nation remain strangers to each other and will likely never meet.[7] Hence the phrase, "a nation of strangers" used by such writers as Vance Packard.