Asia religion
Asia is home to forms of religion in all its
forms. The major religions Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Confucianism, Daoism and Shintoism originated here.
Christianity, Islam and Buddhism spread over large
parts of the world, while others, such as Hinduism
and Confucianism, grew mighty within their own
cultural spheres. In addition to the major
religions, numerous tribal religions are represented
in Asia.
Christianity and Islam have deep roots in
Judaism. Apart from smaller Jewish communities in
different parts of Asia, the Jews living in Asia
live in Israel.
Christianity is worldwide and globally the most
comprehensive of the major religions. Although Asian
in its origins, it spread to the west. Reminiscences
from the Christian ancient church make up the small
communities in the Middle East that belong to the
Syrian church, as well as the so-called Thomas
Christians in Kerala in southern India. The other
Christian congregations scattered throughout most of
Asia - often as prominent minorities - are the
result of Catholic or Protestant missionary activity
emanating from the West.
From the 1500's. began an extensive mission from
the Roman Catholic side. The first Protestant
missionary work in India was due to a Danish
initiative, as Frederik IV in 1705 sent two
missionaries to the Danish colony Tranquebar. During
the 1800's. increased the Protestant mission,
especially in India, China, and Japan. As the only
country in Asia, the Philippines has a Christian
majority, with almost 95% of the population being
Christian - of which 84% are Roman Catholic.
Islam is the religion in Asia that has the most
followers (about 800 million). After the founding in
the early 600-t. Islam spread rapidly from the
Arabian Peninsula to the entire Middle East and
further across Central Asia to China and through
South Asia to Indonesia. Islam is the state religion
in several Middle Eastern states as well as in
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Indonesia is home
to over 120 million. Muslims and thus have more than
any other country. In India, Muslims make up a
significant minority group (around 75 million). The
majority of Asian Muslims are Sunnis, but in Iran
and Iraq the Shiites are in the majority, and Shia
Islam is the state religion in Iran (as the only
place).
Buddhismemerged in northern India as a reform
movement around 500 BC. The Buddha would neither
recognize the Brahmins, the clergy, as a privileged
spiritual upper class, nor the ancient Vedic
scriptures as the supreme religious authority. Three
major directions developed over the centuries in
Buddhism: hinayana, mahayana and vajrayana. For more
than a millennium, Buddhism flourished in India, but
Hinduism and Islamic expansion gradually supplanted
it from the motherland. Buddhism disappeared, so to
speak, from Indian territory around 1200 AD, but in
turn became an important religious factor in other
parts of Asia. The only survivor of the ancient
hinayana schools is theravada. It lives on in
Buddhism in Sri Lanka and in large parts of
Southeast Asia. The other two directions, Mahayana
and Vajrayana, are the basis of Buddhism in Bhutan,
Tibet, Mongolia and East Asia. Buddhism has recently
had a renaissance in India, with over three million.
casteless Hindus have converted to Buddhism due toBR
Ambedkar's movement against social injustice against
the casteless.
Hinduism is a mixture of the religion of the
Indian indigenous people and the ancient Vedic
religion, which the Aryan tribes brought with them
to India when they between 2000 and 1500 BC. invaded
the country. It is India's dominant religion, with
more than 80% of the population being Hindus. In
Nepal, which as the only country has Hinduism as its
state religion, almost 90% are Hindus. There are
also significant Hindu groups elsewhere, for example
in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Bali.
Jainism originated in India at about the same
time as Buddhism. Its teachings are heretical like
those of Buddhism. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism,
could recognize the ideals of the Vedic religion as
little as the Buddha. It has approximately three
million followers. Sikhism is a reform movement
founded in the 1500's. It contains elements from
both Hinduism and Islam. There live about 13
million. Sikhs in India. Finally, approximately
120,000 Parsis, followers of Parsism, the
contemporary version of Zarathustra's ancient
Iranian religion.
China's two major traditional religions,
Confucianism and Daoism, originated in 500 BC. The
thoughts of Confucianism built on ancient Chinese
ideals and beliefs. Daoism redefined the inherited
concepts from a mystical, natural-philosophical
worldview and became a movement directed towards the
existing order. Both have been of great importance
to religion and culture throughout East Asia. In the
1st century AD. the first Buddhist monks arrived in
China. Here developed from the 500-t. a special
Buddhist meditation school, chan. It spread in the
700's. to Japan, where in the following centuries it
was further developed into the zen school. Shintoism,
Japan's national religion, has always worked closely
with Buddhism.
The so-called primitive or tribal religions are
found especially in India, Nepal, Southeast Asia and
Indonesia. They usually have no written tradition.
We encounter shamanism in North and Central Asia,
South Korea and Japan.
Source:
https://www.countryaah.com/asian-countries/
From around the mid-1960's, many Westerners have
felt attracted to thoughts and ideas emanating from
Asian religions. Various forms of yoga are popular
in many circles in the Western world, which has led
to the existence of yoga schools in most major
cities and in many places meditation centers. In the
Hare Krishna movement, Western followers closely
follow the rituals of a Bengali, Vishnuite sect. The
Buddhists also run missions in the West. One or more
Buddhist organizations are based in the majority of
Western countries. Pakistan's foreign
policy
Pakistan's foreign policy has been dominated by
relations with India, and this has often also been
crucial to Pakistan's relations with other
countries. Other key countries in Pakistan's foreign
policy are Afghanistan and the United States.
India
Since the split of British India in 1947, when
Pakistan and India became independent countries,
Pakistan has felt its existence threatened by the
much larger and more resourceful India. The
contradictions have historical, religious and ethnic
dimensions.
Relations with India worsened significantly when
India conducted three underground nuclear test
blasts in the Thar Desert, southwest of New Delhi on
May 11, 1998, and a day later followed with two new
blasts. Pakistan's response came in the form of a
series of five similar blasts from May 28 of the
same year in the desert of Baluchistan, about 50
miles from Islamabad, near the big city of Quetta.
Both countries' blasts were sharply criticized by
the outside world.
The Kashmir conflict has been central, and gained
new intensity in the 1990s. The two countries have
fought limited wars in Kashmir (1947-1948) and Rann
of Kutch (1965), and major wars in 1965 and 1971. In
1999, open conflict again broke out between India
and Pakistan in Kashmir (see Kashmir's history).
The Cold War
In the 1950s, Pakistan was allied with the United
States through the SEATO Pact 1954 and the Baghdad
Pact (CENTO) 1958. In the 1960s, Pakistan also
aligned itself with China. During the wars of 1965
and 1971, Pakistan was only supported by China and
some Islamic nations.
In the 1970s, Pakistan withdrew from the United
States and became a member of the alliance-free
group. Following the Soviet Union's intervention in
Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan gained strategic
importance in the Cold War East-West conflict. The
United States opened up for extensive assistance,
while relations with the Soviet Union became very
strained. During the Afghanistan war, Pakistan
welcomed over three million Afghan refugees. The
resistance movement in Afghanistan also operated
from bases in Pakistan. After the 1988 Soviet
retreat, Pakistan became less important to the West.
The war on terror
In the internal conflict in Afghanistan, Pakistan
has mainly supported fundamentalist factions, since
1994 also by contributing to the building of the
far-flung Taliban militia. Islamabad hoped the
Taliban would create stable conditions in the
country, thus opening the way to new markets in
former Soviet Central Asia. After September 11,
2001, the United States exerted pressure on Pakistan
to make active efforts in the " war on terror ". The
army has repeatedly attacked al-Qaeda and Taliban
supporters in the autonomous tribal areas along the
Afghan border. In return, Pakistan has received
considerable financial support.
Pakistan and India have for many years been
competing for influence in Afghanistan, while the
Pakistani authorities have rarely concealed their
dissatisfaction with what they perceived as
Afghan-Indian cooperation with stalemate against
Pakistan. Former President Pervez Musharraf
confirmed in an interview with The Guardian
newspaper in February 2015 that his government
sought to thwart Hamid Karzai and his government.
The backdrop was an experience that Pakistani
authorities accused Karzai of "destroying Pakistan"
and assisting India in "falling back on Pakistan".
Musharraf further stated that the change of
president in Afghanistan has created a new situation
and he advocated a strong cooperation with President
Ashraf Ghani and his government. He also asked the
Pakistani authorities to suspend their support for
various "deputy" militant groups in Afghanistan. The
latter was not least relevant in relation to
repeated Afghan claims that Pakistani institutions,
and in particular the intelligence agency
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), support Taliban
factions in Afghanistan.
For decades, Pakistan was host to many millions
of Afghans fleeing civil war and Soviet occupation.
As the Taliban movement carried out its strictly
religious regime towards the end of the 1990s, a
further hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled across
the border. In 2001, it was estimated that Pakistan
housed the most refugees in the world. At year-end
2005/2006, about 1.5 million Afghans still lived as
refugees in Pakistan. At the same time, some 20,000
Pakistani refugees were living in exile, mainly in
western countries, due to alleged human rights
violations and religious persecution.
2004 brought an international startling scandal:
Nuclear physicist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, "Pakistani
nuclear bomb father", has admitted to selling
advanced nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea
and Iran. This must have happened on its own,
without the government's consent. Khan was
criticized and placed under house arrest, but not
otherwise punished. In February 2009, a court
formally lifted the house arrest, and in September
of that year, remaining restrictions on his freedom
of movement, such as foreign travel, were also
lifted.
Most connections to India were broken in December
2001 after a Pakistani jihad group attacked India's
National Assembly. In 2004, a cautious peace process
started again. The hope was eventually to come to a
solution to the core problem of Kashmir itself.
India claims that since 1990, Pakistan has waged a
"deputy war" in Kashmir with the help of militant
jihad groups; Pakistan only grants moral and
political support. So far, most symbolic measures
have been taken during the peace process, such as
cricket matches. For the two countries' top leaders,
a "hotline" was adopted in 2004 to reduce the risk
of war between the two fresh nuclear powers. The
so-called Friendship Express - train service twice
weekly Lahore-Delhi - got started again in 2004. In
2005, a regular weekly bus service was opened
between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar in shared Kashmir.
The peace process was repeatedly put to the test,
for example in February 2007 when 68 people, mostly
Pakistanis, were killed by bombs on the Friendship
Express. The biggest hit by jihad groups came in
November 2008 when 179 were killed during a
coordinated raid on several targets in Mumbai.
Pakistan's political closeness to the United
States following the September 11, 2001 attacks
provided the country with significant resources,
both financially and militarily. However, widespread
domestic political protests against the community
contributed to a gradual weakening of the alliance,
and the execution of Osama bin Laden in May 2011
caused many politicians and military in the United
States to question the credibility of Pakistan as a
partner. Bin Laden was found in Bilal Town, about
100 kilometers north of Islamabad, and it was taken
for granted that the Pakistani authorities must have
known about his many years of residence there. |