Alamy

“WELL, it was time somebody spoke up, wasn't it?” Quite a few Westerners, by no means all of them Christians or fans of the Vatican, will have muttered something like that as they watched Pope Benedict touring Turkey and speaking up for the rights of Christians and other non-Muslims.

By linking Turkey's hope of a European future to a change in its attitude to minority faiths, the pope has given heart to a growing body of people who demand “reciprocity” in relations between the Muslim world and the West. Their argument is that since Muslim minorities are free to practise their faith in historically Christian countries, the Western world should expect Muslim countries to show more respect for the rights of local Christians (and, indeed, Jews).

In countless ways, the argument goes on, those rights are violated—ranging from Saudi Arabia's ban on non-Muslim worship to the more subtle pressure on the Copts of Egypt who fear the rising power of Islamism. In divided lands like Nigeria and Sudan, Christians in Muslim-dominated regions say they are subject to sharia law at its harshest. In Iran, around 300,000 Christians and 30,000 Jews report harassment, discrimination and hostile propaganda from the official media; followers of the Bahai faith suffer even more.

At its crudest, talk of “reciprocity” can sound grim. The West should treat all religious groups fairly on principle—not as a part of any trade-off. Even if the fate of Christians in the Islamic world were far worse, that would not be a reason for the West to mistreat Muslims. But religious minorities in Muslim lands should be a cause for a concern—among all Westerners, not just church leaders. Apart from the general principle of human rights, religious diversity is a safeguard against the “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West that extremists expect or want. A settled, law-abiding Muslim population in the West, and content, secure religious minorities in the Islamic world, can be counters to the view that every place “belongs” to just one faith or culture.

One problem is that church leaders such as the pope are not best placed to make that case. As he has found in Turkey, many Muslims fear that their Christian neighbours are fifth-columnists for hostile Western powers. That fear grows when Westerners lobby for fellow believers in the East.

Who, then, is the ideal advocate for the rights of religious minorities in the Muslim world? One group of people who should join the fray are Muslim thinkers who live in the West and are hence free to interpret their own religion, and interact with other faiths, in a more generous spirit than tends to be possible in the more conservative atmosphere of most Muslim-majority societies. As beneficiaries of a culture of religious tolerance, they are especially well placed to explain its merits to co-religionists in Islam's heartland.

As the pope learned in Turkey, the Ottoman treatment of minorities was less harsh than that of some Christian regimes. But it certainly shouldn't be idealised either, and nor should anyone argue that traditional Muslim theocracy—which protects the other “peoples of the book”, the Christians and Jews, but also treats them as second-class citizens—is any basis for a modern state. The old theocracy served a purpose, perhaps, in a different age, before the ideals of universal suffrage and human rights had been put forward. But it can have no place in today's world, and more Western Muslims should find the courage to say so.