The Most Racist Countries in the World? The Uncomfortable Data on Islamic Countries

The debate over the most racist countries is almost always narrated according to a ready-made ideological script: the West in the dock, the rest of the planet assigned the role of moral victim. Europe, America, colonialism, slavery, discrimination, supremacism: the vocabulary is always the same, repeated until it becomes a political liturgy. But as soon as one moves from sermonizing to comparative data, this representation begins to crack.

One of the most uncomfortable maps circulated in recent years, built on data from the World Values Survey and picked up by the Washington Post, showed the percentage of respondents who said they would not want people “of another race” as neighbors. The result did not confirm the image of the West as the moral epicenter of racial intolerance. On the contrary, it showed a distribution far less useful to anti-Western propaganda: many non-Western countries, including several Islamic contexts, appeared among the more problematic areas.

The question was simple: among the categories of people one would not want as neighbors, respondents could also indicate people belonging to a “different race”. This is not a theoretical nuance, but an explicit indicator of social rejection of the other. Anyone who says they do not want people of another race living next to them is expressing a recognizable form of racial intolerance.

The Ranking That Anti-Western Rhetoric Dislikes

The result was indigestible for the dominant script. Some of the highest levels of declared racial intolerance emerged outside the West, including in Muslim-majority areas or cultures marked by Islam. It was not the map one would expect after listening to certain propaganda, where Europe and America are treated as the natural home of racism and the rest of the world as an archive of wounded innocence.

A single question does not claim to explain every form of racism. It does not measure all discrimination, nor does it always distinguish between race, ethnicity, tribe, caste, religion, nationality, or local conflicts. But this caution does not erase the political meaning of the finding. The data are enough to blow up an ideological construction: the idea that racism is almost a Western pathology.

The map says something else. It says that declared racial intolerance can emerge strongly precisely in societies that, in Western public discourse, are often spared any severe judgment. When racism is Western, it becomes systemic guilt, an inherited mark, proof of a collective disease. When it appears in Asian, African, or Islamic societies, the mitigating explanations begin: context, history, colonialism, poverty, tradition, cultural complexity. Western racism is judged; non-Western racism is often translated, explained, softened.

Islamic Countries and Declared Racial Intolerance

The title may sound provocative, but the data are more uncomfortable than the provocation: in several Muslim-majority countries, or in contexts culturally marked by Islam, declared intolerance toward people of another race is higher than in many Western societies that are accused daily of being the moral center of global racism.

This does not mean that every Muslim is racist, nor that every Islamic country is identical. It means something more precise and far more irritating to the dominant rhetoric: declared racial intolerance is not automatically concentrated where anti-Western ideology would like to place it. In many cases it emerges outside the West, including within societies treated with disproportionate indulgence by parts of academia, journalism, and political activism.

The contradiction is obvious. The West is subjected to a permanent trial, while racism, tribalism, antisemitism, and religious discrimination in the Islamic world are often left at the margins of discussion. As if racism were scandalous only when it can be attributed to Europe, America, or historical Christianity. When it arises elsewhere, the tone suddenly changes, the moral category changes, the treatment changes.

Racism Does Not Need the Word “Race”

One of the most common deceptions is to look for racism only where the modern racial vocabulary appears. But the inferiorization of the other can function perfectly well without using the word “race”. It can pass through religion, tribe, caste, ethnicity, language, skin color, family origin, or the condition of believer and non-believer.

In the classical Islamic world, the separation between Muslims and non-Muslims was not simply a private difference of faith. It was also a legal category. The non-Muslim could be tolerated, but often not as a full equal. The system of dhimma placed Jews and Christians under Islamic rule in a subordinate position: recognized, protected, but inferior.

This is not the same as European biological racism of the modern age, but it belongs to the same moral family of subordinating the other. The person is not considered first as an individual, but as a member of an inferior religious category. The Muslim occupies the superior normative position; the non-Muslim is placed below. The language changes, but the structure remains: hierarchy, inequality, conditional tolerance.

The Double Standard on Islam

Those who today speak obsessively about discrimination should also look at the hierarchies produced by Islamic law, the historical condition of dhimmis, the subordination of non-Muslims, the punishment of apostasy, Arab-Islamic antisemitism, and the religious minorities crushed in many Islamic contexts. Instead, the opposite often happens: everything concerning Islam is softened, contextualized, neutralized.

Islamic religious discrimination becomes “complex history”. The subordination of non-Muslims becomes “medieval tolerance”. Islamic slavery becomes a marginal parenthesis. Arab-Islamic antisemitism is reduced to a geopolitical reaction. The persecution of Christians is downgraded to local tensions. Violence against apostates, converts, or minorities is treated as a social incident, never as a structural problem.

This is not historical rigor. It is ideological protection. Islam must remain in the position of the useful victim, even when its sources, its political history, and many of its legal systems show dynamics of domination, exclusion, and inferiorization of the other.

Islamic Slavery Erased from Public Memory

The double standard becomes even more evident when discussing slavery in the Islamic world. For centuries, commercial, military, and religious networks fueled the capture, sale, and exploitation of enslaved Africans, Slavs, Turks, Caucasians, and people of many other origins. Yet this history is often left on the margins, while Western slavery is rightly analyzed, denounced, taught, and transformed into permanent public memory.

There is no need to turn the West into an innocent party in order to recognize the obvious: the history of slavery, racism, and the subordination of the other is far broader than the European story alone. Reducing it to the Western chapter means constructing a partial memory, morally aggressive but historically incomplete. Islamic slavery, human markets in the Muslim world, and hierarchies between believers and non-believers cannot disappear simply because they disturb the dominant narrative.

If one wants to discuss racism and discrimination seriously, one must also speak about slave markets in the Muslim world, raids, eunuchs, concubines, hierarchies between believers and non-believers, the inferiorization of Black people in many Arab societies, Islamic antisemitism, the condition of Christians under Islamic rule, and the legal subordination of non-Muslims. Otherwise, we are not dealing with history, but with the preventive choice of the culprit.

The West Is Accused Also Because It Allows Itself to Be Accused

The great irony is that the West is attacked precisely with the tools that the West itself produced. It developed the modern language of individual rights. It turned equality before the law into a political principle. It produced modern abolitionism. It made racism, slavery, and discrimination matters of public scandal. It allowed its critics to denounce it freely inside universities, newspapers, parliaments, courts, and cultural institutions.

This does not make the West innocent, but it does make grotesque its representation as the only moral monster in history. In many non-Western societies, public criticism of racism, religious discrimination, or ethnic hierarchies is weaker, riskier, or openly repressed. Where religious, tribal, or authoritarian power weighs more than the individual, intolerance can be more brutal and at the same time less visible.

The mechanism is perverse: the West is accused because it allows accusation; other systems are acquitted because they prevent, limit, or discourage internal criticism. Thus Western racism is amplified without end, while non-Western racism often remains out of frame.

Religious Intolerance: The Other Face of the Problem

The discussion of declared racism intersects with that of religious freedom. Reports from the Pew Research Center have shown for years that government restrictions on religion and social hostilities toward religious groups are a global problem, often very serious outside the West. In the report published in 2024, Pew noted that in 2022 the global median score for government restrictions on religion remained at the highest level recorded in the series, while 59 countries had “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions.

Pew does not measure racism, but it measures a related phenomenon: the treatment of the other when that person belongs to a different faith, a minority, or a non-conforming group. Here too the anti-Western fable cracks. In many non-Western contexts, including Muslim-majority countries, individual freedom, religious freedom, and civil equality face deep obstacles.

Applying the same standard to everyone would mean speaking not only about Western racism, but also about the persecution of Christians, Islamic antisemitism, religious discrimination, punished conversions, persecuted apostasy, intimidated minorities, and societies where the non-conforming person is not merely criticized, but crushed. And it is precisely this symmetry of judgment that anti-Westernism rejects.

Anti-Westernism Does Not Fight Racism: It Manages It

Anti-Westernism does not fight racism wherever it is found. It selects it. It uses it. It turns it into a moral club aimed almost always in the same direction. If racism is Western, it becomes proof of systemic guilt. If it is Islamic, tribal, Asian, African, or anti-Western, it is absorbed into context, explained by history, diluted in poverty, attributed to colonialism, made politically less embarrassing.

Thus a rigged morality is born: the West must confess everything, atone for everything, pay for everything; the others are explained, pitied, justified. This is not a fight against racism. It is an ideological distribution of guilt.

The World Values Survey map is irritating precisely because it disrupts this pattern. It shows that declared racial intolerance can be higher in societies that dominant Western culture often treats with almost sacred caution. It reminds us that racism does not have one political color, one passport, one religion, or one civilization.

Racism Outside the West Exists

Racism outside the West exists. It exists in Islamic countries. It exists in Asian countries. It exists in African societies. It exists in ethnic nationalisms. It exists in castes. It exists in religious hierarchies. It exists in Arab-Islamic antisemitism. It exists in contempt toward Black people in many Arab societies. It exists in discrimination against Christian, Jewish, Hindu, animist, Yazidi, or apostate minorities.

The fact that it is discussed less does not make it less real. It only makes it more useful to those who want to preserve intact the fable of the West as the sole culprit and the rest of the world as collective innocence.

The real intellectual obscenity lies here: using anti-racism as an instrument of selective accusation, not as a universal principle. Because a truly universal principle would protect no one on the basis of origin, religion, culture, or political usefulness. It would also judge Islamic racism, non-Western tribalism, Arab antisemitism, religious discrimination, Islamic slavery, and hierarchies that do not bear the European mark.

Conclusion: Racism Does Not Obey Propaganda

Racism does not become less serious when it is not Western. It does not become less violent when it arises in Islamic, Asian, or African societies. It does not become less hateful when it hides behind religion, tribe, caste, nationalism, tradition, or anti-Western resentment.

The map based on the World Values Survey remains an uncomfortable document because it forces us to look outside the West, into cultures and societies that the contemporary ideological court prefers to acquit before even examining them.

The real scandal is not remembering that the West has known racism. That is repeated every day, taught everywhere, transformed into permanent guilt. The scandal is saying that racism also exists outside the West, often in forms that are more explicit, more socially accepted, and far less contested. And among the places where this discussion is systematically avoided are also many Islamic countries.

Sources

• World Values Survey – online data archive
• Washington Post – A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries
• Washington Post – methodological observations on the racial tolerance map
• Pew Research Center – Government restrictions on religion stayed at peak levels globally in 2022
• Pew Research Center – Countries with “very high” government restrictions in 2022