They’re still permitted to build mosques, but without minarets.
That’s no different to the situation in Qatar with a Christian church and considerably better than in Saudi Arabia (a country heavily defended by ostensibly Christian nations, to no good purpose for those nationa apart from oil).
Muslims are in no position to complain when some Islamic countries are considerably more restrictive towards Christians and their churches.
Interfaith dialogue has become an important exercise in finding the right words to overcome both extreme violence and ordinary misunderstanding. True progress, however, is best measured in deeds. The inauguration last week of Qatar’s first Christian church — a small Catholic chapel bearing neither bells nor visible crosses — has been hailed as a welcome step forward in relations between Catholicism and Islam. But an even more dramatic development is under discussion just across the border: The Vatican has confirmed that it is negotiating for permission to build the first church in Saudi Arabia.
Presiding over the cradle of Islam and home to its holiest sites, the Saudi monarchy has long banned the open worship of other faiths, even as the number of Catholics resident in Saudi Arabia has risen to 800,000 thanks to an influx of immigrant workers from places like the Philippines and India. Mosques are the only houses of prayer in a country where the strict Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam dominates. But Archbishop Paul-Mounged El-Hachem, the papal envoy to the smaller countries on the Arabian peninsula, such as Kuwait and Qatar, has confirmed that talks are under way to establish formal diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, and to eventually allow for Catholic churches to be built there. Pope Benedict XVI is believed to have personally appealed to King Abdullah on the topic during the Saudi monarch’s first ever visit to the Vatican last November.
Top Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said that a Catholic parish in this key Islamic country would be “a historic achievement” in the push to expand religious freedom and foster a positive interfaith rapport. Under Benedict, the Catholic hierarchy has stepped up calls from its Muslim counterparts for “reciprocity,” demanding that the same religious freedom enjoyed by Muslims in the West should be granted to Christian minorities in the Islamic world. They note that Europe’s biggest mosque, built with Saudi funds, was opened in 1995 in Rome, just across the river from the Vatican.
Pope Benedict passionately condemned last week’s death of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, who was kidnapped on Feb. 29 in the northern Iraqi city. As many as 350,000 of the 800,000 Christians in Iraq before the war have since fled the country, while smaller but similar exoduses have occurred in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and other parts of the Arab world.
While Christians in those areas trace their roots to the earliest centuries of the faith, the Catholics in Saudi Arabia are mostly migrant workers. And the restrictions on any outward manifestation of their religious beliefs have been particularly severe. The celebration of non-Muslim holidays is forbidden, as is the wearing of crucifixes and other religious symbols.
My bold
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1723715,00.html
Try building a Catholic cathedral in Mecca and see how much religious tolerance is shown by the Saudis who funded the biggest mosque in Europe opposite the Vatican.
I don’t much care about religions as they’re all a waste of space and tax exemptions and equal opportunity exemptions, but if one religion demands tolerance and freedoms for itself then commonsense fairness dictates that it has to show the same to other religions.
Which is rather unlikely because they all think they’re the one true faith and the only path to heaven. It’s just that one of them is currently rather more aggressive in the attitude of some its members than most of the rest, although most of the rest were just as aggressive at times in their pasts.
