You've been told the flight of minorities from Muslim-majority lands is ancient history. In Afghanistan the US State Department counted six Hindus and Sikhs left in 2023. In the 1970s there were hundreds of thousands.
Sindh fell in 711, Bengal around 1204, the Maldives in 1153. The slow conquest → What the medieval chronicles describe over centuries, South and Southeast Asia's censuses, courts and human-rights monitors are recording in decades: minorities squeezed by blasphemy law, mob violence, forced conversion and sharia codes, and then simply leaving.
Where the curve has already reached the bottom.
Afghanistan · 1970s to 2023
Roughly 700,000 Hindus and Sikhs lived in Afghanistan in the 1970s, about 220,000 by 1992, about 15,000 under the mujahideen and the first Taliban regime, around 150 when the Taliban returned in 2021, and six by the US State Department's 2023 count. In 2001 the same Taliban dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas, fifteen centuries old, as idols. They erased the stone and the people alike.
19 January 1990 · Kashmir
That evening, announcements from mosque loudspeakers across the Kashmir valley told Hindus to leave. Between January and March, some 90,000 to 100,000 Kashmiri Pandits, most of a community of 120,000 to 140,000 that had lived in the valley for millennia, fled. The state government reported 72,077 Hindu families gone. India's Home Ministry recorded 217 Hindus killed between 1988 and 1991. Most never went back.
Bangladesh · 1951 to 2024
Hindus were 22.05% of East Pakistan in 1951 and 7.95% at the 2022 census, which itself names out-migration as a cause. After Sheikh Hasina's government fell on 5 August 2024, the Bangladeshi newspaper Prothom Alo documented 1,068 attacks on minorities across 49 districts in fifteen days. The Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council counted 2,010 incidents and 152 temples damaged.
The machinery of the Pact of Umar, rebuilt in modern statute. Islamic law in its own words →
Pakistan · Section 295-C
Since a 1991 ruling by Pakistan's Federal Shariat Court, insulting the Prophet carries one sentence: death. The International Commission of Jurists reviewed 25 blasphemy appeals: high courts acquitted in 15, finding the complaints fabricated or made for personal or political revenge. Appeals take more than five years on average, and the accused are routinely refused bail. The law does not need a conviction to work. The accusation is the punishment. Asia Bibi spent eight years on death row. Her case →
16 August 2023 · Jaranwala
After two Christian brothers were accused of desecrating the Quran, mobs led by supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a party built on defending the blasphemy law, burned 26 churches and more than 80 Christian homes in a single day. Police later found the evidence was forged: one man wrote the insulting letters in the brothers' names, another tore the Quran pages and scattered them in the street to set off the riot. A year on, Amnesty International reported more than 90% of the suspects still at large.
Pakistan · Forced conversion
The Movement for Solidarity and Peace estimated in 2014 that up to 1,000 Christian and Hindu women and girls aged 12 to 25 are abducted, converted and married to Muslim men every year, most of them in Punjab and Sindh. Pakistan's Human Rights Commission still reports the practice continuing. Hindus are now 2.17% of Pakistan by its 2023 census. The Pact of Umar made Christians swear never to stop their kin from entering Islam. In Sindh, the kin being taken are girls of twelve.
9 May 2017 · Jakarta
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, the Christian governor of Indonesia's capital, was sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy after mass Islamist rallies over a remark about a Quran verse. Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience.
Aceh · The Qanun Jinayat, 2014
Indonesia's Aceh province passed an Islamic criminal code with public caning of up to 100 lashes for adultery and punishments for gay sex, drinking and being alone with an unrelated person of the opposite sex. Some of its offences apply to non-Muslims too.
23 June 2014 · Malaysia
Malaysia's Federal Court, 4 to 3, upheld a government ban on the Catholic weekly The Herald using the word "Allah" for God in its Malay edition, the word Malay has for God. The government insisted the ruling covered only that one newspaper. A church was told by a court which word for God it could print.
The Maldives · 1153 to today
The end state. A Buddhist kingdom whose king converted in 1153, where monks were beheaded, and whose constitution now makes Islam a condition of citizenship. The ledger →