Never mind poor Edgardo, in 1935 the Roman Catholic church chose to appoint this man a saint:- "As Lord Chancellor, More had six Lutherans burned at the stake and imprisoned as many as forty others, some of whom were interrogated under torture in his own house." Quotation from Wiki.

added to @COB. Dude I love delicious.

typo: "state saction"

Malaysia had earlier converted a famous Malyasian Hindu mountaineer in death from Hinduism to Islam. They claimed that he had converted on his deathbed, but his widow denied that. Malaysia's top court ruled that it could not override the Islamic court's decision that the "conversion" had happened. They took his body and gave him an Islamic funeral against the wishes of his widow who wanted him to have a Hindu cremation.

BBC Link

For the world of Islam these are the Edgardo Mortara moments, but the outcome will not be measured via such sensational cases, but rather by the slow but inevitable wheels of liberalism grinding away at the edifice of medieval social control.

Something about that sentence sounds as if it were taken straight from a college sociology paper.

but rather by the slow but inevitable wheels of liberalism grinding away at the edifice of medieval social control.

This might happen in the long run, but as we know, we are all dead in the long run anyway. But more to the point, I think it will get worse in the short term before it gets better. Most of the Muslim world was illiterate and not very aware of how Islam worked in the center of gravity of the Islamic world - the Arabian peninsula. Now with greater literacy, they are trying to ape them and follow the fundamentalist texts rather than the more liberal Islam their older societies followed. The practice of this more strict (authentic?) Islam might make them see the light and make it more liberal. On the other hand it might not, if the example of Afghanistan has any validity for the wider Islamic world. Afghanistan was rid of the Taliban and has had an opportunity to liberalize. But it does not look like it is happening. Maybe it is not happening because the ouster of the Taliban was not indigenous.

But more to the point, I think it will get worse in the short term before it gets better.

this is a plausible perspective, but more for say bangladesh, than malaysia. after all, malays have had a generation of prosperity, and always made ostentatious attempts to ape arab (as opposed to turco-persian indian) islam. also, the social dynamics matter. i think you will see a lot more debate and tension, and probably finally accommodation in a society like the hui muslims of china than in pakistan, for obvious reasons. malaysia is somewhere in the middle.

I could imagine guest workers in the gulf states converting to evangelical christianity. Those countries are moderately liberal and the "turn the other cheek...our reward is in heaven" seems like an appealing philosophy to a guest worker (poor Americans love it).

In what sense Malaysia is a moderate Muslim country? It is led by a fanatic Hadrami community which are anything but moderate.