these countries are either current or former communist states such as China, Cuba, Russia and Vietnam. Twenty four of the USCIRF's twenty nine countries are also included on Open Doors Worldwide Watch list because they are especially dangerous for Christians. Eleven predominantly Muslim countries are ruled by governments which proclaim that their states are secular. "These countries account for nearly 140 million Muslims, or 13.5 percent of the 1 billion Muslims living in predominantly Muslim countries. The 11 remaining predominantly Muslim countries have not made any constitutional declaration concerning the Islamic or secular nature of the state, and have not made Islam the official state religion. This group of countries, which includes Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, accounts for over 250 million Muslims". This demonstrates that the majority of the world's Muslim population live in countries that either proclaim the state to be secular, or that make no pronouncements concerning Islam as the official state religion. In the Muslim world Christians have faced increasing levels of persecution in the Muslim world. Muslim-majority nations in which Christian populations have suffered acute discrimination, persecution, repression, violence and in some cases death, mass murder or ethnic cleansing include; Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Qatar, Kuwait, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives. Furthermore, any Muslim person – including any person who was born into a Muslim family or any person who became a Muslim at a given point in his or her life – who converts to Christianity or re-converts to it, is considered an apostate. Apostasy, the conscious abandonment of Islam by a Muslim in word or deed, including conversion to Christianity, is punishable as a crime under applications of the Sharia (countries in the graph). There are, however, cases in which a Muslim will adopt the Christian faith, secretly without declaring his/her apostasy. As a result, they are practising Christians, but legally, they are still considered Muslims, and as a result, they can still face the death penalty according to the Sharia. Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman, was sentenced to death for apostasy in 2014, because the government of Sudan classified her as a Muslim, even though she was raised as a Christian. A report by the international catholic charity organisation Aid to the Church in Need said that the religiously motivated ethnic cleansing of Christians is so severe that they are set to completely disappear from parts of