To my mind Kashmir and the middle east both suffer from an over abundance of religion. Take the religions away and the problems would follow i suspect.
In both cases it is one religion that is somewhat more aggressive (at present, by which i mean the last 50 years) in it’s extremes than others.
Alas I disagree almost entirely with this sentiment. I think that beneath most apparently religious conflicts you will find other, more worldly concerns. The Crusades are a typical example: beneath the superficial narrative of Christians attempting to take Jerusalem from the infidels one finds a variety of worldy concerns: economic interests on the part of Genoa, Venica; the desire to export the violence then endemic to Northern and Central France elsewhere, and the contest for both religious and secular authority between Rome and Constantinople as guardians of Christianity and heirs to the Roman empire. Certainly there many individuals who were sincerely motivated by their faith, but they do not explain the historical events. And so it is for most apparent contemporary clashes between religions. Nigeria is perhaps the most worrying long-term hotspot: up to 400 million people split 50/50 between Muslim north and Christian south, but to characterise the tensions there as basically religious in character is to ignore how the arrangement came about in the first place: how the British virtually nailed together three different cultures to produce the state of Nigeria, and ran the place through but one of them — a reliable recipe for happy endings as Rwanda, etc. demonstrates. The differences are fundamentally ethnic and cultural, not religious. This is not to suggest that religion plays no role in terrorism, political instability, and other worldly matters: it can unite otherwise disparate peoples in a sense of shared identity and injustice, and provides them with an elevated and universalist ideological discourse by which their actions can be justified. But religious faith, and differences between faiths, rarely create conflicts in and of themselves.
Graham Fuller’s book ‘A World Without Islam’ is a good casual read on this subject. It is advertised as being written by “the former Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA” — personally I think I would prefer to read the book written by Fuller the historian (which he is) but apparently the former characterisation generates better sales figures. :p
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