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Until the moment of the Iranian revolution, the overthrow of the Shah, the installation of Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of a Shia Islamic theocracy in Iran in 1979, largely by young people, who then formed the fanatical backbone of the Revolutionary Guard, it had looked from the West as though post-war history was one of relentless retreat of religion and the inevitable advance of scientific secularism.
The Iranian revolution changed all that. Suddenly, the Islamic world had a new confidence and a new leadership and seemed to be embracing a regression to medieval religious fundamentalism. Something had gone wrong!
Or was this just a temporary reversal? How long would young people tolerate the state micromanaging their lives? How long would women tolerate the prohibition on their independence and their former right to dress in fashionable cloths, to date boys of their choice and the requirement, under pain of punishment by male 'modesty police' to cover themselves in dull, black, unflattering jijabs in public?
Incredibly, this Islamic fundamentalism was spreading and an increasing number of women were allowing themselves to be the possession of their husbands or the 'wards' of their father and brothers! Increasingly, especially in the West, an Islamic cultural identity required wearing the uniform of a Moslem at least in public in an assertive rejection of Western, materialist liberalism. So, how has resurgent fundamentalist Islam fared in its homeland in Iran? To find out, a group known as the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN) conducted an online survey with the collaboration of Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.
The result may be surprising!
According to this report:
The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation.
Reaching Iranians online
Iran’s census claims that 99.5% of the population are Muslim, a figure that hides the state’s active hostility toward irreligiosity, conversion and unrecognised religious minorities.
Iranians live with an ever-present fear of retribution for speaking against the state. In Iran, one cannot simply call people or knock on doors seeking answers to politically sensitive questions. That’s why the anonymity of digital surveys offers an opportunity to capture what Iranians really think about religion.
Since the revolution, literacy rates have risen sharply and the urban population has grown substantially. Levels of internet penetration in Iran are comparable to those in Italy, with around 60 million users and the number grows relentlessly: 70% of adults are members of at least one social media platform.
For our survey on religious belief in Iran, we targeted diverse digital channels after analysing which groups showed lower participation rates in our previous large-scale surveys. The link to the survey was shared by Kurdish, Arab, Sufi and other networks. And our research assistant successfully convinced Shia pro-regime channels to spread it among their followers, too. We reached mass audiences by sharing the survey on Instagram pages and Telegram channels, some of which had a few million followers.
After cleaning our data, we were left with a sample of almost 40,000 Iranians living in Iran. The sample was weighted and balanced to the target population of literate Iranians aged above 19, using five demographic variables and voting behaviour in the 2017 presidential elections.
A secular and diverse Iran
Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.
In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.
Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.
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With this loss of belief in heaven and hell, Islam has lost one of its most important coercive weapons - the fear of Hell. As deconverted Moslems (and Christians) have said, it was losing that last, overpowering, cloying fear of an eternity of torture that was the hardest thing to let go of in their move to Atheism. Once that was gone, the sense of liberation was exhilarating.
And the loss of belief in Heaven has deprived the fundamentalists of the promise of reward for martyrdom. On these figures, 70% of Iranians are no longer subject to this carrot and stick coercion. Lost also is the fear of jinns or genies, from which religious conformity was supposed to provide protection.
These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.
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The astonishing change in attitude towards religion is perhaps best shown in these movement figures with almost half, and in the case of the youngest cohort - the 20-29 year olds - well over half the respondents reporting moving from being religious to non-religious. Even the 50+ cohort, many of whom would have been the 1979 revolutionaries, have lost almost half their numbers to non-belief and their children in the 30-49 year-old cohort, have lost over half their number from Islam, overwhelmingly to non-belief, but also to other religions.
The role of improved education, often the death knell for religion, is reflected in the fact that 51% if respondents have reported moving from faith to non-religious.
A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being “sick”). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.
Source Religion and legislation
We found that societal secularisation was also linked to a critical view of the religious governance system: 68% agreed that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers hold a parliamentary majority, and 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil.
Even the hijab, once that symbol of resurgent Islam and, to us in the West, of the subjugation of women and maybe to Moslem women, of their increasing confidence in the religion and cultural identity, is now losing favour!
So little has been the direct influence of the West in Iran that this major change in social attitudes must have come largely from within, as improved education has exposed Iranian to new ideas and. The same secular forces folowing the European Enlightenment, are now at play in Iran. One manifestation of this increasing secularisation in Iran is a massive fall in the birth-rate - often associated with increased secularisation. This year, Iran recorded its lowest ever population growth of under 1%.
And of course, with increased and increasing access to the Internet and to social networking sites, the online antics of Islamic fundamentalists, cannot be excluded. 60 million Iranians now have Internet access. As in the USA, exposure to the insanity of religious fundamentalists in the social media is probably a major driver away from religion and towards non-belief.
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