newswire: 9/25/2020
- According to a new survey, only 40% of Iranian citizens identify as Muslim. The survey offers evidence of widespread secularization: Fully 90% of respondents say they have been raised in a religious family, but 47% report that they have lost their faith. (GAMAAN)
- NH: In 2016, Iran’s census claimed that 99.6% of the country's population is Muslim. Six years earlier, a Pew Research Center survey reported a similar figure: 99.5%. But according to a new report from GAMAAN, a nonprofit organization that studies public opinion in Iran, the share of Iranian adults who identify as Muslim is vastly lower: just 40%.
- The report goes on to present several other surprising findings. Though Iran is officially a Shi’ite Muslim country, just 32% of the population identify as such. The second-most common religious affiliation is “none,” with 22%. Rounding out the top five are atheist (9%), Zoroastrian (7%), and “spiritual” (7%). Though 91% of respondents say they have been raised in a household that believes in God, just under half (47%) report they have lost their religion--a response more common among the urban, educated, and young. Fully 52% of 20- to 29-year-old Iranians say they have lost their religion, compared to 41% of Iranians age 50 and older.
- When asked how often they observe the duty to pray, almost 60% say they don’t pray. 27% pray five times a day, while less than 3% observe some other kind of regular prayer schedule (i.e. once a day or once a week). Another 10% pray “in times of felt spiritual need.”
- What explains the huge gap? Due to the threat of government retribution, the researchers faced a challenge trying to gather honest opinions about religion in Iran. Since around 94% of Iranians use the internet and 70% use social media, they decided to use anonymous digital surveys. They targeted different ethnic and religious networks and shared the survey on Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram. This opt-in approach, of course, calls into question whether this is a truly random sample since the responses “snowballed” from one sharer to the next. Ultimately, the researchers collected data from 40,000 literate Iranians living in Iran, That's a big sample size. But it's very likely that most who are most likely to respond are the most urban and secular Iranian households.
- Still, if these numbers are anywhere near the truth, they are stunning. They show a stark difference between the image of Iran projected to the world by the Supreme Leader and how the Iranian people feel about their own lives. Nearly three-quarters (72%) are opposed to requiring women to wear the hijab in public; 57% don’t believe in wearing the hijab altogether. What’s more, 68% think that religious prescriptions should not be part of legislation. And the share of those who believe no religion should have the right to proselytize in public (43%) outweighs those who believe all religions should have that right (41%). Only 4% think this right should be reserved exclusively for Muslims.
- What’s more, a third of the respondents said that they either drink regularly or occasionally. This is also most common among young people. While a majority of 20- to 29-year-olds (59%) either don’t drink alcohol or say they can’t buy it, 37% say they drink occasionally and 4% regularly. This is remarkable for a country where alcohol production and consumption is illegal. A 2017 study in The Lancet found a much lower incidence of drinking among Iranians: Only 5.7% of adults said they had consumed alcohol in the past year.
- One thing that’s not clear is the degree to which these numbers reflect a recent shift in attitudes, or whether these attitudes have always existed and just went unreported. We might be seeing a mix of secular attitudes that pre-date the revolution among older Iranians, more fervor among those who came of age during the revolutionary era, and a reversion to secular attitudes among urbanized Iranians under 40. This doesn’t necessarily mean Iran is on the verge of civil upheaval. Since most of these questions concern personal beliefs, many probably figure it’s easier to silently disagree than to revolt. But as the population grows more educated and urbanized, it’s not hard to imagine state power facing a new legitimacy crisis in the not-too-distant future--perhaps when Iran's next "youth wave" hits later in this decade. (See "Iran Ponders Its Low Birth Rate.")
