Battle for the Soul of Islam
By James M. Dorsey
This story was first published in Horizons
TROUBLE is brewing in the backyard of Muslim-majority states
competing for religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world in what
amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam. Shifting youth attitudes towards
religion and religiosity threaten to undermine the rival efforts of Saudi
Arabia, Turkey, Iran and, to a lesser degree, the United Arab Emirates, to
cement their individual state-controlled interpretations of Islam as the Muslim
world’s dominant religious narrative. Each of the rivals see their efforts as key
to securing their autocratic or authoritarian rule as well as advancing their
endeavors to carve out a place for themselves in a new world order in which power
is being rebalanced.
Research and opinion polls consistently show that the gap
between the religious aspirations of youth—and, in the case of Iran other age
groups—and state-imposed interpretations of Islam is widening. The shifting
attitudes amount to a rejection of Ash’arism, the fundament of centuries-long
religiously legitimized authoritarian rule in the Sunni Muslim world that
stresses the role of scriptural and clerical authority. Mustafa Akyol, a
prominent Turkish Muslim intellectual, argues that Ash’arism has dominated
Muslim politics for centuries at the expense of more liberal strands of the
faith “not because of its merits, but because of the support of the states that
ruled the medieval Muslim world.”
Similarly, Nadia Oweidat, a student of the history of Islamic
thought, notes that “no topic has impacted the region more profoundly than religion.
It has changed the geography of the region, it has changed its language, it has
changed its culture. It has been shaping the region for thousands of years.
[...] Religion controls every aspect of people who live in the Arab world.”
The polls and research suggest that youth are increasingly
skeptical towards religious and worldly authority. They aspire to more
individual, more spiritual experiences of religion. Their search leads them in
multiple directions that range from changes in personal religious behavior that
deviates from that proscribed by the state to conversions in secret to other
religions even though apostasy is banned and punishable by death, to an
abandonment of organized religion all together in favor of deism, agnosticism,
or atheism.
“The youth are not interested in institutions or organizations.
These do not attract them or give them any incentive; just the opposite, these
institutions and organizations and their leadership take advantage of them only
when they are needed for their attendance and for filling out the crowds,” said
Palestinian scholar and former Hamas education minister Nasser al-Din al-Shaer.
Atheists and converts cite perceived discriminatory provisions
in Islam’s legal code towards various Muslim sects, non-Muslims, and women as a
reason for turning their back on the faith. “The primary thing that led me to
atheism is Islam’s moral aspect. How can, for example, a merciful and
compassionate God, said to be more merciful than a woman on her baby, permit
slavery and the trade of slaves in slave markets? How come He permits rape of
women simply because they are war prisoners? These acts would not be committed
by a merciful human being much less by a merciful God,” said Hicham Nostic, a
Moroccan atheist, writing under a pen name.
Revival, Reversal
The recent research and polls suggest a reversal of an Islamic
revival that scholars like John Esposito in the 1990s and Jean-Paul Carvalho in
2009 observed that was bolstered by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the
results of a 1996 World Values Survey that reported a strengthening of
traditional religious values in the Muslim world, the rise of Turkish leader
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the initial Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in
Egypt and Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts.
“The indices of Islamic reawakening in personal life are many:
increased attention to religious observances (mosque attendance, prayer,
fasting), proliferation of religious programming and publications, more
emphasis on Islamic dress and values, the revitalization of Sufism (mysticism).
This broader-based renewal has also been accompanied by Islam’s reassertion in
public life: an increase in Islamically oriented governments, organizations,
laws, banks, social welfare services, and educational institutions,” Esposito
noted at the time.
Carvalho argued that an economic “growth reversal which raised
aspirations and led subsequently to a decline in social mobility which left
aspirations unfulfilled among the educated middle class (and) increasing income
inequality and impoverishment of the lower-middle class” was driving the
revival. The same factors currently fuel a shift away from traditional,
Orthodox, and ultra-conservative values and norms of religiosity.
The shift in Muslim-majority countries also contrasts starkly
with a trend towards greater religious Orthodoxy in some Muslim minority
communities in Europe. A 2018 report by the Dutch government’s Social and
Cultural Planning Bureau noted that the number of Muslims of Turkish and
Moroccan descent who strictly observe traditional religious precepts had
increased by approximately eight percent. Dutch citizens of Turkish and
Moroccan descent account for two-thirds of the country’s Muslim community. The
report suggested that in a pluralistic society in which Muslims are a minority,
“the more personal, individualistic search for true Islam can lead to youth
becoming more strict in observance than their parents or environment ever
were.”
Changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity that mirror
shifting attitudes in non-Muslim countries are particularly risky for leaders,
irrespective of their politics, who cloak themselves in the mantle of religion
as well as nationalism and seek to leverage that in their geopolitical pursuit
of religious soft power. The 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as mass
anti-government protests in various Middle Eastern countries in 2019 and 2020
spotlighted the subversiveness of the change. “The Arab Spring was the tipping
point in the shift [...]. It was the epitome of how we see the change. The
calls were for ‘dawla madiniya,’ a civic state. A civic state is as close as
you can come to saying [...], we want a state where the laws are written by
people so that we can challenge them, we can change them, we can adjust them.
It’s not God’s law, it’s madiniya, it’s people’s law,” Oweidat, the Islamic
thought scholar, said.
Akyol went further, noting in a journal article that “too many
terrible things have recently happened in the Arab world in the name of Islam.
These include the sectarian civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where most of
the belligerents have fought in the name of God, often with appalling brutality.
The millions of victims and bystanders of these wars have experienced shock and
disillusionment with religious politics, and more than a few began asking
deeper questions.”
The 2011 popular Arab revolts reverberated across the Middle
East, reshaping relations between states as well as domestic policies, even
though initial achievements of the protesters were rolled back in Egypt and
sparked wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a 3.5
year-long diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in part to cut their youth
off from access to the Gulf state’s popular Al Jazeera television network that
supported the revolts and Islamist groups that challenged the region’s
autocratic rulers. Seeking to lead and tightly control a social and economic
reform agenda driven by youth who were enamored by the uprisings, Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman “sought to recapture this mandate of change, wrap it
in a national mantle, and sever it from its Arab Spring associations. The
boycott and ensuing nationalist campaign against Qatar became central to
achieving that,” said Gulf scholar Kristin Smith Diwan.
Referring to the revolts, Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi
suggested that “the Arab Spring may have stalled, if not receded, but when it
comes to religious beliefs and attitudes, a generational dynamic is at play.
Large numbers of individuals are tilting away from the rote religiosity
Westerners reflexively associate with the Arab world.”
Benchemsi went on to argue that “in today’s Arab world, it’s not
religiosity that is mandatory; it’s the appearance of it. Nonreligious
attitudes and beliefs are tolerated as long as they’re not conspicuous. As a
system, social hypocrisy provides breathing room to secular lifestyles, while
preserving the façade of religion. Atheism, per se, is not the problem.
Claiming it out loud is. So those who publicize their atheism in the Arab world
are fighting less for freedom of conscience than for freedom of speech.” The
same could be said for the right to convert or opt for alternative practices of
Islam.
Syrian journalist Sham al-Ali recounts the story of a female
relative who escaped the civil war to Germany where she decided to remove her
hijab. Her father, who lives in Turkey, accepted his daughter’s decision but
threatened to disown her if she posted pictures of herself uncovered on
Facebook. “His issue was not with his daughter’s abandonment of religious duty,
but with her publicizing that before her family and society at large,” Al-Ali
said.
Neo-patriarchism
Neo-patriarchism, a pillar of Arab autocratic rule, heightens
concern about public appearance and perception. A phrase coined by
American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neo-patriarchism involves
projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocratic Arab
society, according to Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a
patriarch around which the national as well as the nuclear family are
organized. Relations between a ruler and the ruled are replicated in the relationship
between a father and his children. In both settings, the paternal will is
absolute, mediated in society as well as the family by a forced consensus based
on ritual and coercion.
As a result, neo-patriarchism often reinforces pressure to abide
by state-imposed religious behavior and at the same time fuels changes in
attitudes towards religion and religiosity among youth who resent their
inability to chart a path of their own. Primary and secondary schools have
emerged as one frontline in the struggle to determine the boundaries of
religious expression and behavior. Recent developments in Egypt, a brutal
autocracy, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, offer
contrasting perspectives on how the tug of war between students and parents,
schoolteachers and administrations, and the state plays out.
Mada Masr, Egypt’s foremost independent news outlet, documented
how in 2020 Egyptian schoolgirls who refused to wear a hijab were being coerced
and publicly shamed in the knowledge that the education ministry was reluctant
to enforce its policy not to mandate the wearing of a headdress. “The model,
decent girl is expected to dress modestly and wear a hijab to signal her pride
in her religious identity, since hijab is what distinguishes her from a
Christian girl,” said Lamia Lotfy, a gender consultant and rights activist.
Teachers at public high schools said they were reluctant to take boys to task
for violating dress codes because they were more likely to push back and create
problems.
In sharp contrast, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut
Cholil Qoumas issued in early 2021 a decree together with the ministers of home
affairs and education threatening to sanction state schools that seek to impose
religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations. The decree was
issued amid a public row sparked by the refusal of a Christian student to obey
her school principal’s instructions requiring all pupils to wear Islamic
clothing. Qoumas is a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim
movement and foremost advocate of theological reform in line with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. “Religions do not promote conflict, neither do
they justify acting unfairly against those who are different,” Qoumas said.
A Muslim nation that replaced a decades long autocratic regime
with a democracy in a popular revolt in 1998, Indonesia is Middle Eastern
rulers’ worst nightmare. The shifting attitudes of Middle Eastern youth towards
religion and religiosity suggest that experimentation with religion in
post-revolt Indonesia is a path that it would embark on if given the opportunity.
Indonesia is “where the removal of constraints imposed by an authoritarian
regime has opened up the imaginative terrain, allowing particular types of religious
beliefs and practices to emerge [...]. The Indonesian cases study [...] brings
into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life
elsewhere,” said Indonesia scholar Nur Amali Ibrahim.
A 2019 poll of Arab youth showed that two-thirds of those
surveyed felt that religion played too large a role in their lives, up from 50
percent four years earlier. Nearly 80 percent argued that religious
institutions needed to be reformed while half said that religious values were
holding the Arab world back. Surveys conducted over the last decade by Arab
Barometer, a research network at Princeton University and the University of
Michigan, showed a growing number of youths turning their backs on religion.
“Personal piety has declined some 43 percent over the past decade, indicating
less than a quarter of the population now define themselves as religious,” the
survey concluded.
With the trend being the strongest among Libyans, many Libyan
youth gravitate towards secretive atheist Facebook pages. They often are
products of the UAE’s failed attempt to align the hard power of its military
intervention in Libya with religious soft power. Said, a 25-year-old student
from Benghazi, the stronghold of the UAE and Saudi-backed rebel forces led by
self-appointed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, turned his back on religion after
his cousin was beheaded in 2016 for speaking out against militants. UAE backing
of Haftar has involved the population of his army by Madkhalists, a branch of
Salafism named after a Saudi scholar who preaches absolute obedience to the
ruler and projects the kingdom as a model of Islamic governance. “My cousin’s
death occurred during a period when I was deeply religious, praying five times
a day and studying ten new pages of the Qur’an each evening,” Said said.
A majority of respondents in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, and Iran said in a 2017 poll conducted by
Washington-based John Zogby Associates that they wanted religious movements to
focus on personal faith and spiritual guidance and not involve themselves in
politics. Iraq and Palestine were the outliers with a majority favoring a
political role for religious groups.
The response to polls in the second half of the second decade of
the twenty-first century contrasts starkly with attitudes expressed in a survey
of the world’s Muslims by the Pew Research Center several years earlier. Pew’s
polling suggested that ultra-conservative attitudes long promoted by Saudi
Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar that legitimized authoritarian and autocratic
regimes remained popular. More than 70 percent of those surveyed at the time in
South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa favored making
Sharia the law of the land and granting Sharia courts jurisdiction over family
law and property disputes.
Those numbers varied broadly, however, when respondents were
asked about specific issues like apostasy and corporal punishment.
Three-quarters of South Asians favored the death sentence for apostasy as
opposed to 56 percent in the Middle East and only 27 percent in Southeast Asia,
while 81 percent in South Asia supported physical punishment compared to 57
percent in the Middle East and North Africa and 46 percent in Southeast Asia.
South Asia emerged as the only part of the Muslim world in which respondents
preferred a strong leader to democracy while a majority of the faithful in all
three regions viewed religious freedom as positive. Between 65 and 79 percent
in all regions wanted to see religious leaders have political influence.
Honor killings may be the one area where attitudes have not
changed that much in recent years. Arab Barometer’s polling in 2018 and 2019
showed that more people thought honor killings were acceptable than
homosexuality. In most countries polled, young Arabs appeared more likely than
their parents to condone honor killings. Social media and occasional protests
bear that out. Thousands rallied in early 2020 in Hebron, a conservative city
on the West Bank, after the Palestinian Authority signed the UN Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Nonetheless, the assertions by Saudi Arabia that projects itself
as the leader of an unidentified form of moderate Islam that preaches absolute
obedience to the ruler and by advocates of varying strands of political Islam
such as Turkey and Iran ring hollow in light of the dramatic shift in attitudes
towards religion and religiosity.
Acknowledging Change
Among the Middle Eastern rivals for religious soft power, the
United Arab Emirates, populated in majority by non-nationals, may be the only
one to emerge with a cleaner slate. The UAE is the only contender to have
started acknowledging changing attitudes and demographic realities. Authorities
in November 2020 lifted the ban on consumption of alcohol and cohabitation
among unmarried couples. In a further effort to reach out to youth, the UAE
organized in 2021 a virtual consultation with 3,000 students aimed at
motivating them to think innovatively over the country’s path in the next 50
years.
Such moves do not fundamentally eliminate the risk that the
changing attitudes may undercut the religious soft power efforts of the UAE and
its Middle Eastern competitors. The problem for rulers like the UAE and Saudi
crown princes, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman, respectively, is
that the loosening of social restrictions in Saudi Arabia—including the
emasculation of the kingdom’s religious police, the lifting of a ban on women’s
driving, less strict implementation of gender segregation, the introduction of
Western-style entertainment and greater professional opportunities for women,
and a degree of genuine religious tolerance and pluralism in the UAE—are only
first steps in responding to youth aspirations.
“People are sick and tired of organized religion and being told
what to do. That is true for all Gulf states and the rest of the Arab world,”
quipped a Saudi businessman. Social scientist Ellen van de Bovenkamp describes
Moroccans she interviewed for her PhD thesis as living “a personalized, self-made
religiosity, in which ethics and politics are more important than rituals.”
Nevertheless, religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE,
Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and Morocco continue to project interpretations of the
faith that serve the state and are often framed in the language of tolerance
and inter-faith dialogue but preserve outmoded legal categories, traditions,
and scripture that date back centuries. Outdated concepts of slavery, who is a
believer and who is an infidel, apostasy, blasphemy, and physical punishment
that need reconceptualization remain in terms of religious law frozen in time. Many
of those concepts, with the exception of slavery that has been banned in
national law yet remains part of Islamic law, have been embedded in national legislations.
While Turkey continues to, at least nominally, adhere to its
secular republican origins, it is no different from its rivals when it comes to
grooming state-aligned clergymen, whose ability to think out of the box and
develop new interpretations of the faith is impeded by a religious education
system that stymies critical thinking and creativity. Instead, it too
emphasizes the study of Arabic and memorization of the Qur’an and other
religious texts and creates a religious and political establishment that
discourages, if not penalizes, innovation.
Widening the gap between state projections of religion and
popular aspirations is the fact that governments’ subjugation of religious
establishments turns clerics and scholars into regime parrots and fuels youth
skepticism towards religious institutions and leaders.
“Youth have [...] witnessed how religious figures, who still
remain influential in many Arab societies, can sometimes give in to change even
if they have resisted it initially. This not only feeds into Arab youth’s
skepticism towards religious institutions but also further highlights the inconsistency
of the religious discourse and its inability to provide timely explanations or
justifications to the changing reality of today,” said Gulf scholar Eman
Alhussein in a commentary on the 2020 Arab Youth Survey.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, the co-organizer of an online survey in 2020
of Iranian attitudes towards religion that revealed a stunning rejection of
state-imposed adherence to conservative religious mores as well as the role of
religion in public life noted the widening gap “becomes an existential question.
The state wants you to be something that you don’t want to be [...]. “Political
disappointment steadily turned into religious disappointment [...]. Iranians
have turned away from institutional religion on an unprecedented scale.”
In a similar vein, Turkish art historian Nese Yildiran recently
warned that a fatwa issued by President Erdogan’s Directorate of Religious
Affairs or Diyanet declaring popular talismans to ward off “the evil eye” as
forbidden by Islam fueled criticism of one of the best-funded branches of
government. The fatwa followed the issuance of similar religious opinions
banning the dying of men’s moustaches and beards, feeding dogs at home,
tattoos, and playing the national lottery as well as statements that were
perceived to condone or belittle child abuse and violence against women.
Although compatible with a trend across the Middle East, the
Iranian survey’s results, which is based on 50,000 respondents who
overwhelmingly said they resided in the Islamic republic, suggested that Iranians
were in the frontlines of the region’s quest for religious change.
Funded by Washington-based Iranian human rights activist Ladan
Boroumand, the Iranian survey, coupled with other research and opinion polls
across the Middle East and North Africa, suggests that not only Muslim youth,
but also other age groups, who are increasingly skeptical towards religious and
worldly authority, aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of
religion.
Their quest runs the gamut from changes in personal religious
behavior to conversions in secret to other religions because apostasy is banned
and, in some cases, punishable by death, to an abandonment of religion in favor
of agnosticism or atheism. Responding to the survey, 80 percent of the
participants said they believed in God but only 32.2 percent identified
themselves as Shiite Muslims—a far lower percentage than asserted in official
figures of predominantly Shiite Iran.
More than one third of the respondents said that they either did
not belong to a religion or were atheists or agnostics. Between 43 and 53
percent, depending on age group, suggested that their religious views had
changed over time with 6 percent of those saying that they had converted to
another religious orientation.
In addition, 68 percent said they opposed the inclusion of
religious precepts in national legislation. Moreover 70 percent rejected public
funding of religious institutions while 56 percent opposed mandatory religious
education in schools. Almost 60 percent admitted that they do not pray, and 72
percent disagreed with women being obliged to wear a hijab in public.
An unpublished slide of the survey shows the change in
religiosity reflected in the fact that an increasing number of Iranians no
longer name their children after religious figures.
A five-minute YouTube clip uploaded by an ultra-conservative
channel allegedly related to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards attacked the survey
despite having distributed the questionnaire once the pollsters disclosed in
their report that the poll had been supported by an exile human rights group.
“Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle
East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap
operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most
Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible [...]. Alcohol is
banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza [...]. Religion felt
frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a
minority,” wrote journalist Nicholas Pelham based on a visit in 2019 during
which he was detained for several weeks.
In yet another sign of rejection of state-imposed expressions of
Islam, Iranians have sought to alleviate the social impact of COVID-19 related
lockdowns and restrictions on face-to-face human contact by acquiring dogs,
cats, birds, and even reptiles as pets. The Islamic Republic has long viewed
pets as a fixture of Western culture. One of the main reasons for keeping pets
in Iran is that people no longer believe in the old cultural, religious, or
doctrinal taboos as the unalterable words of God. “This shift towards
deconstructing old taboos signals a transformation of the Iranian identity—from
the traditional to the new,” said psychologist Farnoush Khaledi.
Pets are one form of dissent; clandestine conversions are
another. Exiled Iranian Shiite scholar Yaser Mirdamadi noted that “Iranians no
longer have faith in state-imposed religion and are groping for religious
alternatives.”
A former Israeli army intelligence chief, retired Lt. Col. Marco
Moreno, puts the number of converts in Iran, a country of 83 million, at about
one million. Moreno’s estimate may be an overestimate. Other studies in put the
figure at between 100,000 and 500,000. Whatever the number is, the conversions
fit a trend not only in Iran but across the Muslim world of changing attitudes
towards religion, a rejection of state-imposed interpretations of Islam, and a
search for more individual and varied religious experiences. Iranian press
reports about the discovery of clandestine church gatherings in homes in the
holy city of Qom suggest conversions to Christianity began more than a decade
ago. “The fact that conversions had reached Qom was an indication that this was
happening elsewhere in the country,” Mirdamadi, the Shiite cleric, said.
Seeing the converts as an Israeli asset, Moreno backed
production of a two-hour documentary, Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, produced by
two American Evangelists, one of which resettled on the Israeli-occupied Golan
Heights, that asserts that Iran’s underground community of converts to
Christianity is the world’s fastest growing church.
“What if I told you the mosques are empty inside Iran?” said a
church leader in the film, his identity masked and his voice distorted to avoid
identification. Based on interviews with Iranian converts while they were
travelling abroad, the documentary opens with a scene on an Indonesian beach
where they meet with the filmmakers for a religious training session.
“What if I told you that Islam is dead? What if I told you that
the mosques are empty inside Iran? [...] What if I told you no one follows
Islam inside of Iran? Would you believe me? This is exactly what is happening
inside of Iran. God is moving powerfully inside of Iran?” the church leader
added. Unsurprisingly, given the film’s Israeli backing and the filmmaker’s
affinity with Israel, the documentary emphasizes the converts’ break with
Iran’s staunch rejection of the Jewish State by emphasizing their empathy for
Judaism and Israel.
Reduced Religiosity
The Iran survey’s results as well as observations by analysts
and journalists like Pelham stroke with responses to various polls of Arab
public opinion in recent years and fit a global pattern of reduced religiosity.
A 2019 Pew Research Center study concluded that adherence to Christianity in
the United States was declining at a rapid pace.
The Arab Youth Survey found that, despite 40 percent of those
polled defining religion as the most important constituent element of their
identity, 66 percent saw a need for religious institutions to be reformed. “The
way some Arab countries consume religion in the political discourse, which is
further amplified on social media, is no longer deceptive to the youth who can
now see through it,” Alhussein, the Gulf scholar, said.
A 2018 Arab Opinion Index poll suggested that public opinion may
support the reconceptualization of Muslim jurisprudence. Almost 70 percent of
those polled agreed that “no religious authority is entitled to declare
followers of other religions to be infidels.” Similarly, 70 percent of those
surveyed rejected the notion that democracy was incompatible with Islam while
76 percent viewed it as the most appropriate system of governance.
What that means in practice is, however, less clear. Arab public
opinion appears split down the middle when it comes to issues like separation
of religion and politics or the right to protest.
Arab Barometer director Michael Robbins cautioned in a
commentary in the Washington Post, co-authored with international affairs
scholar Lawrence Rubin, that recent moves by the government of Sudan to
separate religion and state may not enjoy public support.
The transitional government brought to office in 2020 by a
popular revolt that topped decades of Islamist rule by ousted President Omar
al-Bashir agreed in peace talks with Sudanese rebel groups to a “separation of
religion and state.” The government also ended the ban on apostasy and
consumption of alcohol by non-Muslims and prohibited corporal punishment,
including public flogging.
Robbins and Rubin noted that 61 percent of those surveyed on the
eve of the revolt believed that Sudanese law should be based on the Sharia or
Islamic law defined by two-thirds of the respondents as ensuring the provision
of basic services and lack of corruption. The researchers, nonetheless, also
concluded that youth favored a reduced role of religious leaders in political
life. They said youth had soured on the idea of religion-based governance
because of widespread corruption during the region of Al-Bashir who professed
his adherence to religious principles.
“If the transitional government can deliver on providing basic
services to the country’s citizens and tackling corruption, the formal shift
away from Sharia is likely to be acceptable in the eyes of the public. However,
if these problems remain, a new set of religious leaders may be able to
galvanize a movement aimed at reinstituting Sharia as a means to achieve these
objectives,” Robbins and Rubin warned.
Writing at the outset of the popular revolt that toppled
Al-Bashir, Islam scholar and former Sudanese diplomat Abdelwahab El-Affendi
noted that “for most Sudanese, Islamism came to signify corruption, hypocrisy,
cruelty, and bad faith. Sudan is perhaps the first genuinely anti-Islamist
country in popular terms. But being anti-Islamist in Sudan does not mean being
secular.”
It is a warning that is as valid for Sudan as it is for much of
the Arab and Muslim world.
Saudi columnist Wafa al-Rashid sparked fiery debate on social
media after calling in a local newspaper for a secular state in the kingdom.
“How long will we continue to shy away from enlightenment and change? Religious
enlightenment, which is in line with reality and the thinking of youth, who
rebelled and withdrew from us because we are no longer like them. [...] We no
longer speak their language or understand their dreams,” Al-Rashid wrote.
Asked in a poll conducted by The Washington Institute of Near
East Policy whether “it’s a good thing we aren’t having big street
demonstrations here now the way they do in some other countries”—a reference to
the past decade of popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon,
Iraq and Sudan—Saudi public opinion was split down the middle. The numbers indicate
that 48 percent of respondents agreed and 48 percent disagreed. Saudis, like
most Gulf Arabs, are likely less inclined to take grievances to the streets.
Nonetheless, the poll indicates that they may prove to be more empathetic to
protests should they occur.
Tamimi Arab, the Iran pollster, argued that his Iran survey
“shows that there is a social basis” for concern among authoritarian and
autocratic governments that employ religion to further their geopolitical goals
and seek to maintain their grip on potentially restive populations. His warning
reverberates in the responses by governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and
elsewhere in the Middle East to changing attitudes towards religion and
religiosity. They demonstrate the degree to which they perceive the change as a
threat, often expressed in existential terms.
Mohammad Mehdi Mirbaqeri, a prominent Shiite cleric and member
of Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts that appoints the country’s supreme
leader, described COVID-19 in late 2020 as a “secular virus” and a declaration
of war on “religious civilization” and “religious institutions.”
Saudi Arabia went further by defining the “calling for atheist
thought in any form” as terrorism in its anti-terrorism law. Saudi dissident
and activist Rafi Badawi was sentenced on charges of apostasy to ten years in
prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis should be obliged to adhere
to Islam and asserting that the faith did not have answers to all questions.
Analysts, writers, journalists, and pollsters have traced
changes in attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider
Muslim world for much of the past decade, if not longer. A Western Bangladesh
scholar resident in Dacca in 1989 recalled Bangladeshis looking for a copy of
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses as soon as it was banned by Iran’s Ayatollah
Khomeini, who condemned the British author to death. “It was the allure of
forbidden fruit. Yet, I also found that many were looking for things to
criticize, an excuse to think differently,” the scholar wrote.
Widely viewed as a bastion of ultra-conservatism. Malaysia’s top
religious regulatory body, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department
(Jakim), which responsible for training Islamic teachers and preparing weekly
state-controlled Friday sermons, has long portrayed liberalism and pluralism as
threats, pointing to a national fatwa that in 2006 condemned liberalism as
heretical. “The pulpit would like to state today that many tactics are being
undertaken by irresponsible people to weaken Muslim unity, among them through
spreading new but inverse thinking like Pluralism, Liberalism, and such. The
pulpit would like to state that the Liberal movement contains concepts that are
found to have deviated from the Islamic faith and shariah,” read a 2014 Friday
sermon drafted and distributed by Jakim.
The fatwa echoed a similar legal opinion issued a year earlier
by Indonesia’s semi-governmental Council of Religious Scholars (MUI) labelled
with SIPILIS as its acronym to equate secularism, pluralism, and liberalism
with the venereal disease. The council was headed at the time by current Vice
President Ma’ruf Amin, a prominent Nahdlatul Ulama figure.
Challenging attempts by governments and religious authorities to
suppress changing attitudes rather than engage with groups groping for greater
religious freedom, Kuwaiti writer Sajed al-Abdali noted in 2012 that “it is
essential that we acknowledge today that atheism exists and is increasing in
our society, especially among our youth, and evidence of this is in no short
supply.”
Al-Abdali sounded his alarm three years prior to the publication
of a Pew Research Center study that sought to predict the growth trajectories
of the world’s religions by the year 2050. The study suggested that the number
of people among the 300 million inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa
that were unaffiliated with any faith would remain stable at about 0.6 percent
of the population.
Two years later, the Egyptian government’s religious advisory
body, Dar al-Ifta Al-Missriya, published a scientifically disputed survey that
sought to project the number of atheists in the region as negligible. The
survey identified 2,293 atheists, including 866 Egyptians, 325 Moroccans, 320
Tunisians, 242 Iraqis, 178 Saudis, 170 Jordanians, 70 Sudanese, 56 Syrians, 34
Libyans, and 32 Yemenis. It defined atheists as not only those who did not
believe in God but also as encompassing converts to other religions and
advocates of a secular state. A poll conducted that same year by Al Azhar,
Cairo’s ancient citadel of Islamic learning, concluded that Egypt counted 10.7
million atheists. Al Azhar’s Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, warned at the time on
state television that the flight from religion constituted a social problem.
A 2012 survey by international polling firm WIN/Gallup
International reported that 5 percent of Saudis—or more than one million
people—identified themselves as “convinced atheists” on par with the percentage
in the United States; while 19 percent described themselves as non-religious.
By the same token, Benchemsi, the Moroccan journalist, found 250 Arab
atheism-related pages or groups while searching the internet, with memberships
ranging from a few individuals to more than 11,000. “And these numbers only
pertain to Arab atheists (or Arabs concerned with the topic of atheism) who are
committed enough to leave a trace online,” Benchemsi said, noting that many
more were unlikely to publicly disclose their beliefs.
The picture is replicated across the Middle East. The number of
atheists and agnostics in Iraq, for example, is growing. Iraqi writer and
one-time Shiite cleric Gaith al-Tamimi argued that religious figures have come
to represent all that’s inherently wrong in Iraqi politics society. Iraqis of
all generations seek to escape religious dogma, he says, adding that “Iraqis
are questioning the role religion serves today.” Fadhil, a 30-year-old from the
southern port city of Basra complained that religious leaders “overuse and
misuse God’s name, police human bodies, prohibit extramarital sex, and police
the bodies of women.” Changing attitudes towards religion figured prominently
in mass anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019 and 2020 that rejected
sectarianism and called for a secular national Iraqi identity.
Even in Syria, a fulcrum of militant and ultra-conservative
forms of Islam that fed on a decade of brutal civil war and foreign
intervention, many concluded in the words of Al-Ali, the Syrian journalist,
that “religious and political authorities are ‘protective friends one of the other,’
and that political despotism stems from religious absolutism. [...] In Syria,
the prestige sheikhs had enjoyed was undermined alongside that of the regime.”
Religion and religious figures’ inability to explain the horror that Syria was
experiencing and that had uprooted the lives of millions drove many forced to
flee to question long-held beliefs.
Multiple Turkish surveys suggested that Erdogan’s goal of
raising a religious generation had backfired despite pouring billions of
dollars into religious education. Students often rejected religion, described
themselves as atheists, deists, or feminists, and challenged the interpretation
of Islam taught in schools. A 2019 survey by polling and data company IPSOS
reported that only 12 percent of Turks trusted religious officials and 44
percent distrusted clerics. “We have declined when religious sincerity and
morality expressed by the people is taken into account,” said Ali Bardakoglu,
who headed Erdogan’s Religious Affairs Department or Diyanet from 2003 to 2010.
Unaware that microphones had not been muted, Erdogan expressed
concern a year earlier to his education minister about the spread of deism, a
belief in a God that does not intervene in the universe and that is not defined
by organized religion, among Turkish youth during a meeting of his party’s
parliamentary group. “No, no such thing can happen,” Erdogan ordained against
the backdrop of Turkish officials painting deism as a Western conspiracy
designed to weaken Turkey. Erdogan’s comments came in response to the
publication of an education ministry report that, in line with the subsequent
survey, warned that popular rejection of religious knowledge acquired through
revelation and religious teachings and a growing embrace of reason was on the
rise.
The report noted that increased enrollment in a rising number of
state-run religious Imam Hatip high schools had not stopped mounting
questioning of orthodox Islamic precepts. Neither had increased study of religion
in mainstream schools that deemphasized the teaching of evolution. The greater
emphasis on religion failed to advance Erdogan’s dream of a pious generation
that would have a Qur’an in one hand and a computer in the other. Instead,
reflecting a discussion on faith and youth among some 50 religion teachers, the
report suggested that lack of faith in educators had fueled the rise of deism.
Teachers were unable to answer the often-posed question: why does God not
intervene to halt evil and why does he remain silent? The report’s cautionary
note was bolstered by a flurry of anonymous confessions and personal stories by
deists as well as atheists recounted in newspaper interviews.
Acting on Erdogan’s instructions, Ali Erbas, the director of
Diyanet, declared war on deism. The government’s top cleric, Erbas blamed
Western missionaries seeking to convert Turkish youth to Christianity for
deism’s increased popularity. Erbas’ declaration followed a three-day
consultation with 70 religious scholars and bureaucrats convened by the
Directorate that identified “Deism, Atheism, Nihilism, Agnosticism” as the
enemy. Erdogan’s alarm and Erbas’ spinning of conspiracy theories constituted
attempts to detract attention from the fact that youth in Tukey, like in Iran
and the Arab world, were turning their back on orthodox and classical
interpretations of Islam on the back of increasingly authoritarian and
autocratic rule. Erdogan thundered that “there is no such thing” as LGBT and
added that “this country is national and spiritual, and will continue to walk
into the future as such” when protesting students displayed a poster depicting
one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, with LGBT flags.
“There is a dictatorship in Turkey. This drives people away from
religion,” said Temel Karamollaoglu, the leader of the Islamist Felicity Party
that opposes Erdogan’s AKP because of its authoritarianism. Turkey scholar
Mucahit Bilici described Turkish youths’ rejection of Orthodox and politicized
interpretations of Islam as “a flowering of post-Islamist sentiment” by a
“younger generation (that) is choosing the path of individualized spirituality
and a silent rejection of tradition.”
Saudi authorities view the high numbers in the WIN/Gallup
International as a threat to the religious legitimacy that the kingdom’s ruling
Al-Saud family has long cloaked itself in. The groundswell of aspirations that
have guided youth away from the confines of ultra-conservatism highlight failed
efforts of the government and the religious establishment going back to the
1980s. The culture and information ministry banned the word ‘modernity’ at the
time in a bid to squash an emerging debate that challenged the narrow confines
of ultra-conservatism as well as the authority of religion and the religious establishment
to govern personal and public life.
False Equation
The threat perceived by Saudi and other Middle Eastern autocrats
and authoritarians as well as conservative religious voices is fueled by an
implicit equation of atheism and/or rejection of state-imposed conservative and
ultra-conservative strands of the faith with anarchy.
“Any calls that challenge Islamic rule or Islamic ideology is
considered subversive in Saudi Arabia and would be subversive and could lead to
chaos,” said Saudi ambassador to the United Nations Abdallah al-Mouallimi. Echoing
journalist Benchemsi, Muallimi argued that “if (a person) was disbelieving in
God, and keeping that to himself, and conducting himself, nobody would do
anything or say anything about it. If he is going out in the public, and
saying, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ that’s subversive. He is inviting others to
retaliate.”
Similarly, Sheikh Ahmad Turki, speaking as the coordinator of
the anti-atheism campaign of the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, asserted that
atheism “is a national security issue. Atheists have no principles; it’s
certain that they have dysfunctional concepts—in ethics, views of the society
and even in their nationalistic affiliations. If [atheists] rebel against
religion, they will rebel against everything.’’
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have sought to
experiment with alternatives to orthodox and ultra-conservative strands of
Islam without surrendering state control by encouraging Al Azhar to embrace
legal reform that is influenced by Sufism, Islam’s mystical tradition. “There
is a movement of renewal of Islamic jurisprudence. [...] It’s a movement that
is funded by the wealthy Gulf countries. Don’t forget that one reason for the
success of the Salafis is the financial power that backed them for decades.
This financial power is now being directed to the Azharis, and they are taking
advantage of it. [...] Don’t underestimate what is happening. It might be a
true alternative to Salafism,” said Egyptian Islam scholar Wael Farouq.
By contrast, Pakistan, a country influenced by Saudi-inspired
ultra-conservatism, has stepped up its efforts to ringfence religious
minorities. In an act of overreach modelled on American insistence on
extra-territorial abidance by some of its laws, Pakistan laid down a gauntlet
in the struggle to define religious freedom by seeking to block and shut down a
U.S.-based website associated with Ahmadis on charges of blasphemy.
Ahmadis are a minority sect viewed as heretics by many Muslims
that have been targeted in Indonesia and elsewhere, but nowhere more so than in
Pakistan where they have been constitutionally classified as non-Muslims.
Blasphemy is potentially punishable in Pakistan with a death sentence.
The Pakistani effort was launched at a moment that anti-Ahmadi
and anti-Shiite sentiment in Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shia Muslim
minority, was on the rise. Mass demonstrations denounced Shiites as
“blasphemers” and “infidels” and called for their beheading as the number of
blasphemy cases being filed against Shiites in the courts mushroomed.
Shifting attitudes towards religion and religiosity raise
fundamental chicken and egg questions about the relationship between religious
and political reform, including what comes first and whether one is possible
without the other. Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama argues that religious reform
requires recontextualization of the faith as well as a revision of legal codes
and religious jurisprudence. The only Muslim institution to have initiated a
process of eliminating legal concepts in Islamic law that are obsolete or
discriminatory—such as the endorsement of slavery and notions of infidels and
dhimmis or People of the Book with lesser rights—Nahdlatul Ulama, a movement
created almost a century ago in opposition to Wahhabism, the puritan
interpretation of Islam on which Saudi Arabia was founded, is in alignment with
advocates of religious reform elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Said Mohammed Sharour, a Syrian Quranist who believed that the
Qur’an was Islam’s only relevant text, dismissed the Hadith—the compilation of
the Prophet’s sayings and the Sunnah, the traditions, and practices of the
Prophet that serve as a model for Muslims: “The religious heritage must be
critically read and interpreted anew. Cultural and religious reforms are more
important than political ones, as they are the preconditions for any secular
reforms.” Shahrour went on to say that the reforms, comparable to those of 16th
century scholar and priest Martin Luther’s reformation of Christianity, “must
include all those ideas on which the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks
based their interpretations of sources. [...] We simply have to rethink the
fundamental principles. It is [...] said that the fixed values of religion
cannot be rethought. But I say that it is exactly these values that we must
study and rethink.”
The thinking of Nahdlatul Ulama’s critical mass of Islamic
scholars and men like Shahrour offers little solace to authoritarian and
autocratic leaders and their religious allies in the Muslim world at a time
that Muslims are clamoring not only for political and religious change. If
anything, it puts them on the spot by offering a bottom-up alternative to
state-controlled religion that seeks to ensure the survival of autocratic
regimes and the protection of vested interests.
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