Skip to content
Read • Question • ConnectAnthony’s notes & researchReturn with a new question
Anthony’s NotesA personal field guide
From the notebook

How Religious Are Muslims?

Yes – there are serious, in-depth studies on how religious Muslim-majority societies actually are, including a lot of work that tries to get at “below the surface” belief, doubt, and non-religion. The picture is more nuanced than “everyone is devout” or “it’s all fake.”
I’ll break this into two parts: big cross-national data, then work on hidden doubt and non-belief.

1. Big cross-national surveys of religiosity in Muslim-majority countries

Pew Research Center: The World’s Muslims (2012, 2013)

Pew did probably the single most systematic, large-N look at Muslim religiosity worldwide, with tens of thousands of face-to-face interviews in 39 countries. They measured:

  • Belief in God, angels, prophets, etc.
  • Frequency of prayer and mosque attendance
  • Fasting in Ramadan, zakat
  • How important religion is in life
  • Support for sharia, religious courts, religiously-based morality laws, etc. (Pew Research Assets)
    Key takeaways:
  • In most Muslim-majority countries, overwhelming majorities say:
    • Religion is very important in their lives.
    • They fast in Ramadan and believe in God and Muhammad.
  • There is big variation:

World Values Survey & similar work: “How religious are people, really?”

The World Values Survey (WVS) and related studies try to measure depth of religiosity via:

  • “How important is God in your life?” (0–10 scale)
  • Self-description as religious/not religious
  • Mosque attendance
  • Confidence in religious institutions
    A well-cited paper Measuring Religiosity in a Majority Muslim Context uses WVS data from 14 majority-Muslim countries and analyzes how these different items cluster together (belief vs practice vs identity). It finds:
  • Muslims in these countries are on average highly religious, but:
  • “Religiosity” is multi-dimensional: some people are strong believers but not frequent mosque-goers; others are the reverse. (jstor.org)
    So there are attempts to model “how deep” religion runs, not just whether people tick “Muslim” on a census.

Arab Barometer runs repeated, representative surveys in MENA and has tracked changes in how religious people say they are.
Some key findings:

Religion, politics, and “depth”

There’s also work linking personal piety (prayer, mosque attendance, etc.) to support for religious governance or political Islam. For example:

  • Godly Governance: A Cross-National Examination of Religious Politics in Arab Muslim-Majority Countries uses Arab Barometer data to show that higher personal piety tends to correlate with more support for religious law and institutions, but that this is moderated by how liberal or conservative people’s interpretation of Islam is. (Arab Barometer)
  • Another Arab Barometer paper shows that support for “political Islam” has, in some places, begun to rebound after declines in the mid-2010s. (Arab Barometer)
    So “deeply religious” often does show up empirically as “more likely to want religion in law and politics,” but not always and not uniformly.

2. “Below the surface”: doubt, hidden non-belief, and secularization

Your question is really about this: what do people actually believe under social pressure to appear devout? There’s a growing body of work explicitly on non-religion, doubt, and quiet secularization in Muslim contexts.

Nonreligion & atheism in Muslim-majority societies

A few important pieces:

  • Jack David Eller, “A Quiet Tsunami: Nonreligion and Atheism in the Muslim World” (2022)
    Surveys research on nonreligion and atheism in Muslim societies and argues that:
    • Non-belief is more widespread than official stats suggest.
    • Legal and social risks mean atheists, agnostics, and doubters often stay underground.
    • Online communities, pseudonymous social media, and diaspora networks are crucial spaces where these views show up. (Nedaye Azadi)
  • Special issue “Spirituality, Religious Doubt, and Non-Religion in the Middle East” (van Nieuwkerk, 2021)
    Case studies from Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, Syria and diaspora look at:
    • People moving from strict Islam to looser, more “spiritual” positions.
    • Quiet skeptics who keep a Muslim identity outwardly but privately doubt core doctrines.
    • Freethinkers and nonbelievers organizing on social media under pseudonyms. (MDPI)
  • “Non-Belief: An Islamic Perspective” (Sevinç, 2018)
    Argues you can’t just import Western categories like “atheist” into Muslim contexts and expect them to map cleanly; identities are more fluid and people may navigate between public and private religiosity in strategic ways. (Secularism and Nonreligion)
  • Cambridge History of Atheism, chapter “Atheist Spring? Emerging Non-belief in the Islamic World”
    Describes how explicitly atheist discourses in Arab and broader Muslim-majority societies are gaining visibility due to the internet, even where legal penalties for apostasy are severe. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

Focused study: “Understanding Unbelief in Egypt”

The Understanding Unbelief project (University of Kent) did in-depth work specifically on non-belief and doubting Muslims in Egypt:

  • It relied on qualitative interviews with self-described non-believers, doubters, and spiritual-but-not-religious people.
  • It finds a spectrum:
    • Some are fully atheistic in belief but still perform Muslim identity to avoid trouble.
    • Others are in a liminal state, critical of institutions and certain doctrines but still engaged with Islamic tradition.
  • A recurring theme is double life: one face for family/society, another in private and online. (Research at Kent)
    Report overview (plain URL):
    https://research.kent.ac.uk/understandingunbelief/publications-2/understanding-unbelief-in-egypt/

What do these studies actually say about “depth”?

Putting it together, the research (quant + qual) suggests:

  1. Self-reported religiosity is genuinely high in many Muslim-majority societies.
    On average, people report strong belief in God, the importance of religion, high rates of fasting and prayer. This is not just “surface,” but it is shaped by social and political environments. (Pew Research Assets)
  2. There is a lot of internal diversity.
    Within the “religious,” you have:
    • Strict legalistic Islamists.
    • Personal-piety-focused believers who dislike politicized Islam.
    • Culturally Muslim but lax in practice.
      Survey work that decomposes religiosity into belief, identity, and practice shows these dimensions only partially overlap. (jstor.org)
  3. Hidden doubt and nonbelief do exist, but are hard to measure with standard surveys.
    Ethnographic and qualitative research consistently reports:
    • People who are privately atheist or agnostic but continue outward practice.
    • People who stay formally Muslim but re-interpret core doctrines in very non-orthodox ways.
      The gap between “what you tell a face-to-face interviewer in a conservative society” and “what you say anonymously online or to a trusted researcher” can be large. (Nedaye Azadi)
  4. Trends aren’t linear secularization; they look more like polarization and flux.
    Over the last decade or so in Arab countries you see:
    • Rise, then partial fall, in declared “not religious.”
    • Some evidence of declining personal piety overall, but with a segment doubling down on religious commitment. (SAGE Journals)
  5. Legal and social constraints matter a lot.
    Where apostasy and blasphemy are punished, people with weak or no belief are more likely to:
    • Maintain an official religious identity.
    • Underreport non-belief or doubt to surveyors.
      Researchers explicitly warn that this means all survey numbers on unbelief in such countries are likely underestimates. (Secularism and Nonreligion)

If you want to go deeper

Some good starting points (all plain URLs):