Arab Barometer data, an index that periodically measures opinion trends in the Arab world, clearly show that religion continues to play a key role in the lives of most people across the region, especially young people, and that this role is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
In the seventh cycle of surveys (2021-2022), it was found that people are more likely to consider themselves "religious", especially youth, compared to previous surveys conducted after the Arab Spring, with 9 out of 10 individuals surveyed in the twelve countries in the region surveyed stating that they are religious.
This change is particularly significant among young people. In Tunisia, 18-29-year-olds are now 15 percentage points less likely to consider themselves "irreligious" than three years ago. In other countries, there was a decline among young people by 3 percentage points in Morocco and Egypt, 12 points in Jordan, 8 points in Algeria, and 7 points in Palestine. In Iraq and Sudan, there has been little change among young people, while only Lebanon is the country where the proportion of young people who consider themselves "non-religious" has increased significantly (5 percentage points).
Although the relationship between religiosity and authoritarianism has been a subject of study in political, psychological and social sciences at least since the fifties, there is no easy answer to the question of whether religiosity promotes or hinders commitment to democracy. Previous research has largely pointed to religiosity as a source of anti-democratic tendencies, however, recent empirical evidence is less conclusive, suggesting that the impact of religiosity on democratic commitment can be positive, negative, or neutral.
This is at the global level, where approximately 62% of the world's population considers religion important in their daily lives, according to the Pew Center, which specializes in opinion polls, but what about the Arab region?
Five notes
In this article, we offer some introductory remarks with which we open the discussion on this topic, but the focus will be from the perspective of religious individuals themselves, not from the producers of religious discourse, both formal and informal.
First: Values and Priorities
One study answered the question: Did religiosity encourage or discourage participation in protest against authoritarian regimes during the Arab Spring? Using unique data collected in Tunisia and Egypt shortly after the fall of their regimes in 2011, I examined how different dimensions of religiosity were associated with higher or lower levels of protest during these important events.
The study reached a new conclusion: reading the Qur'an, not attending a mosque, is closely associated with an increased likelihood of participating in a protest. Moreover, this relationship is not just a function of supporting political Islam movements, but Quran readers are more sensitive to inequality and more supportive of democracy than others.
These results indicate the nature of an individual's religiosity in terms of the hierarchy of values and priorities he embraces, and represent the truth of his religious belief. Individuals are surrounded by multiple religious discourses – not a single discourse – that are adjacent to each other, intersect and conflict, but they are similar to each other because many of them are loaded with authoritarian contents that come from two angles:
Scholars who have field-examined the relationship between religiosity and democratic commitment have written that "a large body of research suggests that church involvement [by which I mean the institutional understanding that the church represents, in our experience this applies to religious institutions in general] predicts a set of authoritarian attitudes, characterized by respect for law and order, social traditions, and intolerance of dissenting groups."
Some studies explain the relationship between religiosity and democratic orientations by pointing out the logical links between the content of religious beliefs and the democratic norms involved, especially since religious leaders often interpret religious teachings differently to justify different ends.
In our Arab experience, "institutional" religiosity deepens authoritarianism as a result of the regimes' desire to control religious affairs, support it to maintain the status quo, and confront religious discourses that represent a threat to the regime.
Despite the apparent conflict and competition between the religiosity offered by official institutions and the religiosity of organizations, groups and methods, the two parties offer religion only in terms of the extent to which it is able to control and control the behavior, values and beliefs of the individual, and not in terms of the ability to free him from his stable traditions and conditions controlled by the interests of those in political or financial power, as I always say: "Monotheism is the highest stage of liberation for man."
One night Ramadan, the imam pointed out that there are two divisions of the people of faith in Surat al-Shura that many preachers usually do not talk about: "And their command is a consultation among them," "and those who are afflicted by a prostitute will triumph." We are in the process of systematic and unstructured coverage of some of the teachings of the religion to support the status quo.
Another point: Traits of religiosity may be positively correlated with authoritarian personality traits, which include submission to authority and intolerance of dissenting groups. There is a particularly strong relationship between authoritarianism and the way religious texts are understood; both are characterized by professionalism in understanding texts and presenting them according to a specific and unique jurisprudential choice without highlighting their pluralism, both characterized by low openness to multiple human experiences, claims to possess absolute truth, and low cognitive complexity.
Authoritarianism is positively associated with formal religiosity in which there is no dialogue, and in which the spaces for pluralism are diminished.
Second: Decentralization of Religious Discourses
Although all entities, official and unofficial, have tried to control the entire religious sphere or significant sectors of it, developments – for which we have seen great momentum since the new millennium – make such control impossible.
We realized early when we started the experience of Islam Online 2000/1999 that the content provided must be governed by the value of pluralism in Islamic ideas, fatwas, practices and of course political choices, and this is not by virtue of the fact that this is a characteristic close to the nature of religion itself - as we understand it - but by virtue of the first generation of the Internet that preceded the emergence of social networks, and is characterized as a "globalized" tool that must reflect multiple particularities, while the next generations of the Internet give greater impetus to pluralism that may reach the stage of fragmentation.
The contemporary religiosity of young people is "networked", it does not have a central point of a sheikh or a specific religious opinion, and it is based on the voracious consumption of material and moral symbols and the rapid transformation from them, and this may explain the rapid rise and fall of religious symbols and their disappearance.
This network is reinforced by the absence of the major religious authorities that have shaped religious conscience since the seventies of the last century, and for four decades until the first decade of the twentieth century - such as Ibn Baz, Al-Ghazali, Al-Qaradawi, Al-Bouti, Fadlallah, Khomeini and Mahdi Shams al-Din... In addition to the crisis of the major Islamist organizations in the region and the erosion of their theses in the era of the Arab Spring.
Third: Context and its importance
Although Arab public opinion, according to the Arab Index, supports and favors democracy, and evaluates its level of achievement in Arab countries unfavorably, it is clear that reluctance to engage politically or "political apathy" prevails. This may be expected in the context of limited political participation, or that what is available is not convincing to the citizen in terms of influence.
This is exacerbated by the low involvement of Arab citizens in voluntary civil and civil organizations, which does not exceed 13%, and the percentages become even lower, if we measure the extent to which respondents "participate" in the bodies to which they report that they are affiliated. Membership in family associations and bodies is still higher than in civil, civil, cultural and voluntary associations. Only 14% of those who belong to a political party or current are affiliated with 64% and no party or current represents them.
What is the relationship between these indicators and the issue of religiosity and authoritarianism?
Democratic consciousness is formed and civic culture is strengthened through practice, not just through theoretical awareness. We have seen many examples from the experience of Islamists in the region, where their greater involvement in electoral processes – I do not say democracy – has led to their greater acceptance of the rules governing these processes.
The Arab Spring uprisings gave great impetus among religious people to change peacefully, casting a shadow over the approach to violent change among jihadist groups, but this quickly declined—or at least became questionable—after these uprisings suffered setbacks and the intervention of the military in Egypt in 2013.
Youth awareness may be formed according to a cognitive model based on pluralism and the absence of a center, as I presented, but this awareness will only be enhanced by the extent of civic and partisan participation, which is largely lacking in the Arab reality.
The contemporary religiosity of young people is "networked", which does not have a central point of a sheikh or a specific religious opinion, and is based on the voracious consumption of material and moral symbols and the rapid transformation from them, which may explain the rapid rise and fall of religious symbols and their disappearance
Fourth: Differentiated Effects
The different dimensions or expressions of religion—that is, elements related to different aspects of religious experience—are likely to be in tension with each other within a single individual.
For example, religious belief is closely related to values that promote the maintenance of social order, such as traditions and compliance with social norms, thus reducing the possibilities of an individual's protest. On the other hand, attending socio-religious activities contributes positively to political protest by increasing the visibility of group interests, recruiting religious people to engage in the political process, and increasing the likelihood that participants will acquire civic skills.
Participation in religious social activities may have a positive effect on interest in politics, as religious leaders or social networks mobilize believers, increase political awareness, and increase political visibility of group identities.
The perception of religious experience as a multidimensional phenomenon explains some of the contradictory consequences of the relationship between religiosity and authoritarianism. This suggests that it may not be religious belief or socio-religious behavior per se that sustains or disrupts democratic commitment, but rather the psychological mechanisms underlying it and the context in which it operates, as I have indicated.
One of the problems of contemporary religiosity is that it is like the "karakib" cabinet, in Egyptian terms, which is the place where we put many things that do not have a link, and sometimes it can be dangerous to put them next to each other.
Fifth: Closed Groups
Democratic commitment is reflected in:
- Political participation.
- Support for political equality, including political tolerance, which refers to acceptance of the different and the desire to extend political rights to him.
The problem in our region is that the decade of the Arab Spring has witnessed the increasing employment of religious patterns in the political struggle, and this has deepened the conflict of religious identities mixed with the political, which has cast a heavy shadow on the polarization that has multiple axes and intersections.
We have seen closed-minded religious groups, often with like-minded individuals, and political conversation between them can lead to the demarcation of group boundaries and increase awareness or magnification of their own grievances and threat perceptions of other groups.
Strong religious identities are also associated with higher levels of perceived threats from dissenting groups, particularly in the context of conflict between them, which often leads to social and political intolerance, all supported by numerical algorithms that call on content to deepen a certain understanding, and are further closed by disinformation.
A minimum of consensus and addressing polarizations are conditions for democratic commitment, in addition to expanding the spaces of the public sphere in which individuals attend and express their visions and interests, as equal citizens and not individuals belonging to closed religious, ethnic and sectarian groups.