The Middle East’s Quiet Liberal Revolution

The idea that the Middle East is becoming more liberal may sound counterintuitive. Nearly 50 years ago, a revolution in Iran dismantled the country’s secular order and ushered in an absolutist clerical regime grounded in Shiite fundamentalism whose battle cry was “Death to America.” The region has since been an incubator for numerous terrorist attacks in Europe and North America, insurgent movements committed to authoritarian theocracy, and repressive regimes that subjugate women, crush free expression, and marginalize minorities. By now, it might seem easy to conclude that Middle Eastern societies are simply less interested in liberalism—that they are governed by a fundamentally different, more religiously oriented “regime of truth,” as the philosopher Michel Foucault declared in 1978 about the uprising in Iran. In this view, a system of rule in which fundamentalists claim authority to define the faith as they see fit—subordinating individual liberty to religious diktats, promoting male supremacy, and imposing restrictive dress codes on women—will forever distinguish the region from the West.

But this assessment mistakes the consequences of domination for its causes. Beneath the authoritarian entrenchment, another history has been unfolding. Between 2000 and 2020, I supervised a series of surveys in the Middle East, conducting face-to-face interviews with representative samplings of people in five key countries to understand why citizens hold the values they do and to track shifts in those values. To varying degrees, respondents in these countries—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, and Turkey—expressed an increasing preference for liberal values, even as their rulers sought to suppress popular demands for democratic change. (We focused on these countries because their size and political importance made them valuable cases for testing sociological theories.)

The survey queried respondents about a broad range of values, but we sought to capture their attitudes toward liberal values with 15 questions covering three dimensions: expressive individualism, gender equality, and secular politics. Expressive individualism was measured by a preference for marrying for love rather than parental approval, independence and imagination over obedience and religious faith as desirable qualities in children, and the right of women to dress as they wish. Views on gender equality were elicited through questions on polygamy, wifely obedience, and giving priority to men in politics, the job market, and education. Perspectives on secular politics were assessed through queries about separating religion from politics; Western-style governance; Islamic government; and sharia law. We then combined the responses to generate a “liberalism index” score of 1 to 4 for each population in each survey, with higher scores indicating greater support for liberalism.

These indices showed significant increases in liberalism, although the magnitude of the change differed by domain and country. Support for Islamic government and sharia generally declined across the region. Among Iranians, there has been a growing demand for the separation of religion and politics, for gender equality, and for freedom of dress. These changing values have translated into political action, most notably in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 and the nationwide protests of 2025–26, when tens of thousands of protesters were reported to have been killed by the Islamic Republic’s security forces. In Egypt, the proportion of respondents who considered Islamic government to be “very good” fell from 25 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2020; the share who felt sharia law was “very important” declined from 28 percent to 18 percent. Among Iraqi respondents, the proportion that strongly supported Islamic government and sharia law fell from 30 and 34 percent in 2004 to 15 and 14 percent in 2011. 

Although many survey questions on forms of government were excluded in Saudi Arabia because of political sensitivities, surveys in that country captured significant changes: the proportion of respondents who considered it very important to implement sharia law fell from 73 percent in 2003 to 35 percent in 2011. On gender equality, meanwhile, the share who strongly agreed that university education is more important for boys than for girls declined significantly, especially among Egyptians (from 15 percent in 2001 to eight percent in 2020) and Iraqis (from 29 percent in 2004 to eight percent in 2011—a level that remained unchanged, on average, in 2021–22, according to the research group Arab Barometer).

A more fine-grained look at the results in individual countries suggests that the experience of religious domination itself may have fed, rather than foreclosed, a desire for a responsive political order. It can take time for popular ideas to reshape a society’s governing institutions. Yet Middle Eastern history shows that shifts in values can be crucial in bringing about changes in social and political organization. The rise of liberal nationalist movements in Egypt, Syria, and Iran in the early twentieth century, for example, was preceded by the emergence of liberal and nationalist ideologies decades earlier. The same pattern is evident in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, which culminated in the establishment of Islamic regimes and the spread of Islamist extremism.

A STEADY SHIFT

Between 2000 and 2020, we conducted five surveys in Egypt, three in Iran, seven in Iraq, two in Saudi Arabia, and three in Turkey. We also considered specific findings in surveys conducted after 2011 in Iraq by Arab Barometer and in Iran by the World Values Survey in 2020, in which the questions mirrored our own. These data reveal a striking contrast between political developments and public opinion: even as the Arab Spring was smothered in its cradle, jihadist movements terrorized the region, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan pursued dreams of Ottoman revivalism, Iran’s supreme leader sought to cast the country as the center of a Shiite-led axis of resistance, and Saudi leaders defended Sunni sectarianism, publics in each of these key Middle Eastern countries increasingly favored liberal values.

For instance, Egypt’s liberalism index rating rose from 2.09 to 2.28 among men and from 2.08 to 2.39 among women. The most striking change was a surge in support for separating religion and politics and for adopting a Western style of government. Respondents were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed that Egypt would be a better place if religion and politics were separated and if its government resembled those of Western countries. The percentage that strongly agreed or agreed with separating religion and politics rose from 44 percent in 2007, when we first asked the question, to 56 percent in 2011, 82 percent in 2016, and 81 percent in 2020. Support for Western-style government increased from 30 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2011, 55 percent in 2016, and 82 percent in 2020.

To understand these shifts, we interviewed a sampling of panel respondents whose views had changed between 2011 and 2020. Among those who remembered their earlier responses, a large majority attributed their newfound support for separating religion from politics to disillusionment with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement whose candidate won Egypt’s 2012 presidential election. Those who had come to favor Western models of governance cited the economic prosperity of Western countries and hoped that the adoption of similar institutions would bring comparable prosperity to Egypt. Egyptians’ support for gender equality and expressive individualism also increased, albeit more modestly.

Turkish popular opinion also shifted significantly toward liberal values. Between 2013 and 2020, Turkey’s liberalism index rose from 2.64 to 2.88 among men and from 2.70 to 2.91 among women. In both Egypt and Turkey, liberal values expanded more broadly among women than men. But whereas the liberal shift in Egypt was especially pronounced in attitudes toward secular politics, in Turkey the largest shifts toward liberal views related to views of gender equality and expressive individualism.

These liberalizing trends unfolded even as Erdogan pursued an increasingly authoritarian, Islamist political project. Erdogan’s appointment as prime minister in 2003 after a ballot-box triumph by his Justice and Development Party was initially hailed as a sign that a form of Islamism could coexist with democracy. But he would eventually abandon any real commitment to democratic governance, dismantling institutional checks and balances and forcing a 2017 constitutional referendum that entrenched his power. Erdogan’s attempt to foster an Ottoman-style pan-Islamism appears to have accelerated liberalization rather than strengthened religious conformity.

An important indication of this process is the shift in Turkish respondents’ self-identification toward nation rather than religion under Erdogan, alongside a decline in mosque attendance. In 2001, 64 percent of respondents identified primarily as Muslim, and only 34 percent identified foremost as Turkish citizens. By 2013, these figures had shifted to 39 and 44 percent, respectively; in 2016, they stood at 36 and 53 percent, and by 2020, at 24 percent for Muslim identity and 63 percent for Turkish citizenship. Mosque attendance also declined over this period: the proportion of respondents who reported attending a mosque more than once a week fell from 19 percent in 2001 to 16 percent in 2013 and then to just 11 percent in 2020. Given that mosque attendance was already declining before Erdogan came to power, his initial appeal may have owed less to religious conservatism than to his record as mayor of Istanbul and widespread frustration with Turkey’s secular political establishment. But our survey respondents’ subsequent shift toward national identity, coupled with a further decline in mosque attendance, suggest that Erdogan’s turn toward authoritarianism may have intensified an ongoing trend toward liberalization.

RELIGIOUS RECOIL

It may seem an irony of history that the very forces seeking to discredit liberalism have helped generate support for it. But conventional explanations emphasizing liberalism’s association with economic development and the rise of a middle class cannot fully account for ideological shifts. A given class may embrace liberalism under one set of historical conditions and illiberalism under another. (For instance, liberal values in early-twentieth-century Egypt were supported by the new middle class, the effendiyya, but later, the same class came to favor the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.) Rather, ideas acquire meaning in opposition to other ideas that dominate society. This contestation takes place through philosophical debates, religious disputations, and public discussions, whether direct or indirect, open or clandestine. When a constellation of ideas comes to occupy a dominant position in a society, it simultaneously becomes a target of contestation and a catalyst for the production of ideas. A yearning for political equality tends to arise in opposition to authoritarian power, just as demands for gender equality emerge in reaction to patriarchal institutions, the desire to express one’s individuality in response to familial or communal constraints, and the demand for freedom of dress in defiance of restrictive sartorial regulations.

The Middle East’s interest in liberal values—that is, the value of separating religion from politics, the celebration of individual judgment, and the recognition of the individual rather than a collective as the fundamental unit of a political community—appears to have developed in recent decades in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism and its coercive regulation of conduct. Restrictions on women’s mobility in Saudi Arabia and dress regulations imposed on Iranian women, for example, made the exercise of religious control over individual conduct especially visible. Resistance to specific limits such as these can help foster a wider conviction that political power should not arbitrarily determine matters properly belonging to individual judgment.

This process is evident in Egypt and Turkey, where declining mosque attendance has accompanied the growing appeal of liberal values, particularly secularism. In Egypt, average mosque attendance (scored on a range of 1 to 4) fell from 2.65 in 2011 to 2.30 in 2020, while in Turkey, it declined from 1.96 in 2013 to 1.82 in 2020. It is striking that Iran and Saudi Arabia, both governed by Islamic regimes, recorded the lowest levels of mosque attendance among the countries we surveyed in the early 2000s, with an average of 1.86 in each country. In Iran, this figure declined over time, reaching 1.79 in 2020.

Religious coercion has contributed to the rise of militant liberalism among Iranians. The Islamic Republic has faced sustained opposition for more than three decades: first, the reformist movement of the 1990s; then, the Green Movement of 2009; and, more recently, the nationwide protests after the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died in police custody after being arrested for allegedly violating compulsory veiling rules. Over time, the objectives of this opposition have shifted from reforming the regime to challenging its authority. Although the regime has retreated from enforcing compulsory veiling, the opposition movement has continued to radicalize. The revolutionary movement of early 2026 expressed a growing determination to liberate the country from the authoritarian rule of the Islamic Republic itself.

Authoritarian conditions may lead people to conceal their true preferences in surveys. Nonetheless, the data reveal a marked decline in Iranians’ religious attachment over the past two decades. The proportion of survey respondents who considered religious faith an important quality for children to possess fell from 71 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2020. Similarly, the share of Iranians who expressed “a great deal of” confidence in religious institutions dropped from 59 percent to 36 percent. Religious intolerance also declined sharply: the proportion of respondents who said they would not want members of other faiths as neighbors fell from 80 percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2020.

A 2022 survey of approximately 20,000 Iranians conducted by GAMAAN, a research foundation based in the Netherlands that focuses on Iran, further illustrates this shift. Fully 88 percent of respondents expressed favorable attitudes toward democracy, while 67 percent held negative views of a government based on sharia. A secular republic or constitutional monarchy was preferred by 53 percent, compared with just 22 percent favoring an Islamic government.

In Iraq, the 2003 U.S. invasion appears to have contributed to a rise in Iraqi nationalism and a stronger sense of national identity. Respondents were asked, “Which of the following best describes you above all: (1) I am an Iraqi; (2) I am a Muslim; (3) I am an Arab; (4) I am a Kurd; or (5) other?” The share identifying primarily as Iraqi rose from 23 percent in 2004 to 68 percent in 2020. Attachment to a shared national community, rather than to religious or ethnic identity alone, is an important component of liberal citizenship. The sectarian violence that followed the invasion appears to have convinced Iraqis of the importance of both national solidarity and separating religion from politics. The share of Iraqi respondents who agreed that religion and politics should be separated rose from 54 percent in 2004 to 76 percent in 2008, before falling to 69 percent in 2013–14 and rising again to 80 percent in 2018.

The parallel increases in support for secular politics and a sense of national identity are unlikely to be accidental. Sectarian violence made religious mobilization increasingly unattractive, while foreign occupation provoked an awareness of Iraqi nationhood. After 2014, the expansion of Iran’s meddling in Iraq may have additionally driven national solidarity.

READY FOR CHANGE

Even if governance in these Middle Eastern regimes does not yet clearly reflect a shift toward liberal values, it may in the near future. After all, ideas drive history—and they have clearly done so in the Middle East. The formation of modern secular states in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey in the early twentieth century was preceded, in the late nineteenth century, by a rise in the popularity of liberalism, constitutionalism, nationalism, and secularism. The subsequent emergence of Arab nationalist governments in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria from 1952 to 1969 was likewise heavily influenced by the pan-Arab nationalist ideology formulated several decades earlier by Sati al-Husri, a Syrian thinker, and Darwish al-Miqdadi, a Palestinian educator. The late-twentieth-century rise of Islamic states and movements followed an earlier ideological transformation in the opposite direction, as secular projects lost legitimacy and political Islam gained influence.

Egypt and Iraq illustrate how changing social values can reshape politics in different ways. In Egypt, disillusionment with the Muslim Brotherhood appears to have weakened the appeal of political Islam as an alternative to authoritarian rule, while growing support for secular politics and Western-style government points toward a broader rejection of the country’s established authoritarian ideologies. Such attitudes do not by themselves produce democracy, but they may create the foundations of a future democratic movement. And because liberal values have spread more extensively among women than men, they may encourage greater female participation in political life. In Iraq, by contrast, growing support for secular politics could strengthen movements that appeal to territorial nationalism as an alternative to sectarian mobilization.

The spread of liberal values among ordinary people does not guarantee political liberalization. Yet the political alternatives that once dominated the region have lost their capacity to command popular allegiance. This has important implications for how outsiders view the Middle East. For decades, Western democracies have often treated Middle Eastern politics as a choice between a stable authoritarian rule and political Islam. This binary no longer represents the preferences of the region’s citizens. And the rise of liberal values in the Middle East should not be understood simply as a result of Western cultural influence. The liberal awareness documented here has emerged from distinctly regional experiences: religious authoritarianism has exposed the dangers of mixing sacred and political authority in the same institutions, sectarian violence has made national citizenship more attractive, patriarchal regulation has accelerated demands for gender equality, and restrictions on speech, belief, and the body have boosted the appeal of individual autonomy. Liberalism has gained ground in response to the failure of the political projects that preceded it, most significantly the rise of religious regimes, the persistence of religious monopolies, and the maltreatment of the human body, particularly of women. Even where efforts to build democratic institutions have faltered, as after the Arab Spring, liberal ideas have nonetheless persisted and expanded.

Although support for liberal democracy appears to be in retreat in parts of the West, the history of democracy is far from over. The Middle East has already experimented with Arab nationalism, state socialism, secular authoritarianism, monarchy, military rule, and political Islam. None of these experiments have offered political accountability, legitimate governance, or economic prosperity. Liberalism’s next chapter may arise in societies that have experienced the failure of alternatives firsthand. The important question now is not whether the Middle East is ready for democracy but whether its political institutions can keep pace with growing public support for individual rights and freedoms—and whether democracies outside the region are willing to acknowledge and back its people’s democratic aspirations.

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