--- title: "Iran’s freethinkers" date: "2026-06-04T06:00:00+01:00" modified: "2026-06-04T11:04:44+01:00" url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/irans-freethinkers/" post_id: 10516 --- # Iran’s freethinkers ![People shopping at the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, 2023](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/2C74B2H-1024x576.jpg)People shopping at the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, 2023. Credit: Alamy Stock PhotoWhen Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ended his exile and flew to Iran in 1979, covering women with headscarves and pushing minorities to the margins, I doubt he imagined that after 47 years his Islamic Republic would be in such a vulnerable position. Nor could he know that Iranians would be moving away from Islam, towards a more secular and plural society. And it is Iranian society – rather than its government – that we should focus on today. Months after the January protests and massacres, and with Iran isolated and mired in conflict, all eyes are on Tehran and its leaders. Amid airstrikes, shaky ceasefires and unrest, it is easy to overlook the question of who Iranians are, so I took a moment to speak with people from religious minorities and those who don’t believe in a god. Understanding the Iranians – what they believe, and what they are doing with their beliefs – offers us a hint at their future. The roots of revolution ----------------------- First: a quick primer. Iranians overthrew their last king, the Shah, in a 1979 revolution that was won by both leftists and Islamists, yet which led to Khomeini establishing a theocratic government based on Islamic religious law. Decades of persecuting dissidents and minorities followed, interspersed with regional conflicts and bellicose rhetoric against the west. Starting in the 1990s, Iranians began to push back. Over wave after wave of protests, people moved from demanding reform to wholesale calls for the end of Islamist rule. But along with entrenching the clergy in Iran’s government, the Islamic Republic also built an all-encompassing security state. Even today, with war still in the background, threatening to flare again, and after millions took to the streets to protest, it is unclear whether the clerics or the Revolutionary Guards will ever acknowledge the aspirations of their people. These power centres rely on the strategy of divide and conquer: suppressing Iran’s religious, non-religious and ethnic minorities, in a perverse attempt to retain control by splitting society apart. Rich in religious diversity --------------------------- The Islamic Republic aims to present a united front. But Iran’s actual social composition tells a different story. The government census claims that 99.5 per cent of the country is Shia Muslim. This used to be at least close to the truth. A 1975 survey published in the *International Review of Modern Sociology* found that over 80 per cent of Iranians always said their daily prayers and kept the annual Ramadan fast. However, 45 years later, when the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran conducted their 2020 “Gamaan” survey it found that 60 per cent of Iranians did not say their prayers and only 32 per cent called themselves Shia Muslims. The survey had more than 50,000 respondents, with 90 per cent in Iran. The Gamaan poll has its critics. It was conducted anonymously online in order to encourage respondents to answer freely, but that means it may not have reached a truly random cross-section of society, and that it is harder for the researchers to vet the data. Yet supporters of the survey argue that conventional face-to-face and tele-phone polls on religion in Iran are even less reliable, due to the dangers of answering questions honestly. The fact remains that no other survey has tried to measure belief in Iran at this scale, making it a unique resource. The poll suggested that some Iranians had found new religious orientations, with 6 per cent saying they had converted from one belief to another. Almost half said they had lost their religious beliefs. Twenty-two per cent of people expressed no beliefs. Nine per cent identified as atheists, 8 per cent as Zoroastrian, 7 per cent “spiritual”, 6 per cent agnostic, and 5 per cent followed the Sunni Muslim tradition. A separate religious group, the Baha’i faith, does not appear in the poll. The Baha’i community is believed by many, including the Minority Rights Group, to be Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority. (I am a Baha’i, and half-Iranian, though Baha’is today come from almost every country.) Baha’is are also Iran’s most persecuted group, a fact that may in part explain its absence from the Gamaan poll. The treatment of religious minorities ------------------------------------- I asked Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, about the treatment and visibility of these religious and ethnic minorities. Some minorities are permitted by the state, he tells me, although their actions are still restricted. Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians, known as the “People of the Book”, have five reserved seats in parliament. “A Jew can have one representative in the Iranian parliament, so long as she or he knows their place in society,” Milani says. “That is, you don’t proselytise … you respect the authority of Islam, you don’t run for offices other than the ones ‘we’ allow you. To me, that’s second-class citizenship.” Judaism has ancient roots in Iranian culture and history. Iran was home to around 100,000 Jews before the revolution, after which many fled, fearing persecution. Today, estimates put the population at 10,000 to 25,000. For Iranian Jews to survive they need to “systematically, consistently attack Zionism”, Milani says. While the official policy isn’t clear, he says that Jews wishing to travel outside Iran have been asked to guarantee that they will not visit the State of Israel. Zoroastrians also have limited representation, but the community’s traditions and culture are anathema to Islamic authorities. Many of Iran’s most venerable and beloved rituals have roots in the Zoroastrian faith – such as Chaharshanbe Suri, a fire-jumping festival, and the Persian new year festival Nowruz, or “New Day”, both of which happen in March and represent purification as winter ends and spring begins. Many Iranians – Zoroastrian or not – still love these festivals despite decades of Islamic Republic officials trying to snuff them out. Zoroastrian traditions have “always acted as a way of rebellion”, says Sahba Shayani, lecturer in Persian at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The people’s resilience in keeping Nowruz … is an act of resistance.” So is the use of pre-Islamic literature. For example, Iran’s late supreme leader Ali Khamenei was branded “Zahak” by protestors, after a serpent-king who fed on the brains of young Iranians to stay alive in the poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or “Book of Kings”. The name is a provocative reference to the January protests, when authorities were accused of massacring up to 40,000 protestors, most of them young. Christians and apostates ------------------------ Christianity in Iran faces more varied challenges. Iran is home to old Armenian and Assyrian Christian communities, both of which are “permitted” faith groups. But missionary Christian communities are not permitted. The country absorbed missionary waves of Anglicans and others early in the 20th century. Today there is also a growing house church and online church movement, the numbers of which are difficult to gauge. I spoke to Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Church of England’s Bishop of Chelmsford, whose father, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti became Iran’s first Anglican bishop after converting from Islam in 1938. She told me that “the strategy over the last 40 years or so against the Anglican Church has been one effectively of slow suffocation … They are not allowed to baptise any new members.” Her father’s “life’s journey” was “about trying to come to terms with how he could be both Christian and Persian”, she adds, given that in Iran, “social and religious identities are very, very closely bound. He was regarded, as indeed we were all regarded … as betrayers of our Iranian nationality.” The family resettled in England after the 1979 revolution, following the murder of her brother. A US-based internet pastor, Hormoz Shariat, who left Iran around 1979 and later converted to Christianity, says the decades that Iranians have spent living under the Islamic Republic have led to an exodus from Islam. “A large, growing number of people are done with religion because they’re hurt,” he tells me. “Today and after every massacre you see \[more\] Muslims who used to be devout, who start thinking, ‘Is this really Islam?’” Anyone who converts from Islam to another faith, or to no faith, faces the threat of execution on charges of apostasy. Atheists and agnostics are persecuted by the state, along with Sufis and Yarsanis, who practice an ancient syncretic faith. But “the biggest injustice, I think, in terms of sheer numbers and sheer brutality, is against the Baha’is,” Milani says. The case of the Baha’is ----------------------- In the 1980s, Baha’is in Iran were abducted and arrested on a mass scale, guilty of nothing but their faith. Their properties were confiscated or destroyed, and more than 200 were executed without due process. Today, according to Human Rights Watch, the Iranian state continues to commit the “crime against humanity of persecution” in their attempt to “eliminate the Baha’is as a viable entity” in the country. I spoke to Holakou Rahmanian, a Baha’i software engineer living in the United States, who left Iran about 10 years ago. He placed 54th in Iran’s university entrance exams out of 300,000 students, yet he was denied the right to go to university because he refused to hide his faith. He says that many people in Iran do choose to hide their beliefs, including the millions of non-believers from Muslim backgrounds. In Iranian society, “every single person has two identities,” he tells me. “If you want to go to university, if you’re asked about your religion, you write down ‘Islam’,” he says. “You go to university, you take the job you want to take. But in private, you don’t care. You \[might\] even curse the Prophet Muhammad.” In Shia Islam, the option to dissimulate, or to deny one’s religious identity to protect oneself, has been accepted since the time Shias were suppressed by the Sunni mainstream. Today the influence of this practice has led many Iranians of Shia background to hide that they no longer hold religious beliefs. Meanwhile, many Baha’is interrogated and tortured over the past 47 years have reported that they were given the choice to abandon their beliefs (or claim that they had) and be released. But the Baha’i faith, which emerged in 19th-century Iran as an independent religion, rejects dissimulation as an option. “I have one identity,” Rahmanian says. “I’m a Baha’i. Do whatever the hell you want to do with me.” A young generation kicking back ------------------------------- But it is not only the Baha’i community that is rejecting – or wishes to reject – this false duality. Many people, and especially the younger generation, are also refusing to conform to the Iranian government’s ideology and are instead finding new ways to express themselves. Milad Resaeimanesh, an Iranian atheist based in Sweden and a leader of the Central Committee of the Ex-Muslims in Scandinavia, says that in the past 20 years, Iranians have begun to “come out with their own identity and their real face and voice and name, saying, ‘We left Islam, we are not afraid, we exist and we’re not going to be silent anymore and we are not scared of you.’” He adds that, during the 2022-23 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, protestors were attacking mosques and women were burning their headscarves in public acts of defiance. “When they were going to the funerals of people who lost their lives during the protests, their families and loved ones, they didn’t read the Koran, they didn’t cry, they listened to music and started dancing”. This, he points out, is distinct from both Islamic funeral traditions and from what the government dictates. The Gamaan poll found that 9 per cent of Iranians are now atheists and 6 per cent agnostic, with younger respondents reporting higher levels of irreligiosity. But because atheism is “punishable by death”, according to Arash Azizi, a Yale University lecturer and atheist who left Iran in 2008, this “obviously has an effect” on the way atheists live. The police do not seek and prosecute every atheist, Azizi adds, but people have been prosecuted and even executed for “so-called crimes resulting from atheism”. Resaeimanesh mentions Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli-Zare, executed in 2023 on charges of blasphemy after running online Persian-language pages dedicated to atheism. “Atheist parents \[sometimes\] even lie to their children,” Azizi tells me, pretending to be devout and active Muslims, “because they would be worried a child would repeat what they saw at home” and might not understand that “they lived in a society where you need to lie to survive”. The fight for secularism ------------------------ Before 1979, Azizi adds, hundreds of thousands of Marxists in Iran also played a key role in the spread of atheism. After the revolution, Marxist leaders were arrested and tortured, and in 1988 thousands were executed for atheism. Yet today there remains “a thirst” for atheism in Iranian society, Azizi says, “and there has been for a while. People hate the Islamic Republic, and they are looking for answers,” which many have found in an atheist and sometimes also a humanist view of the world. Resaeimanesh says that for him, and many others, the dream is “to have a society where there is no fake identity”. He believes that “secularism is the future”, and that living in this truth is worth the risk. “Iran is diverse, the society is plural,” he adds, pointing out that even among Muslim Iranians there is a rise in those who believe religion has no place in legislation or government. The most hopeful sign there is for Iran’s future is that believers and non-believers alike seem to be arriving at the same place. The fight for secularism is finding its strongest voice in young Iranians, their culture and their insistence on women’s rights. Milani has called it an “incremental revolution”, one that “manifests itself in language, fashion, graffiti, art, street art, underground theatre, the way they dress, where they go.” Rahmanian agrees. “This new generation, the Gen Zs, oh my God, they’re amazing,” he says. “Most of the killing that has happened, the massacres, it was mostly young people … because they are fed up.” “Iran is now intellectually more secular than it ever was,” Milani adds, noting that before the Islamic Republic, the shahs and some intellectuals tried and failed to move Iran toward a more secular path. What those aspiring secular figures failed to do, he says, has been achieved by Khomeini and Khamenei, by the Islamic Republic, “with their brutality, with their beastly murderous attack on people, with their dogmatism, with their denial.” Iranians today are standing up for atheists and religious minorities – whether or not they are Muslim themselves. Every time there are warnings over the possible execution of a young Iranian protester, or a new crackdown on Baha’is or another minority, Iranians inside and outside the country raise an outcry. They are saying, “I’m not going to run my life based on this, I’m not going to let you do this to someone who’s my neighbour,” Milani says. “That’s the positive change.”