AHC: Iran 20% Atheist

In a 2010 poll, this number of respondents of EU nations said "I do not believe there is any kind of spirit, God or life force; in France, that number is 40%. With the latest possible PoD, how could secularism and anti-clericalism become roughly as pervasive in Iran as they are in modern day Europe?
 
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Delta Force

Banned
With the latest possible PoD, how could secularism and anti-clericalism become roughly as pervasive in Iran as they are in modern day Europe?

Iran actually could be 20% atheist, but because apostasy from Islam is a capital offense there it's not like people are going to be very public about it.
 
Some kind of Communist Iran -either through a domestic revolution or Soviet conquest - for a long period is your best avenue.
 
The high percentage of nonbelievers in Europe isn't exactly the same thing as anti-clericalism. There was a sharp decline in the influence of Christianity in most of Europe in the postwar decades; anti-clericalism, in contrast, was common among liberal and socialist intellectuals going back to the 18c, while France became an officially secular state in 1903 or so. This rise in social secularism happened in other modern or modernizing countries, though not the US: high-income East Asia, the core communist countries, China, parts of Latin America (e.g. Uruguay), Turkey. It's entirely possible that given its GDP trajectory Iran would've ended in the same place if Khomeini hadn't taken over in the Revolution. It's even entirely possible Iran is already in that place and nobody openly admits it.
 
Socialist revolution instead Islamic revolution, altough probably even then Atheism wouldn't be much more common than in OTL. Perhaps better changes would be if there not be Operation Ajax but even then there wouldn't be so much atheists.
 
You don't need anything as violent or extreme as the Communists to invade.

You just need Mosaddegh's regime to survive (or ward off) any Anglo-US intervention. Whilst the Shah was almost relatively secular, Mosaddegh's soft centre-left regime with its emphasis on democracy and education would probably have seen a swell of atheism in the country over time similar to Western Europe.

Remember, in the first post war decades, much of the islamic world was actually becoming slightly more secular. The elite and middle-class were very interested in Western-style liberalism (although not necessarily the democracy part) - just see pictures of Egypt/Iran/Turkey in the 1950s etc.
 
In as much as there are people who consider themselves Christian atheists (they regard Christianity more as a thing of loose cultural habits than a religious dogma, and are otherwise more or less living and believing the same things as out-and-out atheists), I could imagine that present-day Iran has its fair share of Muslim atheists, possibly even higher than the 20 percent mark.
 
Some kind of Communist Iran -either through a domestic revolution or Soviet conquest - for a long period is your best avenue.

Domestic revolution Might not appeal to rual farming people, but i dont know. Nasserist Egypt didn´t change anything in rual Egypt, the peasants lived like thousands of years before.
 
Iran under the Pahlavis would at least be secularized, so that could work.

This is a good idea. Iran was set (prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979) to become a modernized secularized first-world country. They had a secular leader, a rising standard of living (which usually translate to higher levels of atheism), and a growing urbanized population (another indicator of higher atheism.)
 
Hard secularism isn't necessarily a benefit to an atheist population. America is hard secular and it has the highest levels of religiosity in the western world. Compare and contrast Britain and Scandinavia.
 

guinazacity

Banned
You don't need anything as violent or extreme as the Communists to invade.

You just need Mosaddegh's regime to survive (or ward off) any Anglo-US intervention. Whilst the Shah was almost relatively secular, Mosaddegh's soft centre-left regime with its emphasis on democracy and education would probably have seen a swell of atheism in the country over time similar to Western Europe.


I agree with this.

The pahlavis would end up being just a secular version of saudi arabia, the only way to do it properly would be a constitutional regime a la mossadegh.
 
Maybe if Ajax goes wrong in a big way, and in response Iran gets driven firmly into the Soviet camp. Due to their complicity in the attempted coup, Mossadegh takes a hard anti-clerical line, seeking to break any power they might have.
 
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