Religious Trends among Arab Muslims, 2010–2022: Continued Revival, Polarization, or Burgeoning Secularization?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “Islamic revival” of the latter 20th century entailed a surge of religious faith among Muslims in Arab countries. But few studies have investigated religious trends in more recent decades—specifically, whether revivalist trends are holding strong, or religiosity is beginning to fade. Using survey data from 11 Arab countries, this study finds that religiosity was becoming weaker in the mid-2010s, but this religious decline was confined to men and youth, while women and elders largely maintained their existing levels of religiosity. This was followed by a sharp rebound in religiosity during the COVID pandemic (2020–2021), supporting arguments that people turn to religion for comfort during times of crisis. As the pandemic eased, religious decline resumed and occurred comprehensively among many demographics. This study also found evidence for religious polarization in recent years, whereby the number of secular, non-religious Arabs has grown alongside an expanding group of highly religious Arabs. Finally, values that entail a role for Islam in government, also known as political Islam, do not appear to be fading among Arab Muslims, even during periods when personal religiosity is in decline.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".