,
7 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
The big new BBC Arabic poll has gotten some misleading coverage. BBC is calling this the rise of the "non-religious" 👇🏾 The problem is the common Arabic translation of "not religious" would be مش متدين or لست متدين which doesn't have quite the same implication as "not religious" 
We have no way of knowing how the question was asked in Arabic, since the battery of survey questions has only so far been released in English
Also, to really get clarity, you'd probably need to ask a follow-up question, namely that if they're "not religious," do they either want to be religious or do they think they *should* become religious?
In English, the category of "not religious" often has an implication of not being theologically Christian or Jewish, i.e. so-called "nones," but in Arab countries, you could easily describe yourself as not religious while still being a Muslim believer
Also, in Arab countries, to be religious is often tied to ritual practice (more so than it would be in Christianity), so if someone is saying that they're not religious, they may also just mean that they're not particularly observant
In any case, you'd think based on the headlines that there was some massive shift in self-described "non-religious" people, but the shift is only from 8% to 13%, which is still (in my view) a surprisingly small percentage of the overall Arab population in light of last 5 years
Considering all the religious conflict and post-Arab Spring polarization between Islamist and non-Islamist groups, I would have expected percentage of non-religious to be higher, but a lot of it still depends on the Arabic words used, so it's sort of 🤷🏾♂️
