Atheism

Atheism is the absence of belief in God or gods. In Persian it is now usually called khodanabavari, ‘not believing in God’, or bi-khodayi. Older words carry the weight of their history: molhed, from the Arabic for one who deviates, dahri, a person who holds that only time and matter are eternal, and zendiq, first used of Manichaeans and later of anyone suspected of heresy. Many unbelievers today prefer neutral words, or describe themselves simply as secular, sekular or orfi. Atheists come from every community of the Iranian world: from Shia and Sunni families, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, Bahá’í and Yarsan ones.

Freethinkers of the medieval Iranian world

The early Islamic centuries, when Persian scholars wrote mostly in Arabic, produced some of the boldest critics of revealed religion. Abu Bakr Mohammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Rey, near modern Tehran, honoured in Iran as a physician and the author of the medical encyclopaedia al-Hawi, is reported to have argued that reason is sufficient to guide humanity and that prophets are not needed. He was not an atheist in the modern sense: by the same accounts he believed in a creator among five eternal principles. His views are known chiefly through his opponents, above all the Ismaili missionary Abu Hatem al-Razi, who recorded their debates in order to refute them.

Ibn al-Rawandi, born in Khorasan in the ninth century, began as a Mu’tazili theologian and, as later writers describe him, came to attack the arguments for prophecy and revelation. His books are lost; what survives are fragments quoted by those who wrote against him. Historians such as Sarah Stroumsa, in Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, caution that such figures are seen almost entirely through hostile eyes, and that their real views may have been more varied than their critics allowed.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new secularism arrived through the press, translation and politics. Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh, the Azerbaijani playwright born in Shaki, wrote fierce criticism of religious authority in letters that circulated in manuscript. Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, executed in Tabriz in 1896, wrote in a similar vein. Through the twentieth century the Marxist left, including the Tudeh Party founded in 1941, carried a materialist outlook to students and workers. In Soviet Tajikistan and Azerbaijan, state atheism was official policy for decades, and some families there still describe themselves as culturally Muslim and personally unbelieving.

Law and risk

In the Islamic Republic of Iran apostasy from Islam is not defined in the Islamic Penal Code. Human Rights Watch and other observers note, however, that the code allows judges to rule on crimes it does not list by drawing on Islamic sources, as Article 167 of the Constitution permits, and that non-belief has been prosecuted under other charges, including ‘insulting the Prophet’, ‘corruption on earth’ and ‘enmity against God’. Amnesty International documented the case of a man sentenced to death in 2014 for Facebook posts judged to insult the Prophet; the sentence was later commuted. UN Special Rapporteurs on Iran and USCIRF annual reports describe atheists and converts from Islam as at risk of arrest and severe punishment. In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule since 2021, open unbelief is not possible, according to the UN and USCIRF.

Counting and the diaspora

How many Iranians are atheist is not known. An online survey by the Netherlands-based group GAMAAN in 2020, led by Ammar Maleki and Pooyan Tamimi Arab, reported a large share of respondents describing themselves as non-religious, atheist or agnostic. The researchers weighted their sample to match census data; critics, including other survey researchers, argue that an online sample overrepresents the educated, urban and connected, and the figures remain debated. In the diaspora, secular and atheist Iranians are visible and organised: the Iranian-born campaigner Maryam Namazie helped found the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain in 2007, and Persian-language humanist channels and podcasts reach listeners inside Iran. Many atheist Iranians keep Nowruz, read Hafez and stand beside believing relatives at weddings and funerals, and many believers count unbelievers among their closest friends.