"A general process of secularization, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran,” declared an online survey titled "Iranians’ attitudes towards religion” conducted by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) in collaboration with Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. Conducted from June 6 to 21, 2020, over 50,000 respondents were surveyed, around 90% of whom lived in Iran.
Religious affiliations of Iranians as surveyed by GAMAAN
When asked "Which of the following is closer to your beliefs and faith?” only 32% explicitly identified as Shia Muslims, while five percent said they were Sunni Muslims and three percent Sufi Muslims. This seemed to belie state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation. Besides the Muslims, nine percent said they were atheists, eight percent said they were Zoroastrians, seven percent identified as spiritual, six percent as agnostics,1.5 percent as Christians. A fairly large component, 22% said "none.”
Bringing the survey findings to the attention of Parsiana, financial consultant Adil Rustomjee commented, "Note the surge in people claiming adherence to Zoroastrianism… eight percent in Iran’s population of 80 million… makes 6.4 million people!... The mullahs, for theocratic reasons, have every incentive to keep insisting that the Zoroastrian population is 25,000. So the actual number is between these two figures but look at the wide dispersion (range).” The researchers though interpreted the eight percent count of Zarathushtis as arising from "an interest in Persian nationalism and the need for an alternative to Islam rather than strict adherence to Zoroastrianism.”
"As someone who knows a thing or two about statistics, I observe that the sample size at 40,000 is very large for a survey. From the law of large numbers, the larger the sample size, the more accurate the inference and extrapolation to the universe (the country’s population in this case),” added Rustomjee.
"Greater access to the world via the Internet but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country… Iran, as we think we know it, is changing in fundamental ways,” summed up GAMAAN, an independent, non-profit research foundation registered in the Netherlands.
The survey found that increasing secularization shown by Iranians was linked to a critical view of the Islamic government: 68% felt that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers held a parliamentary majority; 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil; 56% did not want their children to receive religious education at school, but around 54% approved of their children having the opportunity to learn about diverse faiths at school.