Nonetheless, there reside small numbers of irreligious individuals within those countries who often face serious formal and, in some cases, informal legal and social consequences.
In a BBC News article that highlights a recent Arab Barometer survey on Middle East and North African citizens, Egypt was shown to have a comparatively significant increase in the proportion of people who say they are not actively religious from 2013 to 2019.
Regardless, transparent data on how many citizens in the Middle East are atheists, apostates, or of other form of irreligious identity have been challenging for researchers to discover.
This organization essentially retaliates against religious institutions by claiming they are violent and unnecessary, though some argue that they are mostly criticizing the Islamic faith and community.
Though data on how prevalent atheism is can be difficult to measure where social desirability bias may obscure survey answers, there have been attempts to record potential trends.
Youth in the Persian Gulf countries have increasingly been expressing their atheism on the Internet in recent years, despite residing in heavily religious societies.
[16] The Web and the Internet have been a popular tool where more than 50 atheist Facebook groups and pages, some with more than 8,000 followers,[17] have formed especially since the Arab spring.
Meanwhile, the Global Atheism Index for the same year shows the percent of self-identified atheist in Iraq at 0 and in Saudi Arabia at 5.