Photo of Alice Evans in Morocco in 2023 from Substack Account.

Alice Evans is a fantastic scholar whose work explores social change, often focusing on women’s rights and gender equality. She recently published a fantastic working paper titled The Global Islamic Revival where she addresses a key question – namely, why is it that while the West became massively less religious over the past half century, most Muslim-majority nations have become more pious, experiencing a religious revival marked by more intense devotion and stricter norms around gender?

Many ideas have been put forward, and she reviews ten of them in her paper. Here, I’ll just summarize what she thinks have been the key drivers of this religious renaissance. They are not shown below in any order of priority.

Saudi Influence

Saudi Arabia has had enormous influence as the heartland of Islam and of Arabic. This influence was bolstered by the discovery of vast oil reserves meaning the Saudis had wealth when much of the Muslim world was relatively poor.  Photo credit: Canva.ca

A century ago, Saudi Arabia had a much stricter version of Islam (sometimes called Wahabism) than most of the rest of the Muslim world. But this view has been exported globally since then due to three reasons:

1. The land of Arabia has status to Muslims. Every Muslim faces Mecca to pray, it is where Muhammad lived and where Islamic law schools were born, and people there know Arabic natively;
2. Cheaper travel meant the number of pilgrims to Mecca surged making folks more aware that their local version of Islam was incongruent with how Islam was practiced in the land Muhammad lived in (see chart below);
3. Saudi petrodollars allowed funding madrassas elsewhere that exported these ideas as did setting up scholarships for students from abroad to come to Arabia to learn this stricter version of Islam, then returning home with degrees and credibility where they would become leaders in reforming local traditions to align with Arabian Islam;
4. Labour migration. The wealth of the Gulf states brought in labourers from abroad who, after living in the Gulf region, would return home with stricter views on Islam. Studies show these folks enforced stricter rules around religion in the home.

So you get an unusually strict version of Islam being perfectly placed in the region with status and credibility, at a time when global travel brought different local cultures into contact, and the Arabian peninsula simultaneously became wealthy heightening their influence. As a result, the Arabian version of Islam has had real influence in places like Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco.

Source: Alice Evans, The Global Islamic Revival

Globalization

Al Azhar, a university older than Oxford, is the most prestigious university for Sunni Muslims. Leading Muslim organizations around the world have often sought its opinion on religious questions.  Photo credit: Canva.ca

New technologies led to a more linked world. First was the introduction of modern printing presses. Then, in the 1970s, cassette tapes allowed exporting of sermons and religious instruction from the most learned and revered institutions in the Arabic heartland. Television and the internet furthered this more global conversation over proper Islamic norms.

In this, the stricter versions practiced in Arabia and in Egypt (at the venerated Al Azhar university) took precedence and led to more varied and localized versions of Islam coming under critique.

Mass Schooling

Source: Alice Evans, The Global Islamic Revival

Evans claims that mass education tends to amplify belief systems that already command prestige. In the post-Enlightenment West, the values that were amplified were those of secular-liberalism. 

But in Islamic countries, Islamic learning had the most prestige. When mass education became the norm, the state was seen as a custodian responsible for teaching Islam as part of the curriculum. Evans claims the number of hours of religious instruction received by youth went up by 7, 6, and 15 times in Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey respectively.

This education would focus on book learning and this favoured textual law-focused versions of Islam.

Secularism Loses Credibility

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser encourages Egyptian pilots before the Six Day War. The catastrophic defeat crippled Arab nationalist and secular movements.  Photo credit: Wikipedia

There were numerous Islamic countries led by more secular modernizers in the 1950s and 1960s but these folks first of all ran repressive regimes. But secondly, they lost credibility due to both military and economic failures. The most significant military failure was the crushing defeat in the 1967 Six Day War against Israel. Economic failure came as oil prices surged which benefitted the Saudis but really hurt oil-importing countries like Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia. Religious conservatives blamed military and economic failures on secularists, saying they brought about this destruction by abandoning Islam.

Looking Forward

Saudi leader Mohammed Bin Salman seeks Saudi economic growth and greater integration with the world. He has committed human rights abuses but simultaneously is liberalizing the Kingdom to a certain degree.  Photo Credit: Map from Canva.ca and photo of Mohammed Bin Salman Wikipedia , CC BY 2.0

The future is hard to predict. On the one hand, Islamic culture is quite strong at resisting secularizing trends. Evans shows that second-generation British Muslims still tend to support more conservative gender norms. In Canada, Muslims are one religious demographic (not the only one) where children seem to maintain their religious identity amidst a secularizing country.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is undergoing a liberalization under its leader Muhammad bin-Salman. Restrictions on women are easing, concerts are now held, women’s labour force participation has grown, and new access to Netflix means racy Western shows like Vikings are now a leading show for Saudis. If Saudi conservatism was so central to the exporting of strict religion, will a liberalizing of sorts in the Islamic heartland also spread outwards?

The only constant in religion (and life generally) is change. We will see what the future holds.