Just as there are secular and cultural Jews and, increasingly, people claiming to be “cultural Catholics,” Muslims are likewise claiming that identity, according to scholars speaking at the mid-August conference of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Chicago, which RW attended. Survey research has found that almost a quarter of people from Muslim backgrounds disaffiliate religiously from their faith, following a pattern of religious disaffiliation in the general U.S. population. Based on focus group, interview, and survey research on those identifying as cultural or secular Muslims, Besheer Mohamed of the Pew Research Center found that they are not all atheists, with some maintaining ritual practices for cultural rather than religious purposes. Mohamed found that 17 percent of his sample were raised Muslim but no longer identified as such, while 76 percent of formerly religious Muslims still considered themselves Muslim. He found that 58 percent of his respondents identified with multiple religious traditions.
New York mayoral frontrunner Zoran Mamdani is said to share much with cultural Muslims.
In another presentation, Mohamed, along with Eman Abdelhadi, Anna Fox, and Michael Guilmette, looked at how cultural and secular Muslims retain their Islamic ties and identity even as they drop or minimize the religious components of the faith. The researchers’ study was based on 80 interviews with Muslims of varying levels of religious involvement, although the sample skewed toward a more liberal and less religious orientation, excluding converts and underrepresenting African-American Muslims. Half of the sample consisted of “secular and disembedded Muslims” who continued to identify as Muslims, either politically or culturally. For these Muslims, politics and culture constituted what the researchers called “identity tethers,” serving to keep these people linked to Islam. Being politically Muslim allowed the respondents to maintain a positive sense of group identity in the face of the “political shocks” of a hostile society. Because such individuals, though secular, are still considered to be Muslim because of their ethnicity, particularly their Muslim names, they choose to proactively claim the Muslim identity rather than deny it.
Abdelhadi, Fox, Guilmette, and Mohamed found that even those respondents who had always been secular or were brought up in mixed religious families chose the Muslim identity as a way to fight back at injustice (such as through Palestinian rights activism) and resist prejudice against Islam. Since most of the respondents were between the ages of 15 and 30 during 9/11, they believed that the greater surveillance and prejudice they experienced made their connections to Islam more political. In contrast, those identifying as cultural Muslims valued that identity for helping them to respond to fellow Muslims, especially family. These respondents experienced Islam as a set of cultural celebrations and shared traditions, especially during holidays or when traveling overseas to visit family members. In this case, “elements of religiosity—the restrictions around pork and alcohol—are divorced from religious meanings and passed on as ethnic particularity,” according to the researchers. While they found, to their surprise, that these secular and cultural Muslims wanted to reproduce a Muslim identity in their children, their reluctance to pass on certain elements of Islam and their wariness about immersing themselves in Muslim communities may mean that these identity tethers are not enough to pass down the tradition.
