This question has been on my mind recently, as we watch the escalating protests in Iran, many of which appear to be directed against the religion just as much as they are against the regime. Yes, Iran is Shia, while most of the rest of the Islamic world is Sunni, but I’ve heard quite a few rumblings of religious discontent in the Sunni world as well, which don’t show up on the front pages since Sunni Islam doesn’t typically have a central religious authority the way most Shia sects do (it’s kind of like the difference between the Catholics and the Protestants in that regard).
But this goes beyond just the news of the day. The more I look into this, the more it seems evident that Islam is deeply threatened by the rise of the Internet, and is probably falling into terminal decline because of it. Historically, Islam depends on controlled speech and fear of other Muslims to keep its adherents from leaving the faith. The Internet breaks down both of those things: it provides a medium where people can share their ideas freely and anonymously, and it allows the formation of niche interest communities independent from the mainstream.
From what I understand, most of the statistics that count the global Muslim population do not make a distinction between true believers and people who do not practice the faith, but still identify as Muslim. Which means that there is probably a large percentage—perhaps even a majority—of self-identifying Muslims who don’t actually believe the religion. I forgot where I saw this, but there was a survey of Iranians that provided some evidence that this is the case in that country, at least.
It’s crazy to think that a major world religion might collapse in the next hundred years, but this has happened before. Two thousand years ago, the majority of the world was pagan, but you’d be hard pressed to find a true-believing worshipper of Zeus/Jupiter anywhere in the world today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrianism was a major world religion, but now there are less than a million adherents.
Things generally change less than people expect in the short term, but more than people expect in the long term. One of the more interesting ways that I think the world could change in the next hundred years is with the collapse of Islam as a major world religion. I can’t prove it, of course, and I don’t particularly want to get into the weeds of the argument, but since I do occasionally write stories that take place in the near future, this sort of thing interests me. And one thing I think we all can agree on is that with all of the turmoil of our current age, it’s going to be a very different world 100 years from now.