Phenomenon of Atheism: Causes, Motives and Indicators
Atheism is an ancient phenomenon, which began before the emergence of celestial religions and the importance of discussing it is growing in our time due to the unprecedented technical and technological development that humanity is currently experiencing, which was a direct cause of the spread of this phenomenon and its multiple effects on societies, as well as the arrival of this phenomenon to Arab societies and the Middle East in general, which were to a large extent spared from following the ideas of atheism and atheists for many decades.
The Forum issues this report, which presents in a scientific manner “the meaning of atheism, its history, its motives, and its indicators, as well as a presentation of the efforts of the Egyptian state and its religious institutions to confront this phenomenon.”
The most important recommendations to limit the spread of this phenomenon:
1- Activating the role of the Friday sermon to respond to the suspicions and concepts promoted by atheist websites, which have great repercussions among young people.
2- Exploiting drama in an effective and scientific manner to explain the true religion and shed light on human values and the concepts of mercy and justice in Islam.
3- Develop a major media plan in which traditional media and social media participate to confront the spread of atheism in various societies.
4- The commitment of the relevant religious institutions to moderate religious discourse and the rejection of strange and deviant opinions, which were appropriate for past and past eras.
5- Forming a global body of specialists in the religious, scientific and human sciences on platforms in various languages to respond to suspicions of atheism and dialogue with atheists with reason and logic.
6- Holding open dialogue meetings in universities, mosques, and churches to respond to the suspicions of atheists, discuss their ideas, and dialogue with them through evidence and proof by specialists in all fields.
First: The concept of atheism…
In Arabic, atheism is defined as “abandonment and deviation from integrity.”
As for the concept of atheism as an idea and ideology, it means questioning or denying everything, including religions, beliefs, God, the holy books, and prophecies.
Second: the history of atheism…
There are some historical indicators that recorded the first atheism movements in the year 1000 BC in India, and they included doubt in one of the sacred manuscripts of the ancient Indian religions, which questioned the mechanism of the origin of the universe and the reality of the existence of God and His control over the universe, and about 500 years later, “ Buddhism, which did not provide a clear concept of the existence of a God and Creator of the universe; But it was more concerned with human suffering and desires and the way to get rid of this suffering, by reaching “nirvana” or non-attachment.
These civilizations followed; the emergence of Greek civilization, which laid the foundation for the idea of atheism in its various eras, which relied on the idea of “the eternity of matter.” This theory emphasizes the eternity of a specific material element such as air, water, or fire, and from this element all creatures and existing things branch out. These ideas were launched by philosophers in The pre-Socratic era, which included the Malatian school of “Thales, Anaximanders, Anaximenes”, and the idea was crystallized by the philosopher “Democritus” (460: 370 BC), who did not acknowledge the existence of gods at all.
This era also witnessed the spread of the ideas of the philosopher Epicurus, who emphasized that the world is ancient and eternal, and will remain as it is forever, and that the God whose existence some claim is unable to prevent evil. Therefore, he later adopted the idea of the existence of two gods. One is for good and the other is for evil, with no belief in the existence of life after death, but Aristotle provided rational proof of the existence of “God.” But at the same time, he did not deny the eternity of the world and the existence of matter, which he called “plasmism.”
But Greek ideas and philosophies quickly faded with the fall of Athens to Roman rule and the declaration of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Thus, the idea of “God created the universe from nothing” became popular.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, and coinciding with the repercussions of the French Revolution, which took secularism as an intellectual framework and attacked the ideas of the Church and its control over human lives; Ideas have returned that see experimental science as a solution to all the problems facing humans, and that the world does not need a God to manage its affairs, as long as science is capable of that, with a return once again to the idea of the eternity and antiquity of matter.
Contemporary atheism: The events of September 11 are the first driver of the wave of contemporary atheism, which spread widely in Europe and then moved to the countries of the Middle East. Accusing the Taliban of being the perpetrator of these bombings sparked in thousands the feeling that religion and religiosity are the primary reason for the spread of extremism and the lack of acceptance and threat of others, and even killing them and threatening humanity in general. Currents have emerged calling for making atheism an alternative to religiosity to save people and preserve the scientific and human development .
Third: The causes of atheism…
There are many reasons for the spread of atheism:
1- Psychological reasons: A study titled “The Psychological Type of the Atheist,” which included 320 male people in America, revealed that more than half of the respondents had lost one of their parents before the age of twenty, and that these people had suffered from psychological and social problems in their lives. early; This was reflected not only in their rejection of the rules of family and society; And even rejecting the existence of God, and celebrating that, is what made the study recommend the necessity of studying the psychological reality of atheists in general.
2- Dependence on the West: One of the repercussions of the French Revolution was the West’s adoption of separating religion from politics and abandoning the Church’s control over all aspects of life. This trend was followed by the occurrence of Western and civilizational progress, which made some of the peoples of the world believe that abandoning religion is the primary reason for achieving sophistication and progress. Therefore, the same intellectual approach must be followed to achieve this civilizational achievement.
3-the rigidity of religious discourse and its inability to keep up with the requirements of the era and its accelerated developments, and the inability of a large number of preachers to respond to the suspicions and allegations of atheism.
4-the shortcomings in the DA’wah system and the inability of the religious current to embrace the practical spiritual youth, and often content with dry scientific lessons and sermons that lack renewal .
5-the desire to enjoy life without restrictions, in conjunction with the tremendous cultural development that opened up to the human soul various colors of temptations and pleasures, which religion stood in front of.
6-the emergence of terrorist groups that described themselves as” Islamic ” and committed massacres and barbaric acts in the name of religion, made many people alienate from the entire religious system, and choose atheism as a counter to faith.
Fourth: indicators of atheism locally and globally
There is no doubt that it is difficult to put accurate figures and indicators for the numbers of atheists in the world, especially in the Arab and even Islamic countries specifically, as many atheists hide their identities for fear of social ostracism and victimization of them and their families; however, some indicators can be taken into account to clarify the extent of the spread of this phenomenon globally and locally:
1-Al Arabiya website stated that according to the campaign conducted by the “bioform forum for religion and public life” -an American Studies and Research Center specializing in religions and beliefs – that more than 84% of the world’s population are followers of the heavenly religions, or believers in a belief or something, and the rest do not believe in anything at all, as they classified themselves in a campaign that conducted more than 2,500 censuses in 230 countries and geographical regions of the world throughout 2010.
2-one of the results of this campaign was that atheism has become the third “religion” in number in the world after Christianity and Islam, and that Islam is the most spreadable, distributed between 87 and 90% of the Sunni sect, the rest are Shiites, while Judaism is the weakest religion, and slightly less than half of its followers reside in Israel.
3-Al Arabiya also published a map showing the number of atheists around the world as follows:
The map shows that the number of atheists in Europe reached 134,820,000, while in North America it reached 59,040,000, in Latin America 45,390,000, in Asia 858,580,000, in Africa 26,580,000, and in the Middle East and North Africa the number of atheists is 2,100,000.
The map-which shows the geographical distribution of those who classified themselves as non – religious; they do not believe in any belief, that is, “nihilists” without any connection with metaphysics-shows that the lowest percentage of them is found in the Middle East, where they are no more than 0.2% of the billion and 100 million “atheists” and their number, as shown by the map, is only two million and 100 thousand.
After them come the atheists of the black continent, with the exception of Egypt, Sudan and North African countries, with 2.4% of the total, followed by 4% in Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by 5.2% in the United States and Canada, then 12% in Europe, and the rest in Asia, with 76.2% representing more than 858 million, including 62.2% in China alone, which is approximately 586 million atheists.
4-according to the Al Arabiya website, statistics show that there are 58 million people, less than 1% of the world’s population, who can be considered “hayari” in any religion they belong, including Baha’is, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Magi and”Wicca”, a religion founded in Britain in the Fifties of the last century, as well as “Jains” whose beliefs are widespread in India in particular, as well as followers of “Taoism” spread in China and its neighbors, as well as similar followers of the tenrikyo belief.
5-in January 2014, the Egyptian Dar Al-Ifta issued a report on the number of atheists in the Arab world, where it said that the number of atheists in Egypt is 866, in Morocco 325, in Tunisia 320, in Iraq 242, in Saudi Arabia 178, while the number was 170 in Jordan, 70 in Sudan, 56 in Syria, 34 in Libya, and 32 in Yemen.. This is equal to 2,293 atheists among the then almost 400 million inhabitants of the Arab world. But this statistic has been described by some scholars as inaccurate, stressing that the number of atheists in the Arab world exceeds millions, because in 2012, the WIN Gallup Foundation conducted an opinion poll in which it proved that five percent of Saudi citizens – more than a million people then, according to their census – consider themselves “convinced atheists”, the same percentage in the United States, by the way, while 19 percent of Saudis – about six million people – consider themselves “non-religious”.
6 – according to the data of the world index of religions and atheism at the “Red Sea” Center, 32.4% of Egypt’s atheists are in the age group from 15 to 24 years and 36% in the age group (25-34 years), 73.8% of atheists are male and 26.2% are women.
7-the website of the Egyptian newspaper “Al-Wafd” stated that a survey conducted by the American University of Eastern Michigan revealed that the number of atheists in Egypt reached 3% of the population after the revolution of January 25, 2011, i.e. more than two million atheists, including 8 million abroad according to the population census at the time.
The American University survey also revealed that the largest governorates of Egypt in terms of the number of atheists are Cairo, followed by Alexandria (north), in addition to the presence of atheists in Ismailia (Northeast) and Sharqiya (Nile Delta, North), while Upper Egypt governorates are completely free of atheists, according to the same report
Fifth: Egyptian state’s efforts to confront the atheism
1- The Ministry of Endowments, in cooperation with the Ministry of Youth and Sports, launched a national campaign to confront the spread of atheism among young people, with the assistance of a number of psychologists, sociologists, politicians, and psychiatrists.
2- Al-Azhar International Center for Monitoring and Electronic Fatwas launched the “Bayan” Unit in 2018, to correct concepts and confront waves of extremism and deviations of any kind, especially atheism and non-religious thought, and to confront systematic campaigns to question the concept of religion in general and Islam in particular.
3- The “Bayan” Unit has allocated the hotline “19906”, which is affiliated with the Al-Azhar International Center for Electronic Fatwas, to respond to intellectual and religious questions related to Sahih al-Din, and they are answered directly by specialists over the phone and recorded.
4- The “Bayan” Unit, through the “Thought and Religions” Department, allocated the phone number (0020225973500) to answer questions on suspected atheism from callers from inside and outside Egypt.
5- Al-Azhar Al-Sharif established an electronic follow-up department that monitors abnormal ideas, analyzes them, and draws up systematic plans to address and correct them and protect society from them.
6 – Al-Azhar was keen to prepare the Research and Publishing Department for a number of research and scientific papers to refute atheistic principles and the suspicions that they promote.
