The idea that the Middle East is becoming more liberal may sound counterintuitive. Nearly 50 years ago, a revolution in Iran dismantled the country’s secular order and ushered in an absolutist clerical regime grounded in Shiite fundamentalism whose battle cry was “Death to America.” The region has since been an incubator for numerous terrorist attacks in Europe and North America, insurgent movements committed to authoritarian theocracy, and repressive regimes that subjugate women, crush free expression, and marginalize minorities. By now, it might seem easy to conclude that Middle Eastern societies are simply less interested in liberalism—that they are governed by a fundamentally different, more religiously oriented “regime of truth,” as the philosopher Michel Foucault declared in 1978 about the uprising in Iran. In this view, a system of rule in which fundamentalists claim authority to define the faith as they see fit—subordinating individual liberty to religious diktats, promoting male supremacy, and imposing restrictive dress codes on women—will forever distinguish the region from the West.

But this assessment mistakes the consequences of domination for its causes. Beneath the authoritarian entrenchment, another history has been unfolding. Between 2000 and 2020, I supervised a series of surveys in the Middle East, conducting face-to-face interviews with representative samplings of people in five key countries to understand why citizens hold the values they do and to track shifts in those values. To varying degrees, respondents in these countries—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, and Turkey—expressed an increasing preference for liberal values, even as their rulers sought to suppress popular demands for democratic change. (We focused on these countries because their size and political importance made them valuable cases for testing sociological theories.)

The survey queried respondents about a broad range of values, but we sought to capture their attitudes toward liberal values with 15 questions covering three dimensions: expressive individualism, gender equality, and secular politics. Expressive individualism was measured by a preference for marrying for love rather than parental approval, independence and imagination over obedience and religious faith as desirable qualities in children, and the right of women to dress as they wish. Views on gender equality were elicited through questions on polygamy, wifely obedience, and giving priority to men in politics, the job market, and education. Perspectives on secular politics were assessed through queries about separating religion from politics; Western-style governance; Islamic government; and sharia law. We then combined the responses to generate a “liberalism index” score of 1 to 4 for each population in each survey, with higher scores indicating greater support for liberalism.

These indices showed significant increases in liberalism, although the magnitude of the change differed by domain and country. Support for Islamic government and sharia generally declined across the region. Among Iranians, there has been a growing demand for the separation of religion and politics, for gender equality, and for freedom of dress. These changing values have translated into political action, most notably in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 and the nationwide protests of 2025–26, when tens of thousands of protesters were reported to have been killed by the Islamic Republic’s security forces. In Egypt, the proportion of respondents who considered Islamic government to be “very good” fell from 25 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2020; the share who felt sharia law was “very important” declined from 28 percent to 18 percent. Among Iraqi respondents, the proportion that strongly supported Islamic government and sharia law fell from 30 and 34 percent in 2004 to 15 and 14 percent in 2011. 

Although many survey questions on forms of government were excluded in Saudi Arabia because of political sensitivities, surveys in that country captured significant changes: the proportion of respondents who considered it very important to implement sharia law fell from 73 percent in 2003 to 35 percent in 2011. On gender equality, meanwhile, the share who strongly agreed that university education is more important for boys than for girls declined significantly, especially among Egyptians (from 15 percent in 2001 to eight percent in 2020) and Iraqis (from 29 percent in 2004 to eight percent in 2011—a level that remained unchanged, on average, in 2021–22, according to the research group Arab Barometer).

A more fine-grained look at the results in individual countries suggests that the experience of religious domination itself may have fed, rather than foreclosed, a desire for a responsive political order. It can take time for popular ideas to reshape a society’s governing institutions. Yet Middle Eastern history shows that shifts in values can be crucial in bringing about changes in social and political organization. The rise of liberal nationalist movements in Egypt, Syria, and Iran in the early twentieth century, for example, was preceded by the........

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