I’ve seen polls that show Iran is 98% Muslim. 99.98% if you take the official 2011 Census. On the other hand, social media polls show Iranians as between 32 and 38% Shia Muslims.
Iran shows one of the big problems with polling – if a pollster calls on the telephone, he or she already has my number. It isn’t much of a problem to learn my name and address. Many of the pollsters call and want to speak to Michael – they already know my name as well as my phone number. There is no anonymity in telephone polling. I watched polls in South Dakota that were intensively anti-abortion proven invalid by elections turning down the same laws that the pollsters supported. People don’t tell pollsters what they’re really thinking without anonymity. Heck, I’ve gotten to the point of, when a pollster asks for Michael, putting a sad note into my voice and explaining that he’s dead. We’ll see if that reduces the interruptions as we move into this next election cycle.
So how should I understand Iran’s religion under the Islamic Republic? All Arab News quotes Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi as saying that 50,000 of the country’s 75,000 mosques have closed their doors. He made his speech hoping for more government money to support the mosques – but when the official sources say that two thirds of the mosques are closed, and the social media polls identify somewhere on the close order of a third being Shia Muslims, that’s kind of a correlation. I suspect the Islamic Republic is a minority rule – a plurality at best – and has been for a long time.
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