Arabs and Atheism: Religious Discussions in the Arab Twittersphere

TL;DR

This paper investigates how atheism is discussed on Arab Twitter, categorizing users and analyzing their content and interactions to understand religious discourse in a restrictive social context.

Contribution

It introduces a novel categorization of Arab Twitter users based on their religious content and analyzes their interactions, addressing a gap in research on Arab online atheism discussions.

Findings

Identification of four user categories: atheistic, theistic, tanweeri, and other.

Characterization of content and social networks of each user group.

Insights into cross-cultural religious discourse on social media.

Abstract

Most previous research on online discussions of atheism has focused on atheism within a Christian context. In contrast, discussions about atheism in the Arab world and from Islamic background are relatively poorly studied. An added complication is that open atheism is against the law in some Arab countries, which may further restrict atheist activity on social media. In this work, we explore atheistic discussion in the Arab Twittersphere. We identify four relevant categories of Twitter users according to the content they post: atheistic, theistic, tanweeri (religious renewal), and other. We characterise the typical content posted by these four sets of users and their social networks, paying particular attention to the topics discussed and the interaction among them. Our findings have implication for the study of religious and spiritual discourse on social media and provide a better cross-cultural understanding of relevant aspects.