ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the panorama of religious communities in the MENA, a Muslim-majority region but with Jewish-majority Israel and smaller Christian and non-Abrahamic minorities dispersed throughout. It weighs how religiosity prefigures public attitudes and preferences on social and political issues. It also highlights the mobilizational capacity of Islam, manifest in both efforts to suppress religious movements in the past and the contemporary rise of Islamist movements that range from peaceful service providers to extremist organizations whose violence escapes convenient explanation. Case studies of Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia reveal that different Muslim-majority populations have settled upon divergent frameworks of expressing and protecting their creeds and institutions; such diversity is integral to understanding the texture of social life.
