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On Cultural Muslims, by Selim Koru – 11 December 2025

A friend and I were chatting about Zohran Mamdani after his election victory.

“Do you think he does daily prayers?” he asked.

I said I didn’t think so.

“You don’t know that. He’s twelver Shia. They’re a lot different from us [Hanafi Turks]. Maybe they’re better at being leftist and pious at the same time” he said.

Dear reader, allow me to be blunt here: if Zohran Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, had been very religious, he probably wouldn’t have married a Hindu woman. If his son had been very religious, he probably wouldn’t have gone into hip hop, talked openly about his cannabis consumption, become a socialist, and he wouldn’t have worked with *checks his notes* all of NYC’s leftist Jews.

What is it that I hear?

“You don’t know that Selim!”

Yes I do, OK?

Game knows game.

Part of the problem here is that it’s not always easy to talk about gradients of religious observance with Islam. In that sense, it has been a bit like Protestant Christianity: you’re either of the faith or you aren’t.

I spent quite a bit of time in Wisconsin, which is pretty Protestant. When people there ask you “are you Christian?” they’re not asking if you come from a Christian family. [1] They’re asking if you believe. Another way of asking that question is “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?” It’s a binary question. Yes or no.

For most of my life, it’s been very similar among Muslims. When someone asks you “are you Muslim?” you can either say you aren’t, or you can tilt your head a bit, put your hand on your heart and mutter “Alhamdurillah” [thank God], and feel the rush of endorphins engulfing the two of you.

Again, a binary question. You’re either in or you’re out.

That’s not the case with Catholics and Jews. There the faith is hereditary, and there is a range of adjectives that can signal degrees of practice. There are lapsed Catholics, cultural Catholics, cradle Catholics, as well as reformed Jews, liberal Jews, secular Jews, etc.

The question “are you Catholic” or “are you Jewish” can well be about one’s heritage, rather than personal belief system. The “you” there is both singular and plural, as in “are your people Catholic/Jewish?” Often you get to choose the level at which you want to answer the question.

Here’s my argument: I think Muslims (in the West especially) are gradually moving from the first camp into the second. This is evident in the terms we use.

In the 2000s, there were very few terms for Muslims who weren’t religious.

There were “moderate Muslims,” but this was a media term that acted as a contrast to “radical Muslims.” It wasn’t a concept people used in real life.

You could be a “secular Muslim,” which carried a whiff of French-style Laïcité, or its Kemalist version in Turkey. People often hesitated to identify with those traditions if they didn’t really originate from them.

If you went one step further, you could also be an “ex-Muslim,” which implies a formal exit from the religion. This implied a critical position towards Islam, similar to that of the New Atheists, and to me, it still evokes figures like Aayan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie. [2]

I tried “lapsed Muslim” a few times, but it didn’t resonate with people. “Non-practicing Muslim” is accurate, but too clunky, and you don’t really see it much.

In the last few years, however, a new term has become more prominent: the cultural Muslim.

The term was in use for more than a decade, but I’ve been hearing it a lot more often recently.

Here’s an example from a Reddit discussion of Zohran Mamdani:

warren_stupidity is right! And the reason it’s so intuitive for us to understand “cultural Islam” is that there’s already other forms of cultural Abrahamic religious practice. It fits right in.

The cultural Muslim has adopted a softer attitude towards the religion. He’s aware of the strict binary nature of Islamic identity, but has quietly sidestepped it.

He likes to bask in the warmth of religious belonging, but doesn’t like to restrict himself to it. He’ll adhere to some of the easy things, like eschewing pork (but not insisting on halal), taking his shoes off at home, and saying “inshallah” and “mashallah” at appropriate times. He might pray on a holiday or fast every now and then if the occasion calls for it, but isn’t going to lose sleep over things he’s not doing.

She is almost certainly not wearing a hijab. She’ll date outside the religion, sip some white wine at a party, and may even roll up a joint here and there, but not in front of her elders.

Islamic orthodoxy lightly bounces off of her. She might “believe in a God” or muse about creation at a few points in her life, but for the most part, he doesn’t think about it.

You might say that this sounds an awful lot like secular Muslims or ex-Muslims. On the level of individual practice (or the lack thereof), yes it does. The difference becomes more apparent when thinking about politics.

Secular Muslims are about subtracting Islam from the public sphere. This is a tradition that developed in places where Islam was seen as a dominant and regressive force, and secularism developed to push it back. Secular Muslims are therefore trying to put distance between themselves and Islamic identity. Cultural Muslims are creatures of multicultural environments, or environments where Islam is repressed. They have the freedom to move towards their Islamic identity. They don’t believe, but they’re eager to interact with Muslim communities and embrace Islamic identity in the public space. That’s why, when Mamdani was being attacked for being a “jihadist,” he delivered a speech embracing his Islamic identity, rather than de-emphasizing it.

The emotional inflection is different.

This is all the more evident with Ex-Muslims. By clearly exiting the religion, ex-Muslims put themselves in a position where they’re technically apostates, meaning that their “their blood is halal [to shed],” as orthodox preachers will put it. It’s not like Muslims in Western countries are trying to enforce this, but it does make things a little awkward. Ex-Muslims know that things can get nasty, and often have their guard up.

Ex-Muslims tend to push back on left-liberal eagerness to embrace Muslims, and their opposition to the religion can dominate other political priorities. On Israel-Palestine, they are alarmed by the Islamism of Hamas, and sometimes they’ll openly sympathize with Israel. The New Atheist influence is still significant here.

People who identify as cultural Muslims don’t have that contentious relationship with the religion, and things can go into different directions. Some are like secular Jews, who have distilled the morality of mainstream Abrahamic religion (blessed are the weak, etc.), and gravitate towards left-wing causes. Their moral intuitions merge with loose cultural belonging to Islam to yield strong pro-Palestinian positions.

Consider, for example, the Turkish-American streamer Hasan Piker, who is probably the most influential leftist voice among Gen-Z leftists in the United States. Here he is with the NYT’s Ross Douthat in the Interesting Times podcast:

Douthat: I’m curious how you think about how left-wing politics and Middle Eastern culture and Islamic politics fit together. And I understand you’re not a Muslim — you don’t consider yourself a Muslim — but you’re culturally Muslim, right?

Piker: I mean, I say I’m a Muslim because I’m culturally Muslim in the same way that many secular Jews are Jewish, or many American Protestants say that they’re Christian, but they’re not really.

If pressed, Piker might say that he’s an atheist, but it seems that he likes to wear his bit of Muslim identity, partly because it’s a flourish on his pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist stance. This kind of Muslimness also puts him closer to poor immigrants in the United States.

Serious political Muslims are upset about Islam being watered down into cultural and secular versions. They don’t want Islam to be “racialized.” They pride themselves that in a world of eroding religious faith, Islam has remained fairly rigid, and therefore maintains its authority. Dragoman expressed this very strongly on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast a couple of years ago, and has continued the thought in his comments on the NYC mayoral race.

I personally don’t think Islam’s relative sturdiness has much to do with its intrinsic qualities. It’s mostly a feature of its late entry into modernity. As Muslim countries are urbanizing, and gorging themselves on capitalism and nationalism, they will become much more secular. This is evident in Turkey, my home country.

In the West, however, the shift is already here. Cultural Muslims are governing New York and London, the two most important cities in the English-speaking world. They are in literature, sports, entertainment, and academia. As they accumulate more power and prestige, even very religious Muslims are going to feel the need to soften their attitude and approach them.

Finally, I should note that these states of non-practice are context-dependent, rather than fixed characteristics. If you ask a non-practicing Muslim in Turkey, they might say that they’re secular. When that same person moves to a Western country, chances are that they’ll gradually switch to being a cultural Muslim. Why? Because they no longer have to fend off the influence of Islamically-tinted state authority. Their aversion to Islamic symbols will cool, and as time goes by, they’ll get back in touch with some of the universal aspects of the religious tradition they grew up with.

In the end, the whole idea that Islam is a civilization separate from “Judeo-Christian” West is an illusion. We’re all in it together.

[1] I was once asked if I was “Christian or Catholic?” I thought it strange, and it was later explained to me that this was a common way to talk in Wisconsin. Lutherans are fun, aren’t they?

[2] There’s a Central Council of Ex-Muslims founded in Germany in 2007, and a Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain founded in the same year. There are YouTube channels and influencers who identify in this way, but a lot of it feels very geopolitical, in the sense that they’re attached to Indian or Israeli political projects. There are also a group of ex-Muslims who became Christian, like Nabeel Asif Qureshi.

Selim Koru is an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He has written on Turkish politics for publications such as the New York Times, War on the Rocks, and The Atlantic, and is the author of New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country.

This article was first published on Selim Koru’s Substack.

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