Shia or secular state?

Religious affiliations of Iranians as surveyed by GAMAAN
When asked "Which of the following is closer to your beliefs and faith?” only 32% explicitly identified as Shia Muslims, while five percent said they were Sunni Muslims and three percent Sufi Muslims. This seemed to belie state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation. Besides the Muslims, nine percent said they were atheists, eight percent said they were Zoroastrians, seven percent identified as spiritual, six percent as agnostics,1.5 percent as Christians. A fairly large component, 22% said "none.”
Bringing the survey findings to the attention of Parsiana, financial consultant Adil Rustomjee commented, "Note the surge in people claiming adherence to Zoroastrianism… eight percent in Iran’s population of 80 million… makes 6.4 million people!... The mullahs, for theocratic reasons, have every incentive to keep insisting that the Zoroastrian population is 25,000. So the actual number is between these two figures but look at the wide dispersion (range).” The researchers though interpreted the eight percent count of Zarathushtis as arising from "an interest in Persian nationalism and the need for an alternative to Islam rather than strict adherence to Zoroastrianism.”
"As someone who knows a thing or two about statistics, I observe that the sample size at 40,000 is very large for a survey. From the law of large numbers, the larger the sample size, the more accurate the inference and extrapolation to the universe (the country’s population in this case),” added Rustomjee.
"Greater access to the world via the Internet but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country… Iran, as we think we know it, is changing in fundamental ways,” summed up GAMAAN, an independent, non-profit research foundation registered in the Netherlands.
The survey found that increasing secularization shown by Iranians was linked to a critical view of the Islamic government: 68% felt that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers held a parliamentary majority; 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil; 56% did not want their children to receive religious education at school, but around 54% approved of their children having the opportunity to learn about diverse faiths at school.
Nonsense. 6.4 million Zoroastrians in Iran is misleading and no one should believe it. The number of Zoroastrians are much below 25,000. The Majlis elections show that around a total of 5,000 Zoroastrian votes were cast for the Zoroastrian candidates. So where were all these 6.4 million fellows. Even if 10% would have voted for the Zoroastrians candidates as Zoroastrians the number would be around 640,000. Iraqi Kurdistan has around 5,000 Zoroastrians and request that they should be given more attention and treated as Zoroastrians than some fictitious figure of 6.4 million.
This is an interesting survey! More analysis of facts will certainly help, and I hope the researchers and those interested in analyzing these facts (not opinions!) will continue to study their research.
