Religiosity Inside and Outside the Muslim World

Abstract

Is there something unique about religion in Muslim societies compared to their non-Muslim counterparts, and how would we know? This article examines three recurring challenges in answering that question: our limited capacity to compare across doctrinal traditions, to articulate the different forms that religiosity takes, and to accommodate the varying sensitivity of religious politics. Wide but shallow data from omnibus surveys suggest that Muslim societies are highly religious, but so is most of the rest of the world outside Europe. Yet these data also reveal instrumentation challenges that hamper our ability to compare religiosity across societies or assess its dimensionality: our measures are too crude to discriminate among people at the more devout end of the religiosity spectrum, and too sparse to distinguish the different ways that people are religious. Richer, country-specific data from Indonesia does reveal a core distinction between personal religiosity and views on religion's role in the public sphere, but we can offer little more than informed speculation on how well these distinctions travel across societies until we develop common scales that themselves travel. Finally, studies with Syrian and Lebanese populations demonstrate that impression management is a non-ignorable consideration when studying religion because people care about what other people care about.