“What 1.3 billion Muslims really think. An answer to a recent Gallup study, based on the “World Values Survey”” Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers ((for info: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/).
Keywords: C43 - Index Numbers and Aggregation; F15 - Economic Integration; F5 - International Relations and International Political Economy; Z12 - Religion
ABSTRACT:
This book is based on the quantitative, multivariate analysis of the World Values Survey data from more than 80 countries around the globe on the political and social values of the world’s Muslim communities by international comparison.
For the first time, a fully documented and comprehensive world-wide representative analysis of
• Global Muslim perceptions of life
• Global Muslim perceptions on problems of the environment
• Global Muslim attitudes to work
• Global Muslim attitudes on the family
• Global Muslim opinions on politics and society
• Global Muslim opinions on religion and morale
• Global Muslim opinions on national identity
• Global Muslim Sociodemographics
is thus available to the public. By and large, the study comes to the conclusion that global Muslims and also the Muslim communities in Western democracies are value-conservative, family-oriented, but supportive of democracy.
Which perspectives then are available to analyze the facts? The study takes up the idea of “Asabiyya” (“social cohesion”), inherent in classic Arab historiography, first described by Ibn Chaldun (1332 to 1406) in his important work “Muqaddimah”.
Is “modernization” without “spiritual values” possible in the long run? Starting from the sophisticated multivariate analysis of the World Values Survey data (factor analysis), it is shown that two factors are decisive in understanding global value change: a continuum of “traditional versus secular”, and a continuum „cheating versus active society“. Asabiyya is defined then empirically by the residuals from the factor scores of “traditional versus secular”, and „cheating versus active society“. Asabiyya in the 21st Century, as a way out from the modernization trap of societies, characterized by large-scale social anomaly, is a high secularism combined with a high active society score, thus avoiding the “modernization trap” of an increasingly secular society, which accepts cheating on taxes; accepts government benefits fraud and taking bribes.
According to the empirical analysis of this book, the “active society” of volunteer organization work is the best societal medicine against this kind of value decay, which is so common in countries like France, Brazil, or most of East Central Europe and the former USSR. An active form of religious or non-religious humanism, which provides a noble motivation for such activities as volunteer social services, is a very necessary precondition for social cohesion in the 21st Century.
Our study also constructs various indices of global value change and also performs a factor analysis of global value differences. Without active society, multicultural societies will fail. The study also quantitatively compares European values and paths of secularization, and cautiously argues in favor of the rediscovery of the classic democratic workers’ parties agenda of Europe during the pre-war and post-world-war II period in large sections of the Muslim world.
