Does Islam deter crime in a secular Islamic country? The case of Turkey

Abstract

‘Does Islam deter crime in a secular country like Turkey’ is the research question for which the current study tries to find a tentative answer. The data came from 619 undergraduate university students, 352 academic and non-academic staff at a public university and 498 shop owners in a small city in a Central Anatolian region in Turkey in 2010. The research on the relationship between Islam and crime is almost absent in the criminology literature. The findings of the correlation analysis pointed out that the impact of Islam on crime was more pronounced regarding alcohol use, and generally weak. More importantly, the results of the multivariate statistics showed that some religious measures deterred individuals themselves engaging in deviance and alcohol use. No relationship was found between Islam and violence.

Keywords:

• Islam
• religion
• crime
• deviance
• violence
• alcohol use
• moral community thesis
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Ms Dorothy Lee (Denver, CO) and SPI Global company for editing of the paper.

Notes on contributors

Ozden Ozbay has a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His areas of interest are causes of crime and criminological theories. His recent articles appeared in International Journal of Offender Therapy & Comparative Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice as well as some Turkish Journals. He currently works in the Faculty of Communication at Cumhuriyet University-Sivas, Turkey.