“Not at All Religious”: Irreligiosity as Social Deviance in a Majority Muslim Context

ABSTRACT

In a majority Muslim context, where most college students are raised religiously and appear outwardly to conform to social norms in terms of dress and religious ritual, which college students are most likely to report that, in fact, they consider themselves “Not At All Religious”? When irreligiosity is treated as a measure of social deviance, does Hirschi’s theory of social control appropriately account for this demographic? I use original Islamic Social Attitudes Survey data collected from 1,139 Kuwaiti college students in 2007 to show that gender, being raised religiously, and religious experience are all significantly correlated to irreligiosity. Neither family attachment nor peer networks predicts self-reported irreligiosity like the influence of conservative Mosque Networks.

Notes

¹ Exceptions include Souryal (1992) who looked at juvenile delinquency in Egypt, although the youth in the present study are not comparable in age or social context; and Krauss et al. (2006) looked at youth deviance and religiosity in Malaysia.

² Helal and Coston’s (1996) study looked at Islam’s qualitative influence on the family, neighborhood, education, and social affairs effects on Bahrain’s low crime rate, but did not ascertain statistical significance to these relationships; Souryal (1992) includes some speculation of attachment to family as the main factor affecting low rates of juvenile delinquency in Egypt, but does not directly test that hypothesis.

³ For more information about the Kuwait ISAS 2007, see González (2011, 2013).

⁴ Although the data presented here is in English, the survey version that was distributed and completed was in Arabic. The ISAS English version was translated by a local team of translators and edited by various social science faculty involved with this project. The data was then entered into a database by the Statistical Unit at Kuwait University and analyzed using statistical software packages SAS and SPSS.

⁵ In previous studies, mother’s education was shown to have an important liberalizing influence on social and political attitudes of Kuwait college students (González and Al-Kazi 2011).

⁶ Islamic School of Thought is comparable to denominations such as Catholic, Evangelical, and Mainline Protestant in Christianity and has been used as another measure of Islamic religiosity in previous studies (González 2011) so I include it here.

⁷ Qur’anic Literalism attempts to capture a dimension of religious traditionalism akin to the measure of Biblical Literalism used in majority Christian contexts.

⁸ Percentages reported do not add up to 100 because of missing data due to lack of response.

⁹ It is possible that the Mosque Networks Scale could be addressing a latent political conservatism. However, there was not enough independent variation in the Political Affiliation variable (previously tested in González 2011) in this sample for me to include it as a covariate in the Binary and Multinomial Logistic Regression Analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alessandra L. González

ALESSANDRA L. GONZÁLEZ is a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination (LISD), Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Her research focuses on gender, religion, politics, and deviance.