British Muslim youth and religious fundamentalism: a quantitative investigation

Abstract

Much attention in popular discourse and academic, qualitative research has focused on strengthening ‘fundamentalist’ religiosity among Muslim youth in Britain, and its impact on engendering politicized religious identities and conservative social attitudes. We use new survey data to empirically examine how Muslim youth differ from older Muslims and non-Muslim British peers on religiosity, Islam-specific and broader social attitudes. We find that young Muslims attribute a greater salience to Islam for their personal identity, even though they pray and read scripture less, and support plural interpretations of Islam more than their elders. Like other youth, Muslim youth show liberalizing social attitudes across generations on gay marriage and legal abortion. Notably, like Christian youth, Muslim youth express stronger support for including religion in public debates than their elders. Overall, Muslim youth religiosity although uniquely expressed, influences moral and social attitudes for Muslims similarly to that of Christian or other religious youth.

Keywords:

• Muslim youth
• Islam
• Britain
• religion
• attitudes
• immigrants

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to David Campbell, Jocelyne Cesari, Chaeyoon Lim, Robert Putnam, Tom Sander, David Voas and Matthew Wright for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work.

Notes

1. The census of 2001 data were compiled using standard census tables available at: https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/home/census2001.asp

2. While some have focused on young Muslims in secondary schools (fourteen to seventeen year olds) (Hopkins 2006; Dwyer et al. 2008; Saeed et al. 1999), most have generally defined youth as between the late teens to the mid- to late-twenties. We define youth as seventeen to twenty-nine years; changing this specification does not change results.

3. We use both terms – fundamentalism and traditionalism – intentionally. In much of the literature on Muslims in Europe, fundamentalism is used as a religious category, describing a form of Islam that stresses a totalizing influence of religious customs on the believer's life, a rigid interpretation of the Qu'ran, and a strong focus on Sharia. We use traditionalism or conservatism to refer to broader social values or attitudes that may be influenced by religiosity – such as those surrounding issues of gender, sexuality or schooling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ridhi Kashyap

RIDHI KASHYAP is a Guest Fellow in the Migration and Urban Research Group at the Institute for Empirical and Applied Sociology at the University of Bremen, and worked on this article as the Hauser Human Rights Fellow 2010–11 at Harvard University.

Valerie A. Lewis

VALERIE A. LEWIS is Research Faculty at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Dartmouth Medical School.