The religious and social correlates of Muslim identity: an empirical enquiry into religification among male adolescents in the UK

Abstract

For the first time in 2001 the Census for England and Wales included a question on religious identity. The campaign for the inclusion of this question was largely pioneered by the Muslim community who argued that religious identity was a more significant indicator of social and public significance than ethnicity. This paper tests the thesis that Muslim identity predicts distinctive values of public and social significance among male adolescents (13–15 years of age) who participated in a survey conducted across the four nations of the United Kingdom. From the 11,870 participants in the survey the present analysis compares the responses of 158 male students who self-identified as Muslim with the responses of 1932 male students who self-identified as religiously unaffiliated. Comparisons are drawn across two domains defined as religiosity and as social values. The data demonstrated that for these male adolescents self-identification as Muslim encased a distinctive profile in terms both of religiosity and social values.

Keywords:

• Religious identity
• Muslim identity
• religiosity
• social values

Acknowledgements

Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project (AHRC Reference: AH/G014035/1) was a large-scale mixed methods research project investigating the attitudes of 13–16-year-old students across the United Kingdom. Students from a variety of socio-economic, cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds from different parts of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, with the addition of London as a special case, took part in the study. Professor Robert Jackson was principal investigator and Professor Leslie J. Francis was co-investigator. Together they led a team of qualitative and quantitative researchers based in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, within the Centre for Education Studies at the University of Warwick.