The role of education, religiosity and development on support for violent practices among Muslims in thirty-five countries

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE The role of education, religiosity and development on support for violent practices among Muslims in thirty-five countries Aaron Gullickson ID*, Sarah Ahmed ID Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States of America * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Gullickson A, Ahmed S (2021) The role of education, religiosity and development on support for violent practices among Muslims in thirty-five countries. PLoS ONE 16(11): e0260429. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260429 Editor: Bryan L. Sykes, University of CaliforniaIrvine, UNITED STATES Received: May 5, 2021 Accepted: November 9, 2021 Published: November 24, 2021 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260429 Copyright: © 2021 Gullickson, Ahmed. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data and code uses for the analysis in this article are available on a GitHub repository at https://github.com/ AaronGullickson/muslim_attitudes. Abstract Despite widespread scholarly interest in values and attitudes among Muslim populations, relatively little work has focused on specific attitudes popularly thought to indicate anti-modern or anti-liberal tendencies within Islam. In this article, we use data from the Pew Research Center from 2008-2012 to examine support for violent practices among Muslims in thirty-five countries. Support for violent practices is defined by three questions on the acceptability of killing apostates, the stoning of adulterers, and severe corporal punishment for thieves. Using multilevel models that capture country-level variability, we analyze the relationship between support for violent practices and education, religiosity, and development. In general, we find that support for violent practices is less common among individuals with more education and less religiosity and who come from more developed countries. However, when we examine variation across countries, we see evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the association of education and religiosity with support for violent practices. We find that education is more liberalizing in more liberal countries and in less developed countries. The effects of religiosity are also related to country-level context but vary depending on how religiosity is measured. Overall, the variation we observe across countries calls into question a civilizational approach to studying values among Muslim populations and points to a more detailed multiple modernities approach. Introduction In a viral appearance on the HBO Show “Real Time with Bill Maher” in 2014, actor Ben Affleck became embroiled in an unexpected debate with host Bill Maher and fellow guest, Sam Harris, over the allegedly authoritarian and violent tendencies of Islamic doctrine [1]. Harris, one of the leading figures in the New Atheist movement, argued that Islam “at this moment is the motherlode of bad ideas.” To support this view, Maher offered data from a recent poll of Muslims worldwide conducted by the Pew Research Center which showed that “like 90%” of Egyptian Muslims supported death as a punishment for leaving the faith. Although Maher’s figure was factually correct, the statistic is nonetheless misleading. Egyptian Muslims were more supportive of this statement than Muslims in any other country in PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260429 November 24, 2021 1 / 22 PLOS ONE Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The role of education, religiosity and development on support for violent practices among Muslims the Pew study. In contrast, only 0.8% of Muslims in Kazakhstan felt similarly. Among the more than thirty countries in the cited Pew survey as well as a similar one conducted in subSaharan Africa, the level of support among Muslims for killing apostates varies uniformly between these two extremes. Substantial variation rather than strict orthodoxy is the key to understanding Muslim responses to this question. For social scientists, this variation then begs a further question—why do Muslims vary so much in their support for such “bad” ideas? In this article, we take up this question with a more formal analysis of the Pew data. The data were collected between 2008–12 on Muslims in thirty-five countries representing roughly sixty-five percent of the global Muslim population. From this data, we develop a value construct measuring support for violent practices from three questions on the acceptability of killing apostates, the stoning of adulterers, and severe corporal punishment for thieves. Following prior work on the impact of modernization and development on liberal values in mostly Western contexts, our analysis focuses on the relationship between this value construct, education, religiosity, and development. Our analysis builds on an extensive literature on values and attitude among Muslims, and complements prior research in two important ways. First, we address specific attitudes that have never been examined in scholarly work, despite their prominence in popular discussions of Islam in the West. Most prior research focuses either on attitudes regarding universalistic and abstract concepts such as support for democracy, political violence, and gender equality, or relies upon large aggregate indices that are driven by a multitude of specific attitudes ranging from acceptance of abortion to whether respondents would be willing to sign a petition [2]. A focus on universalistic attitudes, however, provides little insight into the specific attitudes and values that differentiate cultural and religious groups. For example, whether a respondent is willing to sign a petition or is supportive of democracy in the abstract may tell us little to nothing about how that respondent feels toward the mandate that apostates should be killed. Yet, the justifiability of killing apostates is a topic that both divides Muslims internally and distinguishes Muslims from other religious groups. It is not simply that Muslims feel differently on this issue in comparison to other religious groups, but rather that the question itself is only intelligible among Muslims. Second, the large sample of countries here allows us to more systematically examine country-level variation than has been possible in much of the prior work on value systems in Muslim populations. While proponents of classi (...truncated)