Religious Tolerance and Religious Bridging in Muslim-majority Countries

• In Event: Islam and Politics

Abstract

A functioning democracy requires not only elections and other formal institutions but also a degree of willingness among its populace to tolerate minority groups and acknowledge them as legitimate citizens with equal rights. I propose a new explanation to explain the recent findings on how Muslims in Muslim-majority countries have a high support for democracy but low levels of tolerance. Focusing on religious tolerance and diverging from the mainstream approaches that emphasize the influence of Islamic theology, socio-economic modernization, political competition, and institutional arrangements, I focus on the importance of social relationships and argue that the primary driver of the low tolerance is low levels of religious bridging or interfaith friendships among Muslims in the countries. This scarcity of bridging hinders the Muslim majority’s ability to tolerate and understand the viewpoints of the non-Muslim minorities.

I support this claim by offering three pieces of evidence. First, I apply a multi-level modeling on a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center and show that level of interfaith friendships significantly predicts various measures of religious tolerance among Muslims in 17 Muslim-majority countries. Specifically, interfaith friendships are positively related to a lower perception that Christians are hostile to Muslims, a higher acceptance of interfaith marriage, a higher perception that Islam and Christianity share similarities, and a greater awareness that non-Muslim minorities in the countries face restrictions on their religious practice

Second, comparing Muslims’ levels of religious bridging to that of Catholics in Catholic-majority Latin American countries, I show that Muslims in the Muslim-majority countries indeed have lower levels of interfaith friendships. This difference persists even after potentially confounding factors are controlled and after Sunni-Shia sectarianism is taken into account by analyzing only respondents who believed that both Sunnis and Shias are considered Muslim.

Third, I provide causal evidence for the argument by conducting a survey experiment on a representative sample of Muslims in Jakarta, the capital of the world’s largest Muslim-majority country Indonesia. Since it is practically impossible to randomly assign people into friendship networks, the idea is to manipulate the salience of respondents' interfaith friendships and then examine its effects. Previous studies show that merely imagining interactions or relationships with outgroup members is sufficient to improve tolerance level (Miles and Crisp 2014)

A total of 1,015 Muslims were surveyed and assigned into either the control or the treatment group. Respondents in the control group were asked to name neighbors whom they knew well, whereas those in the treatment group were asked to name neighbors whom they knew well and were not Muslim. The dependent variable is a composite score calculated from questions tapping into tolerance toward non-Muslims. I find a statistically significant treatment effect in that respondents in the treatment group exhibited a higher level of tolerance (p < .05, one-tailed t-test since the hypothesis is directional) than those in the control group.

I discuss the implications of these findings on our understanding of Muslims’ political behavior and underline the crucial roles social networks and social interactions play in shaping tolerance level and democratic quality in general. I conclude by highlighting avenues for future research, such as the potential antecedents of the low levels of bridging and how social interactions may improve or harm democratization in the Muslim world and beyond.

Author

• Nathanael Gratias Sumaktoyo, University of Notre Dame