Everyday Sectarianism: Experimental Evidence From the Muslim World

• In Event: Survey Research in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Does everyday religious practice dampen or inflame sectarian tensions? If so, through which mechanism does religion’s physical and cultural institutions---and specifically the Islamic Friday sermon and communal prayer --- influence the religious and political beliefs of the congregants? We investigate this question by exploiting the plausibly random assignment of respondents across days of the week in a large-scale survey of the Muslim World. Across over 30,000 Muslim respondents drawn from 26 countries, we find that respondents interviewed on Fridays, proximate to the weekly communal prayer, were significantly more likely to express anti-Christian attitudes than those interviewed on other days of the week. We find that, furthermore, that the magnitude of the effect increases as the share of Christians in the national population grows. Taken together, these results suggest that, by heightening in-group identification, quotidian religious practices can also generate and/or reinforce sectarian divides in the Islamic world.

Authors

• Steven Brooke, University of Wisconsin- Madison

• Michael Thomas Hoffman, University of Notre Dame

• Youssef Chouhoud, Christopher Newport University