Abstract
Are Muslims Distinctive? addresses the deceptively simple question of how Islam affects individuals and societies. Are Muslims more personally pious than others? Are they more tolerant of crime or corruption? Do Muslim societies treat women less equally? Are they less democratic? The premise of M. Steven Fish’s book is that most work focused on such questions brings more heat than light to these issues, selectively culling data that fits preconceived notions of Islam rather than a dispassionate and comprehensive survey of the available information. This book is an attempt to provide such a survey, through attitudinal data coupled with a wide variety of country-level data drawn from many sources. Six substantive chapters focus on a particular area in which there exists significant public discussion of how Muslims might be distinctive: personal religiosity and views toward religion in politics, social capital and tolerance, corruption and crime, large-scale political violence and terrorism, social inequality, and democracy.
Some of these questions are explored at the level of individual attitudes. Contrary to stubborn stereotypes, Fish finds little evidence that Muslims differ much in their attitudes toward the separation of religion and politics. He also finds that they are no more religiously devout than members of other faiths, and they are just as likely to be members of voluntary associations as anyone else. They are less tolerant of atheism than non-Muslims, but also less tolerant of political corruption. Consistent with other stubborn stereotypes, Muslims do exhibit more sexist views toward women.
Other questions are explored at the societal level, comparing predominantly Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries, he finds, enjoy about the same overall level of social capital as the rest of the world, and suffer from about the same amount of corruption and large-scale political violence. Both economic inequality and violent crime are less prevalent in Muslim countries than they are elsewhere. On the other hand, the social conditions for women are poorer in Muslim countries than in non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also more likely to be home to authoritarian political regimes. And the majority of most deadly terrorist attacks are committed by Islamists (and most of those who die in such attacks are Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries).
The general analytic strategy of each chapter follows the classic pattern of most quantitative journal articles: present the data, show bivariate relationships, explain multivariate statistical models, and provide a short discussion of the results. Fish is a careful methodologist who clearly explains the measures he uses at the beginning of each chapter, including both their strengths and weaknesses. A key strength of the book is his multivariate approach, including regular use of multi-level modeling. For each topic, he takes into account a wide array of potentially confounding independent variables. So for example, he begins Chapter Two by documenting that far more Muslims consider themselves a “religious person” than do non-Muslims, but that this difference largely disappears once age, gender, education level, and the overall proportion of religious people in the society are accounted for. Muslim countries may appear to have more corruption than non-Muslim countries in bivariate measures, but this pattern is entirely explained by their lower overall levels of economic development in the multivariate model. Fish tests the robustness of his findings with alternate measures and data sources in many places throughout the book. Overall he devotes far more space to issues of data availability, data quality, the range of available measures, and model specification issues than do most monographs. Fish also displays a magisterial command of the literature on his topic. Each of the chapters contains extensive citations to work in that area, and he carefully parses it all to identify the key debates and potential hypotheses about the role of Islam.
As the author acknowledges several times, the book is almost entirely descriptive. The goal is to identify patterns using robust statistical analysis, rather than explain the causes of those patterns. Fish shares some of his explanatory hunches in each chapter, but does not explore them in any systematic way. In several places he looks for differences between the Bible and Quran that might explain the divergence between Christians and Muslims on topics such as personal religiosity and gender equality (he finds none). The discussion of his finding that predominantly Muslim countries have significantly less open political systems is perhaps the most interesting of the book, as he explores many possible reasons for the pattern and ultimately finds no evidence for any of them. It is a refreshingly honest analysis—both devastating to many extant explanations for authoritarian Muslim states yet open about the lack of any plausible alternative explanation.
It is a bit disappointing that Fish relies exclusively on quantitative data. The patterns he identifies might be fleshed out more with the inclusion of some other data sources, including the numerous ethnographies and interview-based studies that exist on the different topics he covers. Inclusion of such data would not only enrich the findings, it would allow him to overcome some of the limitations in the measures he uses in the quantitative models.
The intended audience for the book is also not completely clear. The book argues convincingly that more basic quantitative descriptive data on the role of Islam in the world is needed. For social scientists, though, the descriptions of the data and methods will seem too basic. For interested readers outside of the academy, on the other hand, the careful attention to data measures and statistical models will seem tedious.
But both of these points are minor quibbles. Overall the book is packed with carefully developed and described empirical results that will serve as important baseline reference material for a wide variety of scholars. It is a valuable set of analyses for those working on issues of religion and Islam as well as the broader issues of inequality, social capital, democracy, and violence.