New Atheists are wrong about Islam. Here’s how data proves it – Salon.com

Interesting study by Steven Fish of Berkeley on his study and book, Are Muslims Distinctive?: A Look at the Evidence, finding less difference between Muslims and others than commonly believed:

I [Fish] found that Muslims in general are less distinctive than many of us think. In many ways there is really very little difference between Muslims and everybody else. Sometimes I use “everybody else” as the reference category, and sometimes I use Christians in particular, because Christianity and Islam are by far the world’s biggest faith traditions…

Even in some areas in which we expect … I didn’t find a great deal of difference. For example, many people think that Muslims are really intent on fusing religious and political authority, that there’s really no room in Islamic thinking for independent civic sphere that is not run by religious authorities, and in which religious authority and doctrine predominate, meaning there’s little room for an independent civil society and public sphere. Well, I found in this survey data that … Muslims and Christians don’t differ very much on this question, and that most Muslims, once one controls for everything that needs to be controlled for in these statistical analyses, actually do not want to fuse religious and political authority…

Some, of course, do. Some absolutely do. But some Christians do as well … There are many American Christians who are skeptical about dividing church and state rigorously. That’s true for many Muslims as well. But a majority of both Christians and Muslims seem to embrace at least some separation of sacred and secular in politics. That’s one finding that was perhaps surprising and also showed that Muslims are less distinctive than we might think.

Another finding that showed that Muslims were less distinctive than we might think looked at … membership in organizations, all kinds of things that we would use to actually measure social capital — interpersonal trust, for example. We find there that there really is little or no difference between those Muslims and everyone else.

There’s some questions by which I did find evidence of Muslim distinctiveness. For example, gender inequality; I find in the data that there are big problems in the Muslim world relative to other regions, and among Muslims relative to people of other faiths when it comes to gender inequality. It seems that there are lower workforce participation ratios — that is, female-to-male and earned-income ratios — among Muslims than among non-Muslims, generally speaking, which means that women tend to work less and earn less than men do in Muslim countries to a greater extent than they do elsewhere. I also find other evidence of gender discrimination …

Generally speaking, women should outlive men by several years. I found that that gap is somewhat smaller in predominantly Muslim societies, which is a red flag and shows that perhaps there are gender discrimination problems that run more deeply than in predominantly non-Muslim societies.

New Atheists are wrong about Islam. Here’s how data proves it – Salon.com.