Berkley Center

One of the most heavily studied topics when it comes to the Muslim world concerns the apparent lack of democracy in Muslim-majority countries. The common (mis)conception is that that must be so because Muslims do not value democracy. This cannot be further from the empirical evidence scholars have so far collected. When presented with a choice between having an authoritarian system characterized by a strong leader or a democratic system, Muslims across the world, just like non-Muslims do, show a strong preference for the latter. Even in the midst of insecurity and political turmoil that befell some Arab countries following the 2011 uprisings, Muslims in the region continue to exhibit a strong support for democracy. This means that Islam is hardly to blame for the lack of democracy in Muslim countries. History of colonialism, oil curse, and institutional arrangements that do not really specify the proper realms of influence for the sacred and the secular are some of the alternative explanations for the democracy scarcity.

The focus on democracy, however, while important, should not be regarded as the ultimate goal. This brings us to the distinction between electoral democracy and liberal democracy. Electoral democracy, characterized by a relatively free election and political competition, is important. But to be truly beneficial for the people and separate itself from authoritarianism or competitive authoritarianism, democracy needs also to include protection of rights and a degree of civil liberties—a liberal democracy. Civil liberties, in turn, require a degree of tolerance among the citizens. It would be very difficult to guarantee rights and liberties by relying only on security institutions. The citizens themselves need to tolerate dissents and non-mainstream views.

My research, focusing on religious tolerance, examines this tolerance aspect of the society. There are good reasons to study religious tolerance. First, religion as a topic is hardly a mainstream object of inquiry in some social sciences. There is still a sentiment that religion is a residual of the pre-modern time which would disappear once the society becomes modernized and more rational. Second, both the public and academics alike seem to share a concern about the state of religious freedom in the Muslim world. Blasphemy, conversion, and proselytization are politically and socially sensitive issues in many Muslim-majority countries, more so than they are in non-Muslim countries. Existing research also suggests that Muslim-majority countries are more restrictive to religious minorities and non-mainstream faiths.

In explaining this lower tolerance of Muslim countries, I diverge from the traditional explanations. I disagree that the lower tolerance is caused by Islam or the Qur’an—an explanation commonly referred to as the cultural explanation. While Islam is supposedly the same everywhere, Muslims live and understand their religion differently. That is why, for example, women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia but are free to do so in many other Muslim countries. In Indonesia, it is even pretty common to see women in burqa or niqab riding a motorcycle.

Another oft proposed explanation for the lower levels of tolerance relates to the lack of democracy. The argument goes that the lack of political competition in the countries creates fewer incentives for political actors to build inclusive coalitions. Electoral incentives induce ideological actors to moderate themselves through compromise and coalition building. While encouraging and supported by some studies, this view somewhat overlooks the possibility of political competition leading to religious populism instead of moderation. Parties may try to outflank each other, catering to the religious majority and disregarding the minorities.

As an alternative to these perspectives, I propose that the relatively low tolerance in Muslim countries is driven mainly by homogeneous friendship networks of Muslims in these countries. I base this argument on the solid body of research on the contact hypothesis. Scores of studies have documented how positive interactions with individuals from groups different than ours reduce prejudice, allay anxiety, and promote tolerance toward the groups. It is just hard, if not impossible, to hold a generalized negative stereotype toward the groups that our friends belong to. A lack of interactions with the different others (in my case, the religiously different others), on the other hand, might actually serve to reinforce the prejudice, thanks to message reinforcement homogeneous networks tend to provide.

I provide evidence for this claim by analyzing the 2013 Pew survey on the World’s Muslims. I find that Muslims with more non-Muslim friends are more religiously tolerant. Specifically, they are more open to interfaith marriages, less likely to think that Christians are hostile to Muslims, more likely to think that Christianity and Islam share similarities, and are more aware of the restrictions non-Muslims face in practicing their religions. I also find that, compared to Catholics in Catholic-majority Latin American countries, friendship networks of Muslims are indeed more religiously homogeneous. Even after taking into account religious compositions of the countries, levels of socioeconomic development, and religious orthodoxy, Muslims in the Muslim-majority countries are still more likely to befriend fellow Muslims than Catholics in the Latin American countries are to befriend fellow Catholics.

These findings offer us novel insights on the patterns of social relationships in the Muslim world and their potential implications on tolerance. At the same time, they also raise an obvious question: What shapes the patterns of social relationships in a society? Homogeneous friendship networks are likely not given. There is little reason to expect that something unique about Islam makes its followers more likely to bond with each other than followers of other religions are. It is more likely that friendship networks are shaped and influenced by social and political dynamics in the society, which means that it should be possible to develop strategies to promote tolerance through promoting intergroup interactions and cooperation.

Such a tolerance promotion strategy, in turn, shall lead to an improvement in the way we understand tolerance, at least in the Muslim world. Our usual culprits (e.g., Islamic theology, low economic development, lack of democracy, lack of secularism) are not useless. But they overlook the very basic building block that characterizes the political life: people’s relationships with each other. Promoting an inclusive theology is important, but friendships and other kinds of social relationships are no less powerful influencers of behavior. They can in fact shape behavior without individuals consciously aware of the reasons or process. Social relationships, to borrow the words of Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, enable individuals to transcend “the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.” If concerned observers can also transcend the often invoked dichotomies of correct/incorrect theological views or pre-modern/modern societies, I am confident we have fruitful research avenues with potentially significant policy implications ahead of us.