Does Family Country of Origin Matter for Muslims’ Views over “Democratic” and “Moral” Values in Their European Societies of Settlement?

Focussing on the ‘Muslimness’ of Muslims and treating ‘Muslim’ as a master status, risks foregrounding religious difference, or “Methodological Islamism” (Brubaker 2013). Survey research that lumps all ‘Muslims’ together as a ‘group’, irrespective of other possible analytic categories, often finds important gaps between majorities and Muslims over questions of so-called “democratic” and “moral” values. Religiosity is implied to be the explanatory factor, but this is problematic because the Muslim sample is selected on religion as the criterion that separates them from the rest of society. Instead cultural attitudes that are ascribed to Islam might actually result from non-religious cultural factors, e.g., family country of origin. We examine this question using the EurIslam data-set on Muslims with family origins in Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, and Ex-Yugoslavia, who are settled in Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Our descriptive analysis shows significant and systematic patterns of variation between Muslims by family country of origin over “democratic” and “moral” values. The explanatory analysis shows that ‘social contact with the majority’ and ‘family country of origin’ are strong predictors for issues of democratic and moral values, while ‘religiosity’ is only a strong predictor for positions over moral, not democratic values. So, the explanatory power of religiosity is contextually limited to moral questions of gender, homosexuality, and sexual behaviour, while family country of origin seems to matter more generally than religion for Muslims’ views.