jashan emmanuel vybert
Jesper Sahu
Muslims are those who follow the teachings of Islam. According to Imam Duric, Muslim is an Arabic word that means surrender and is derived from a word that means peace. Simply put, a Muslim is one who surrenders to the will of God and the ultimate peace occurs when you submit to the will of God, or Allah (pronounced aa luh) as some Muslims refer to God. Some people are born into Muslim families and others convert, or revert, and become a Muslim.
The goal of Islam is to have the body, heart and mind perform optimally. Muslims believe that three dimensions lead to this optimal performance Islam (submission), Iman (pronounced ee mon, means faith, believe, trust) and Ihsan (pronounced ih san, means perfection or excellence).
The third dimension of Islam, Ihsan, suggests that Muslims should seek to obtain perfection, or excellence, in worship, which leads to excellence in all actions. It specifically states, to worship God as though you see Him, and if you cannot see Him, then indeed He sees you.
Modern-day Muslim discrimination involves the act of limiting participation or non-participation of Muslims in certain activities varying from schools, employment, accommodation, businesses, public parks, and other areas and activities otherwise available to the general public and other religions. These include preventing athletes from being on a sports team, barring a student from attending certain schools or classes, enforcing increased restrictions on airport security measures, passing on a potential candidate for a position even though in all of these cases the individual possesses the requisite determined for the attributed activity solely because he/she is a Muslim.
In addition, Muslims face microaggressions caused by prejudice including remarks, comments, taunts, and direct speech hurdled toward them regarding them and/or their religion that can cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, despair, and discouragement from being a Muslim. Examples are women who wear the hijab being treated with suspicion, inaccurate statements about eating habits, inappropriate questions regarding intimate relations and Sawm, the assumption that obtained positions are due to affirmative action rather than work quality.
Now that you have the basics down you may want even more information about Islam and the Muslim community on our campus. Please contact our Islamic Chaplain with any additional questions you may have.
Test your religious knowledge by taking an interactive quiz. The short quiz includes some questions recently asked in the nationally representative survey that forms the basis of this report. After completing the quiz, you can see how you did in comparison with the general public and with people like yourself.
Most Americans are familiar with some of the basics of Christianity and the Bible, and even a few facts about Islam. But far fewer U.S. adults are able to correctly answer factual questions about Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, and most do not know what the U.S. Constitution says about religion as it relates to elected officials. In addition, large majorities of Americans are unsure (or incorrect) about the share of the U.S. public that is Muslim or Jewish, according to a new Pew Research Center survey that quizzed nearly 11,000 U.S. adults on a variety of religious topics.
Our surveys often ask people about their opinions, but this one was different, asking 32 fact-based, multiple-choice questions about topics related to religion (see here for full list of questions). The average U.S. adult is able to answer fewer than half of them (about 14) correctly.
The questions were designed to span a spectrum of difficulty. Some were meant to be relatively easy, to establish a baseline indication of what nearly all Americans know about religion. Others were intended to be difficult, to differentiate those who are most knowledgeable about religious topics from everyone else.1
On the other hand, Americans are less familiar with some basic facts about other world religions, including Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism.2 Just three-in-ten U.S. adults know that the Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday, one-quarter know that Rosh Hashana is the Jewish New Year, and one-in-eight can correctly identify the religion of Maimonides (an influential Jewish scholar in the Middle Ages).
The average respondent correctly answered 14.2 of the 32 religious knowledge questions. Just 9% of respondents gave correct answers to more than three-quarters (at least 25) of the questions, and less than 1% earned a perfect score.
Jews get 18.7 questions right, on average. Self-described atheists and agnostics also display relatively high levels of religious knowledge, correctly answering an average of 17.9 and 17.0 questions, respectively.
Looking only at questions about the Bible and Christianity, evangelical Protestants give the highest number of right answers (9.3 out of 14, on average). Atheists and Mormons are among the next highest performers, getting an average of 8.6 and 8.5 questions right, respectively. Atheists and agnostics do about as well on questions about the Bible and Christianity as do Christians overall.
One possible explanation for why Jews, atheists and agnostics score among the highest on this survey is that all three of these groups are highly educated, on average. However, Jews, atheists and agnostics display greater religious knowledge than other groups even after controlling for education and other demographic characteristics associated with knowing more about religion. (For additional discussion of statistical regression analysis exploring the factors associated with religious knowledge, see Chapter 3.)
Another educational factor linked with religious knowledge is having taken a class on world religions. Those who say they have taken a world religions class (e.g., in high school or college) answer 17.3 questions correctly, on average, compared with 12.5 among those who have not taken such a class.
Among Christians, knowledge of the Bible and Christianity is closely linked both with the amount of effort respondents say they invest in learning about their faith and with their religious background. Christians who say they regularly spend time learning about their own religion (for example, reading scripture, visiting websites, listening to podcasts, reading books or magazines, or watching television) answer more questions correctly about the Bible and Christianity than do those who say they make such efforts to learn about their faith less often (9.4 questions right out of 14 total, vs. 6.8).
The survey also finds that Christians who attended a religious private school while growing up answer 9.4 questions about the Bible and Christianity correctly, on average. By comparison, Christians who attended a public school or a nonreligious private school get fewer of those questions right.8 Similarly, Christians who spent many years attending Sunday school or a similar type of religious education (for example, CCD for Catholics) correctly answer more questions about the Bible and Christianity than do Christians who never attended Sunday school.
The survey did not include enough interviews with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or members of other religions to permit reliable analysis of the connection between their religious education and knowledge of their respective religions.
Overall, Americans with the most religiously diverse social networks earn the highest scores on the religious knowledge survey. On average, respondents who know someone from at least seven different religious groups answer 19.0 questions right, on average, while those who know someone from three or fewer religious groups average 8.6 right.
Moreover, higher scores on the overall (32-point) religious knowledge scale tend to be associated with warmer evaluations of most religious groups. Jews, for instance, receive an average thermometer rating of 70 degrees from non-Jews who answer 25 or more religious knowledge questions correctly, compared with just 54 degrees from those who answer eight or fewer questions correctly. One exception to this pattern is evangelical Christians, who are rated most warmly by those at the low end of the religious knowledge scale.
Three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) overestimate the size of the U.S. Jewish or Muslim populations, incorrectly stating that one or both of these groups make up more than 5% of the U.S. population. This includes 12% who think the size of both groups exceeds 5%, 13% who think Jews account for more than 5% of U.S. adults, and 4% who believe the Muslim population is larger than it is. Just 14% of respondents know that the Jewish and Muslim communities in the U.S. each make up less than 5% of the overall U.S. population.11 And slightly more than half of U.S. adults (54%) say they are unsure about the size of both the Jewish and Muslim populations.
This is the second time Pew Research Center has tested how much U.S. adults know about religion. The first survey, conducted in 2010, found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons were the top performers, while in the new survey, atheists, Jews, agnostics and evangelical Protestants scored highest. However, there are several important differences between the two surveys that make them not directly comparable. To begin with, many of the questions asked in the new survey were not asked in 2010. Just 12 of the 32 current knowledge questions appeared on the 2010 survey, and all the repeated questions have been modified in ways that make direct comparisons impossible.
Another difference is that the 2010 survey was conducted on the phone by live interviewers, while the current survey was conducted online with respondents entering their own answers. Sometimes when the same question is asked in two different modes, such as over the phone and online, there is a difference in results attributable to what survey methodologists call a mode effect. In other words, the presence of a live interviewer may encourage people to answer questions differently than they would if no one was observing their (self-recorded) responses.
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