Paper: Measuring Muslim Religiosity Using a Halal-Scale

The background and motivation of the research presented in this article is the obligation of Public Theology to do justice to young Muslim refugees as a minority group in German society regarding the role of religiosity for the way they are coping with life. In the research process, the authors be-came increasingly aware that most instruments to measure religiosity have a Western and/or Protestant bias in that they are more interested in religious attitude than in religious practice and/or religious lifestyle which is very important for Muslim religiosity. Therefore, this article fo-cuses on the distinction between halal and haram as indicators for religious practice according to Muslim benchmarks. Both the concept and the operationalization of a two-dimensional instru-ment of living a halal life are described. The instrument distinguishes between the individual im-portance of halal goods (food, medicine, cosmetics) and services (doctors) and their availability in the local environment. Each of the two dimensions comprises four items. Construct validity is shown by confirmatory factor analysis (CFIrobust = .934, TLIrobust = .902, RMSEArobust = .114 [.073; .156]) of a sample of N = 155 Muslim adolescents who have fled to Germany from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. External validity is tested by analyzing the correlation of the measurement instru-ment developed by the authors with the Centrality of Religiosity Scale. The presented halal in-strument offers an approach to Muslim religiosity that meets the orthopractic character of this re-ligion. At the same time, it addresses the consequential dimension of religion within quantitative research.