Minority and Majority Positions: The Religious Subjectivities and Value Profiles Among Muslim Students in Israel and Turkey

Recent research indicates that global changes in life views, religion, and values are taking place. This study explores reflections of these changes on the religious subjectivities and value profiles of young adult Muslim students in Turkey and in Israel. These cases were chosen based on their similar religious backgrounds on the one hand, and the large differences in their cultural and political contexts on the other. Our findings are based on a mixed-method study, Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG), which includes the Schwartz’s value survey (PVQ-RR) and the Faith Q-Sort-method (FQS) developed by Prof. David Wulff. Muslim students in Israel reported higher degrees of self- and family religiosity, and involvement in religious practices in private, as compared to Muslim students in Turkey. Furthermore, the analysis of the FQS yielded five different prototypes for each group, and similarities between certain pairs of prototypes were observed. Our results indicate that despite the shared religious affiliation to Islam, the cultural context of each group contributes largely to differences in religious subjectivities and values between young adult Muslim students in Turkey and in Israel. Such a comparison valuably contributes to understanding the socio-psychological factors that shape the results of the interchange between processes of convergence of cultural values with the persistence of traditional values.