Measuring Muslim Lifestyle 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 in the way they are coping with life. In the research process, the authors became 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 focuses on the distinction between halal and haram as indicators of religious practice according to Muslim benchmarks. Both the concept and the operationalization of a two-dimensional instrument of living a halal life are described. The instrument distinguishes between the individual importance 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 = 0.934, TLIrobust = 0.902, RMSEArobust = 0.114 [0.073; 0.156]) 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 instrument developed by the authors with the Centrality of Religiosity Scale. The presented halal instrument offers an approach to Muslim lifestyle that meets the orthopractic character of this religion. At the same time, it addresses the consequential dimension of religion within quantitative research.