Islamic worldview, religious personality and resilience among Muslim adolescent students in India

Abstract

The present study attempts to examine the effect of Muslim Religiosity Personality on Resilience. The sample for the study consisted of 200 adolescent Muslim students, from Kerala, India. Both males and females were included in the study. The age of the sample ranged from 15 to 18 years of age. The Muslim Religiosity-Personality Inventory (MRPI) (Krauss and Hamzah, 2009), that purports to assess Islamic religiosity in terms of Islamic worldview and religious personality, was used in the study. Resilience was assessed using the Bharathiar University Resilience Scale (BURS) (Annalakshmi, 2009). Comparison of criterion groups on their scores on the scale using ANOVA revealed that the high and low resilient are distinguished from one another on their religious personality but not on Islamic worldview: The highly resilient were higher on Islamic rituals (religious practice and ritual behaviour indicative of the manifestation of one’s religious worldview) and on Mu’amalat (religiously guided behaviours towards one’s family, fellow human beings and the rest of creation including animals and the natural environment). The findings of the present study suggest that cognitive components alone are not adequate to forge relationship between religion and resilience. They clearly indicate that knowledge alone does not make a significant difference in resilience until it manifests in behaviour. Religiosity is both belief/knowledge and action, and in this present study the resilient participants are those able to actually put their beliefs/knowledge into practice.