Abstract

This report, the synthesis of a forthcoming book to be published at Nova Science Publishers, New York, is based on the quantitative, multivariate analysis of the World Values Survey data from more than 80 countries around the globe on the political and social values of the world's Muslim communities by international comparison. For the first time, a fully documented and comprehensive world-wide representative analysis of * Global Muslim perceptions of life * Global Muslim perceptions on problems of the environment * Global Muslim attitudes to work * Global Muslim attitudes on the family * Global Muslim opinions on politics and society * Global Muslim opinions on religion and morale * Global Muslim opinions on national identity * Global Muslim Sociodemographics is thus available to the public. By and large, the study comes to the conclusion that global Muslims and also the Muslim communities in Western democracies are value-conservative, family-oriented, but supportive of democracy. Which perspectives then are available to analyze the facts? The study takes up the idea of "Asabiyya" ("social cohesion"), inherent in classic Arab historiography, first described by Ibn Chaldun (1332 to 1406) in his important work "Muqaddimah". Our study also constructs various indices of global value change and also performs a factor analysis of global value differences. Without active society, multicultural societies will fail. The study also quantitatively compares European values and paths of secularization, and cautiously argues in favor of the rediscovery of the classic democratic workers' parties agenda of Europe during the pre-war and post-world-war II period in large sections of the Muslim world.