The study explores the connection between love for Allah (conceptualised as religious affect) and love for others (conceptualised as empathy) among a sample of 919 self-identified Muslim adolescents (between the ages of 11 and 14 years) attending schools in England. The data demonstrated that, after controlling for personal factors (age and sex) and for psychological factors (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism), there was a significant positive association between the two core variables (religious affect and empathy). From the perspective of the empirical psychology of religion this study confirms among a Muslim sample a finding previously recorded among Christian or post-Christian samples. From the perspective of empirical theology this study confirms that the aspiration expressed in Qur’anic scriptures is reflected in the lives of young Muslims attending schools in England.
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Erken et al. (2020) studied this question.
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