Bashar Albaghli completes his PhD

Bashar came to St Andrews supported by Kuwait University, after completing a Masters in the US. The focus of Bashar’s project has been to explore the links between different understandings of religiosity, political factors, and attitudes toward other religious and political groups.  The thesis title is “Religiosity and prejudice in a Western and Islamic context”.

The thesis explores the role that religion plays in the attitudes that each of these great traditions  (Christianity and Islam ) hold toward the other.

It has two main sections:

  1. In the first section he explores the nature of Islamaphobia in a western context, exploring the dimensionality of various measures of Islamaphobia and examining the role of several different measures of Christian religious belief alongside other political factors.  Several studies were conducted in the UK and USA
  2. In the second section Bashar explores attitudes toward the Christian and Jewish religions and toward the “West” from a Muslim perspective, based on a sample from the Middle East and Gulf region.