Belief And Activity – An Approach To Measure Belief For Mental Health Research

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There is no scientific way we can measure a man’s belief in his religion. As a result when religious issues are researched for mental health we face problems. It is because detail evaluation of the religious system is not much practiced in the scientific activities. This article is intended to show how one can qualitatively measure the belief one Muslim has in his religion Islam by evaluating his daily religious activities.

A Muslim is defined as someone who believes in Islam. In other words a Muslim believes in the statements or in the information that the core Islamic documents mention. As the core documents for the religion of Islam there are two main recognized sources. One is the Holy Quran and the other is the Holy Hadith. These two resources describes the pros and cons of the religion with any other aspects of life, from toilet habit to sleep. Now, there are some mandatory activities that these resources inform for Muslims. For example, believing in Allah, Prophets, life after death etc, and doing some mandatory tasks like saying the daily prayers, paying Jakat for the poor, attending Hazz etc.

The documents describe the benefits and rewards for maintaining those mandatory activities and also the losses and punishments in case of ignoring those. Now very rationally, if someone believes those, that is believes in Islam from the core of his heart, he will be encouraged to perform the activities and also be discouraged to ignore those. If we read the authentic documents of Islam, we will see that the benefits and rewards are very significant as well as the losses and punishments. So naturally, any human who will believe that he or she will be nicely rewarded if something is done and punished severely if not done, he or she must attend those, except for those that are suffering from any psychiatric disorder or illness, or any other severe disability.

So for any purpose, if we measure the extent of daily mandatory religious activity maintained by a Muslim, it will ultimately reveal the extent of belief he/she has in himself/herself about the truths mentioned in Islam. Even it can be used as qualitative measure for scientific purposes too. But what should be kept in mind that any activity shows its consistency when it is performed without any external undue pressure and also for a minimum definite period of time.

For example, one who preaches people for Islam and says the daily prayer timely everyday at least for a month can be taken as a better believer than those that do not perform the above. Because, the reward and punishment mentioned for the daily prayer is significant enough to encourage someone to perform such. So if we confirm the health, both physical and mental, we can surely compare the qualitative amount of belief among the two groups.

Finally one thing should be mentioned that any activity Islam advocates for is always mentioned in its core documents as something good for the human himself, which makes the above claim more eligible for any Muslim. One who knows or believes something as useful for him very seriously but do not perform it must have some problem with his thought or insight if we consider the claim about the belief as true.