Exemplary Feature Writing Sample 1

The fruits, and sorrows, of faith
Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Belief clearly affects people's state of mind, but don't ask how


WHATEVER else they profess, most world religions say happiness is not as simple as it seems; earthly pleasures can easily prove to be a chimera, and true felicity is said to lie in overcoming selfish impulses, or in devoted service to others and to God. Where religions often disagree is on the result of this spiritual effort. Some speak of self-annihilation, others of union with God, others of a very personal sort of reward.

The Koran puts it simply. “Happiness in this life, and in the hereafter” is promised to “those who believe and lead a righteous life”—there is no other way. In the Christian tradition, there is much talk of joy and sorrow being intertwined: you can't have one without the other. Christian monastics cultivate a state known as charmolypi, joy-sorrow: tears for the woes of the world, and gratitude for God's mercy.

But on a more earthly level, sociologists agree that the practice of a faith and broad happiness with life do seem to be related, though nobody has much idea why. “We don't know whether people go to church because they are happy, or whether they are happy because they go to church,” says Andrew Clark, an economist who helped conduct a survey of 30,000 Europeans in 21 countries.

But if religion is a significant factor in making people satisfied, it should presumably show up somewhere in a global investigation of well-being, like the Gallup survey mentioned elsewhere on these pages. Dalia Mogahed, who oversees Gallup's research on Muslim opinion, has made some stark observations about that poll. There are, she notes, many Muslim countries where men and women alike are fed up with life. But of the ten places with the highest correlation between being female and (relatively) satisfied, nine are mainly Muslim: Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Palestine, Jordan and Morocco. Ms Mogahed says this reflects the travails of being a Muslim man as much as any blessings of being female. In traditional lands, where men expect to be breadwinners, many suffer the trauma of being jobless or doing hard, ill-paid work. Another factor, she thinks, is that one big source of female and child poverty in the West—single motherhood—hardly exists in Muslim societies.

Some may find such conclusions too complacent about the fate of Muslim women. Margot Badran, an American scholar of feminism in Islamic countries, says that in most of them there is a palpable sense of grievance among women. “But that doesn't imply that they are miserable, or consumed by victimhood—it just tells us we need a more nuanced picture of life than any simple spectrum of happiness can capture.”

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9481510