Work Hard, Pray Hard

In his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, German sociologist Max Weber argued that early Protestants were uniquely suited to build the foundations of European capitalism thanks to their religious values, which prioritized hard work over spiritual contemplation and eternal salvation.

Weber, of course, was mostly concerned with the distinction between the two dominant European religions, Protestantism and Catholicism, but could the notion of a heaven-sent work ethic apply to other faiths as well? Consider Islam, which, after all, was founded by a trader — Mohammed — who once said that a "truthful, honest merchant is with the prophets." Indeed, some recent data suggest Muslims may now embody Weber’s Protestant work ethic better than Protestants do.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Yavuz Fahir Zulfikar conducted a survey of a sample group of Americans of different faiths to measure attitudes toward pride in work, profit, and upward striving. He found that Protestants and Catholics had nearly identical average scores, but Muslims ranked more than 5 points higher (65 out of a maximum 95). The study follows similar research, with similar results, from Britain, Ireland, and Turkey.

"Muslims are not that different from Protestants," says Zulfikar, an administrator at the University of North Carolina. "Work is seen as a service and almost as worship to God. Being idle is never a good thing in Islam."

Muslim Americans tend to be more committed to their faith than members of other religions, and recent immigrants of all nationalities tend to be more entrepreneurial than native-born citizens — just look at Silicon Valley, where half of America’s top start-up technology firms were founded by immigrants. Maybe assimilation is the problem: Give Muslims in the United States a few more generations, and they’ll end up like today’s slacker Catholics and Protestants.