Attachment to God in the Context of Islamic Culture: Theoretical Foundation and Development of a Scale

The aims of the current study were as following: a) exploration of the theoretical and theological basis of attachment to God in Islamic spirituality, b) development and validation of a scale on the basis of a sound theory. A hermeneutic approach was used to review and interpret Islamic primary sources to extract theoretical and theological basis of attachment to God. Structured interviews, previous scales, and deductive approaches were used to develop a scale. This scale was administered on 313 Australian Muslims sampled from the Sydney and its vicinity by means of stratified sampling procedure. Analysis of the result revealed that a) Islamic spirituality has a solid basis for attachment to God that can be extracted from Quranic verses; Quranic stories, divine attributes, as well as Muslims supplications, b) the attachment to God in Islamic spirituality have a proper validity and reliability indices and factor analysis revealed the six factors in this scale. Data indicated that theoretical foundation of attachment to God was verifiable in Islamic texts. In addition data indicated that development of the scale in attachment to God in Islamic context is plausible and valid.