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The key research issue addressed in this paper is whether individuals perceive advertisements featuring themes from their own religion more positively, and advertisements featuring religious themes from other religions less positively, than neutral ads. In the process, this paper aims to test whether the in-group bias theory (IGBT) and the polarized appraisal theory (PAT) apply in a religious context.

Respondents in a large Indian University were shown advertisements featuring Hindu and Muslim themes as well as a neutral advertisement in the context of pet adoption. Cognitive and affective response measures were used for evaluation.

Respondents did not evaluate advertisements with their own religion’s symbols any more positively than neutral advertisements but did evaluate advertisements with themes from other religions more negatively than neutral ads. In sum, religious advertisements did not have any positive effect on in-group respondents, but rather worked in antagonizing out-group respondents.

Both IGBT and PAT did not work as predicted when tested on in-group respondents but worked as expected on out-group respondents.

In the Indian market, using religious themes has largely negative consequences in terms of alienating out-group members, with no commensurate advantage on in-group members. Firms are better off not using religious advertising, and this decision would likely have a positive impact on a firm’s bottom line.

Though, the general topic of religious advertising has been much researched, but this paper deals with the role of religious symbols in advertising in the Indian context, which is done for the first time in a multi-religious context. Further, the applicability of IGBT and PAT is also tested for the first time in religious advertisement context.

Hate speech in recent times has become a troubling development. It has different meanings to different people in different cultures. The anonymity and ubiquity of the social media provides a breeding ground for hate speech and makes combating it seems like a lost battle. However, what may constitute a hate speech in a cultural or religious neutral society may not be perceived as such in a polarized multi-cultural and multi-religious society like Nigeria. Defining hate speech, therefore, may be contextual. Hate speech in Nigeria may be perceived along ethnic, religious and political boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to check for the presence of hate speech in social media platforms like Twitter, and to what degree is hate speech permissible, if available? It also intends to find out what monitoring mechanisms the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have put in place to combat hate speech. Lexalytics is a term coined by the authors from the words lexical analytics for the purpose of opinion mining unstructured texts like tweets.

This research developed a Python software called polarized opinions sentiment analyzer (POSA), adopting an ego social network analytics technique in which an individual’s behavior is mined and described. POSA uses a customized Python N-Gram dictionary of local context-based terms that may be considered as hate terms. It then applied the Twitter API to stream tweets from popular and trending Nigerian Twitter handles in politics, ethnicity, religion, social activism, racism, etc., and filtered the tweets against the custom dictionary using unsupervised classification of the texts as either positive or negative sentiments. The outcome is visualized using tables, pie charts and word clouds. A similar implementation was also carried out using R-Studio codes and both results are compared and a t-test was applied to determine if there was a significant difference in the results. The research methodology can be classified as both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative in terms of data classification, and quantitative in terms of being able to identify the results as either negative or positive from the computation of text to vector.

The findings from two sets of experiments on POSA and R are as follows: in the first experiment, the POSA software found that the Twitter handles analyzed contained between 33 and 55 percent hate contents, while the R results show hate contents ranging from 38 to 62 percent. Performing a t-test on both positive and negative scores for both POSA and R-studio, results reveal p-values of 0.389 and 0.289, respectively, on an α value of 0.05, implying that there is no significant difference in the results from POSA and R. During the second experiment performed on 11 local handles with 1,207 tweets, the authors deduce as follows: that the percentage of hate contents classified by POSA is 40 percent, while the percentage of hate contents classified by R is 51 percent. That the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by POSA is 87 percent, while free speech is 86 percent. And the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by R is 65 percent, while free speech is 74 percent. This study reveals that neither Twitter nor Facebook has an automated monitoring system for hate speech, and no benchmark is set to decide the level of hate contents allowed in a text. The monitoring is rather done by humans whose assessment is usually subjective and sometimes inconsistent.

This study establishes the fact that hate speech is on the increase on social media. It also shows that hate mongers can actually be pinned down, with the contents of their messages. The POSA system can be used as a plug-in by Twitter to detect and stop hate speech on its platform. The study was limited to public Twitter handles only. N-grams are effective features for word-sense disambiguation, but when using N-grams, the feature vector could take on enormous proportions and in turn increasing sparsity of the feature vectors.

The findings of this study show that if urgent measures are not taken to combat hate speech there could be dare consequences, especially in highly polarized societies that are always heated up along religious and ethnic sentiments. On daily basis tempers are flaring in the social media over comments made by participants. This study has also demonstrated that it is possible to implement a technology that can track and terminate hate speech in a micro-blog like Twitter. This can also be extended to other social media platforms.

This study will help to promote a more positive society, ensuring the social media is positively utilized to the benefit of mankind.

The findings can be used by social media companies to monitor user behaviors, and pin hate crimes to specific persons. Governments and law enforcement bodies can also use the POSA application to track down hate peddlers.

Muslims living in multi-religious societies are considered more conscious about the permissibility (Halal) of products and thus the majority of Halal research in the non-financial sector was conducted in multi-ethnic societies. Nonetheless, the global trade is changing the way we perceive the origin of products and brands and their permissibility under Islamic Sharia laws. This apparently has serious implications for international companies operating in food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of Muslim attitude towards Halal products, their subjective norms and religiosity in predicting intention to choose Halal products.

A structured question was designed to elicit consumer attitude, subjective norms, intention to choose Halal products and degree of inter and intra personal religiosity. Data were collected from 180 adult respondents using a convenience sampling method. Only 150 responses were deemed suitable for further analysis, yielding a response rate of 83 per cent. Stepwise regression analysis was used to test the proposed model.

The results indicated that theory of reasoned action (TRA) is a valid model in predicting intention to choose Halal products. The results further indicate that subjective norms (β=0.455, p, 0.001), attitude towards the Halal products (β=0.265, p, 0.001) and intra personal religiosity (β=0.167, p, 0.001) positively influence attitude towards the Halal products. Interestingly, subjective norm appears to be the strongest of all the predictors for choosing Halal products.

The data collected for the current study investigate global attitude towards Halal products. It would be interesting if future researchers examine consumers ' attitude towards specific Halal products for specific product categories.

It is argued in this research that the presence of strong attitude towards Halal products in Muslim consumers might play an important role in exclusion or inclusion of brands, based on their conformance to Halal requirements.

The paper extends the applicability of the theory of reasoned action model by investigating the role of inter-personal and intra-personal religiosity in intention to choose Halal products.

However, after Singapore's independence and separation from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, the PAP leaders were forced to change their vision of Singapore as part of Malaysia to Singapore as an independent nation, which they had earlier rejected. In other words, the PAP leaders had to “reinvent” Singapore to ensure its survival.

This paper aims to investigate how do Muslims, Christians and Kaharingan adherents conduct interreligious relations among them in their everyday lives in Central Kalimantan; why do these religious communities observe interreligious relations as such; and what makes this model of interreligious relations.

The corpus for analysis comes from in-depth interviews with 20 persons, which took place between August and October in 2016 in Palangka Raya city and Kotawaringin Timur Regency in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesia. The informants were selected from groups believed to be lay members and elites of Muslim, Christian and Kaharingan communities using snowball sampling technique facilitated by local research assistants. These informants are mainly mainstream Muslims, Christians and Kaharingan adherents.

The way to peaceful and co-existence life lived by religious communities in Indonesia is closely related to its rich treasures and precious tradition of cultural heritage: Indonesian communalism, Indonesian community spirit as seen in terms such as “tradisi hidup bersama,” “semangat kebersamaan” and “satu keluarga.” Instead of emphasizing the divisive differences among communities with various religious backgrounds, Muslims, Christians and Kaharingan adherents in Central Kalimantan create “third spaces,” common grounds shared by these religious communities at individual, institutional and societal levels.

Based on empirical findings, this research argues that the practices of peaceful and co-existence life lived by diverse religious communities in Indonesia relate to their particular social-cultural contexts of rich treasures and precious tradition of cultural heritage in the forms of Indonesian communalism and community spirit. Instead of emphasizing the divisive differences among themselves, various religious communities in Central Kalimantan create third spaces, common grounds between them and are shared by them at individual, institutional and societal levels.

This paper aims to examine the impact of increasing the intensity of religious cues in financial service advertisements on target and non-target groups.

To test the proposed hypotheses, a 2 (Religion: Muslims versus Non-Muslims) x 3 (Religious identity primes: Low versus Medium versus High) factorial design was used. Both target and non-target groups were randomly exposed to factitious advertisements of an Islamic bank embedded with low, medium and high intensity of religious cues.

The results of this study indicate that within target group the manipulation did result into a more favourable attitudes towards the advertisement (Aad) and attitudes towards the brand (Ab) for the medium intensity advertisement; however, for high intensity advertisement, only Aad was more favourable compared to low intensity advertisement. Relatively strong evidence was found in case of non-target group negative reactions in term of Aad, Ab and purchase intention. The direct comparison between target and non-target groups suggest a general pattern of more positive response from target group as compared to non-target group.

The findings of this study provide an important insight into the effectiveness of identity salience messages in financial service marketing. The study provide empirical evidence that intensifying the rhetoric beyond a certain point will generate negative results from both target and non-target respondents.

The authors integrated the research on symbolism, social identity and target and non-target effects to analyse the attitudinal and behavioural differences between and within target and non-target groups of financial service advertisements with different intensity of religious cues.

This study aims to investigate Feng Shui elements that can influence housing selection and property pricing in the Malaysian housing market.

A structured questionnaire encompassing 26 Feng Shui elements, which were shortlisted based on relevant previous studies, was distributed to prospective homebuyers in the Klang Valley region. The elements were inferred and ranked according to frequency, significance and importance scores. Kruskal–Wallis ANOVA tests were used to assess the ratings provided by the different respondent groups, while Spearman's rank correlation tests were utilised to measure the degree of agreement or disagreement among each pair of the ethnic group.

The results obtained indicate the following as the five most influential elements: orientation, main entrance, street location, house number and living room. Despite a multiethnic and multicultural society in Malaysia, Spearman's rank correlation tests showed that there are no differences in the prioritisation of Feng Shui elements between three distinct ethnic groups (Malay, Chinese and Indian). However, the distribution scores are statistically different between the groups. Comparing income level with Feng Shui inclinations, the three most frequently considered elements across the three income groups consistently include orientation, main entrance and street location.

The findings of this study are expected to provide guidance to property stakeholders (developers, real estate agencies, architects, local authorities) in their future development projects. For homebuyers, this study serves as a property Feng Shui checklist for home selection and investment.

This study explored the association of Feng Shui principles to housing selection and property pricing based on cultural and income factors. These findings provide useful insights for designing and positioning of residential properties in both primary and secondary housing markets in Malaysia and beyond.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the motivation behind the hijab behavior in a multicultural environment of Malaysia; it is a religious obligation or fashion behavior. In an analytic thinking of motivation in influencing women in wearing a hijab, learning from the social environment on religious obligation and fashion in hijab has been discussed.

Quantitative analysis has been conducted for 100 hijab-wearing female students in the University of Malaya.

The findings were tabulated and the outcomes proved that most of the women took the hijab as a religious obligation instead of fashion motivation. Muslim women are still taking on the religious obligation in styling up the hijab. Modification in the hijab can be accepted in Malaysia, but the substantial design to wear the hijab is an obligation.

This study exclusively discusses the hijab as fashion and religious obligation within the context of Malaysia.

Muslims in Nigeria, like in many Muslim-majority countries, are striving to have a functional Zakat system in search of solutions to the perennial problem of poverty and its damning consequences. Nevertheless, there are still unsettled concerns arising from the current and widespread implementation of dissimilar (diverse) approaches to the Zakat system in various parts of the country. The purpose of this paper is to review comprehensively what are the hindrances of a vibrant Zakat system and how far the identified impediments may affect the system in the Nigerian context.

The methodology adopted is the review of extant relevant literature in the field of scholarly publications.

The findings of this study revealed that the fragmented implementation of the Zakat system within the context of the Nigerian democratic system of government lead to the weak governance with respect to law, administration and management; lack of a generally accepted fatwa from the Muslims scholars (Ulamas); absence of Zakat accounting standard; and low compliance behavior are the major barriers that require the attention of government and other stakeholders such as the traditional leaders, the accounting regulatory bodies, the Ulamas, as well as the economic and accounting researchers.

It was recommended that the stakeholders should make concerted efforts toward ensuring success of the Zakat system for attaining salvation in the hereafter and for social security, as well as economic prosperity.

The paper is the first paper that comprehensively reviews previous literature in the Zakat environment on factors that become barriers to implement a comprehensive Zakat system in Nigeria.