The research team, led by Moh. Dulkiah and colleagues, applied Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to disentangle three conceptually distinct dimensions of Islamic values: ukhuwah, referring to brotherhood and relational solidarity; amanah, referring to trustworthiness and ethical responsibility; and broader Islamic values, encompassing normative principles such as ‘adl (justice), ikhlas (sincerity), ta’awun (mutual assistance), and shura (consultation). The distinction matters because prior research has often treated these dimensions as interchangeable indicators of a general religious orientation, obscuring their potentially different behavioral consequences.

The results are remarkable. Broader Islamic values showed the strongest association with Muslim community participation (β = 0.662, p < 0.001), with a large effect size (f² = 0.537). Amanah showed a positive but very small association (β = 0.074, p = 0.022, f² = 0.007). Ukhuwah, despite its cultural prominence as a source of social solidarity, showed no statistically significant association with participation at all (β = 0.037, p = 0.262, f² = 0.002). Meanwhile, Muslim community participation itself emerged as the strongest predictor of community development in the model (β = 0.729, p < 0.001, f² = 1.137), explaining 53.2% of the variance in both participation and development outcomes.

These findings suggest that the pathway from religious values to rural development runs through active community participation, and that this pathway operates differently depending on the content of the value orientation. Broader Islamic values, with their explicit social dimension concerning justice, mutual assistance, and collective responsibility, appear to provide stronger orientations toward organized collective action than values expressed primarily through interpersonal relationships or personal moral obligation.

The non-significant result for ukhuwah is particularly striking. Brotherhood and relational solidarity may strengthen belonging and mutual support within communities, but they do not automatically produce wider forms of collective engagement such as participation in planning, decision-making, or organized development activities. This distinction echoes the social capital literature, where researchers such as Portes and Vickstrom and Putnam have long differentiated between strong internal ties that generate solidarity within groups and broader network ties that connect individuals across social boundaries.

The small effect for amanah is equally instructive. Trustworthiness, accountability, and the fulfilment of obligations can support dependable interaction and cooperation, but endorsing such values does not necessarily require active involvement in community planning or organized collective activities. A person may consider responsibility an important moral obligation while having relatively few opportunities to express it through formal or informal participation. This pattern fits the distinction between internalized values and behavioral engagement discussed in Self-Determination Theory.

The study’s methodological rigor reinforces these findings. The measurement model showed acceptable reliability and validity across all five constructs, with Cronbach’s Alpha ranging from 0.750 to 0.907 and Composite Reliability from 0.833 to 0.928. Discriminant validity was assessed using the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio (HTMT), with all values below the 0.85 threshold, confirming that ukhuwah, amanah, and broader Islamic values remain empirically distinguishable despite their conceptual proximity. This supports their treatment as separate constructs rather than combining them into a single measure of Islamic values.

The rural Indonesian context provides an important setting for interpreting these results. West Java, Central Java, and Yogyakarta combine longstanding Islamic traditions with established forms of community organization, including extensive networks associated with religious organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah. Rural communities also possess social resources such as gotong royong (mutual assistance) and Islamic philanthropic practices including infak and sadaqah. Decentralization and the Village Law have increased the formal role of villages in development and governance, creating institutional spaces in which citizens can participate in local affairs.

The findings carry significant implications for rural development policy and community empowerment. Programs in Muslim rural communities should not merely promote religious or moral values as abstract principles, but should create concrete institutional spaces through which these values can be practiced. Participatory planning, community deliberation, collective problem-solving, social monitoring, and local decision-making can connect Islamic ethical orientations with development activities. Religious and community organizations can support this process by facilitating participation and transforming shared values into sustained collective action.

The study is limited by its focus on Muslim middle-class communities in three regions of Indonesia and its cross-sectional quantitative design, which restricts broader generalization and limits observation of how values develop into collective action over time. Future research can test the model across different socioeconomic groups, regions, and institutional settings, and combine quantitative analysis with qualitative or longitudinal approaches. Such research would provide deeper insight into the conditions under which ukhuwah, amanah, and broader Islamic values are transformed into sustained participation and meaningful community development.

Beyond the headline statistics, the study’s design choices illuminate why the differentiated results are credible. The researchers deliberately recruited respondents who were not only Muslim and middle-class but also had prior experience in religious or social community organizations. This sampling strategy means the findings speak to people who already have at least some exposure to collective settings, sharpening the puzzle of why ukhuwah nonetheless failed to predict participation. If even organizationally experienced respondents show no measurable link between brotherhood values and engagement, the disconnect between relational solidarity and organized action is unlikely to be an artifact of inexperience alone.

The choice of PLS-SEM over covariance-based structural equation modeling also reflects the study’s explanatory ambitions. Whereas covariance-based approaches prioritize reproducing covariances and confirming theory through model fit indices, partial least squares estimation is geared toward maximizing explained variance in endogenous constructs and estimating complex pathways among latent variables. For a model positing an indirect route from value orientations through participation to development outcomes, this orientation toward variance explanation makes the reported 53.2% of explained variance in both participation and community development a meaningful benchmark, indicating that the value-participation-development framework accounts for roughly half of the variation in these outcomes even before unmeasured factors are considered.

The conceptual architecture of the study draws on a well-established distinction in social theory between bonding and bridging forms of social connection. Ukhuwah, with its emphasis on brotherhood, mutual care, and belonging, most closely resembles bonding capital: dense ties within a group that generate internal cohesion and mutual support. Broader Islamic values, by contrast, incorporate principles such as ta’awun (mutual assistance) and shura (consultation) that explicitly orient believers toward collective conduct beyond immediate circles. The statistical pattern in the data, where the normative-collective dimension predicts participation while the relational dimension does not, is consistent with the long-standing observation that strong in-group ties can coexist with, and sometimes substitute for, engagement in wider civic structures.

This reading gains further plausibility from the Indonesian context itself. Practices such as gotong royong and philanthropic giving through infak and sadaqah are embedded in everyday rural life, meaning that many forms of mutual aid occur within familiar relational frames rather than through formal participatory channels. A respondent high in ukhuwah may therefore express solidarity through kinship networks, neighborhood reciprocity, or congregational life without ever entering village planning forums or development committees. The study’s measurement of participation, which targets engagement in planning, decision-making, and organized development activities, would capture only the latter, leaving the relational expression of solidarity statistically invisible.

The mediating role of Muslim community participation deserves particular emphasis. Because participation fully carries the effects of broader Islamic values and amanah onto community development, the findings imply that values do not directly produce development outcomes; they must first be converted into behavior. This has a practical corollary: interventions that strengthen value internalization without creating opportunities for action are unlikely to yield measurable developmental gains. Conversely, institutional spaces such as village deliberations, community monitoring bodies, and collective work programs can serve as conversion mechanisms where ethical orientations become observable contributions to local development.

The Village SDGs program provides one such institutional arena. By integrating social, economic, environmental, legal, and governance dimensions into village-level planning, it creates formal entry points for the kind of participation the study identifies as the critical pathway. Yet the source evidence notes that rural communities often have limited understanding of how the SDGs relate to daily life, and that inadequate socialization, restricted information access, and weak empowerment constrain engagement. The study’s results suggest that closing this gap requires more than disseminating information; it requires activating the specific value dimensions, particularly the normative-collective ones, that are empirically associated with participatory behavior.

It is also worth noting what the cross-sectional design cannot establish. The data capture associations at a single point in time, so the direction of influence between values and participation, while theoretically motivated, cannot be definitively confirmed. It is conceivable that active participation deepens value commitment rather than the reverse, or that unmeasured factors such as education, organizational affiliation, or local leadership shape both. Longitudinal and qualitative follow-up work would be needed to trace how values and participation reinforce one another over time, and whether the patterns observed in Java hold in regions with different religious and institutional landscapes.

Finally, the study contributes to a broader international conversation about faith-based development. By demonstrating that religious value dimensions can be empirically separated and shown to have divergent behavioral consequences, it offers a template for researchers in other religious and cultural contexts who have similarly treated faith as a monolithic predictor of civic engagement. The implication travels beyond Indonesia: wherever religious traditions contain multiple value orientations, development scholarship and practice stand to benefit from asking not whether religion matters, but which dimensions of it, operating through which mechanisms, actually move communities toward collective action.

Subject of Research: Social Sciences

Article Title: Differentiating Islamic values and their associations with Muslim community participation and rural community development

Article References: Dulkiah, M., Nurdin, A. A., Akmaliyah, Majid, A. S., & Adianto, T. (2026). Differentiating Islamic values and their associations with Muslim community participation and rural community development. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 277. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00634-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00634-w

Keywords: Islamic values, ukhuwah, amanah, community participation, rural development, Indonesia, PLS-SEM, social capital, Differentiating, Islamic, values, associations