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SISR/ISSR 2015 ConferenceInternational Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR)Belgium, July 2-5, 2015http://www.sisr-issr.org/English/Conferences/Conferences.htm Panel Title: Religious Minorities’ Sense of Belonging and Religiosity: Muslims in the West and Minorities in the Islamic ContextsPanel Chair:Dr Yaghoob Foroutan (Mazandaran University, Iran &#38; Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)y_foroutan@yahoo.com  &#38;  foroutan@waikato.ac.nzThis panel provides an avenue to consider religious minorities with specific attention to the world’s fastest growing religion. It includes two interconnected parts: while the first part focuses on the status of Muslim minorities in the western contexts, the second part looks at the status of religious minorities in the Islamic contexts. In these varying contexts, this panel addresses such key questions as, but limited to, whether and to what extent do these religious minorities hold a sense of belonging and religiosity in their residing society? In particular, do Muslim minorities differ from other religious groups in terms of the sense of belonging and integration experiences? Are such experiences different within Muslim minorities by ethnicity and compositional characteristics? Whether and how significantly are such experiences influenced by the religiosity of Muslim minorities? Such particular questions can be also referred to religious minorities in the Islamic contexts.Accordingly, this panel primarily aims to explore the dimensions, determinants and differentials associated with the sense of belonging and religiosity among Muslim minorities in the western contexts and religious minorities in the Islamic contexts. The contrasts designed in this panel will also provide evidence to examine Huntington’s theory asserting that Western ethno-religious minorities in the Islamic states are more discriminated against than Islamic minorities in Western states. The panel welcomes both quantitative and qualitative papers which address each of these two parts of this panel outlined above from cultural, economic, demographic and sociological perspectives.Submission Deadline: December 15, 2014