Objectives: to develop a novel religious orientation scale based on the Quran and validate it with pre-university students of secondary education
Method: All the Quranic ayat which addressed its believers directly regarding their religious orientation were scrutinized in terms of pre-university students’ characteristics, resulting in the selection of 57 upon which a 60-item Quranic Orientation Scale (QOS) was developed. The scale was administered to 1123 students and their responses were subjected to Principal Axis Factoring and Promax with Kaiser Normalization (PKN).
Results: Out of 60 items comprising the QOS, 48 loaded acceptably and exclusively on seven rotated factors called believing in holy scriptures,, remembering and seeking Allah, fulfilling Quranic obligations, following Allah confidently, following Quranic instructions, not befriending disbelievers, and informed Quranic struggle. Both the scale and its underlying factors had internal consistency and correlated significantly with each other.
Conclusion: The Quran teaches the domain of religious orientation directly to its readers as a hierarchically and culturally independent schema consisting of specific species and genera. Pre-university student, however, not only reduce the domain as regards the number of its constituting species and genera but also develop their own religious families. Going through this process consciously they render their religious orientation a hierarchically and culturally organized schema.

Introduction

Almost all studies dealing with religious orientation have been influenced by Allport and Ross [1] who treated it as an either-or schema. They believed individuals are either intrinsically or extrinsically orientated in their religion. They come “to church to thank God, to acknowledge His glory, and to ask His guidance” or “for what they can get. Their interest in the church is to run it or exploit it rather than to serve it”. To assess these opposing motivations, Allport and Ross wrote nine intrinsic and 11 extrinsic items and thus designed the first Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) in the world. The present authors argue that their ROS is developed on the macrostructural approach of schema theory (MACAST). Although it provides the necessary and indispensable background upon which many ROSs have been developed, theMACAST needs to take variables such as culture and scripture into account as well so that it can explain religious orientation more comprehensively. This can be achieved through microstructural approach of schema theory (MICAST).

MACAST-Based Definition of Religious Orientation

Since Allport and Ross [1] approached the cognitive domainof “religion” instrumentally (i.e., they used it to study ethnic prejudice), they replaced it with the term “religious orientation” whose definition, to the best knowledge of present researchers, has stayed unaddressed to date. Citing Hoge [2], Hunt and King [3] and Kirkpatrick and Hood [4], Jaeger

[5] argued that Allport and Ross themselves did not define it because they could not decide whether religious orientation “is a personality variable, cognitive style, way of viewing religion, or motivation for religious beliefs and behaviours”.

Realizing the inherent difficulty involved in defining religious orientation from a MACAST perspective, most scholars have recently opted for various terms such as “attitude towards Christianity” [6], “Attitude toward Islam” [7], “Islamic Religiousness” [8], and “religiosity” [9], to name a few. Among these terms, “religiosity” has been employed the most. It has, for example, a token of 35 while “religious orientation has been used just once in the latest (i.e., 10th) edition of “Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry” [10]. The only sentence in which “religious orientation” occurs reads: religiosity “refers to peoples’ devotion to their religion; Allport and Ross’s Religious Orientation Scale, for example, contains the statement, “My whole approach to life is based on my religion.”’ [11].

MACAST-and-MICAST-Based ROSs

While the followers of MACAST and MICAST both treat Religious Orientation Scales (ROSs) as texts, they differ from each other in a number of ways. Firstly, the former treats them as representatives of a hierarchically and culturally independent schema (HACIS) [12, 13, 14] whereas the latter adopts it as a hierarchically and culturally organized schema (HACOS) whose comprehension by readers depends on their constituting words [15]. The linguistic words represent the basic units of cognition called species [16]. Secondly, while the MACAST does not recognise any cognitive role for the items comprising the ROSs [17], the MICAST treats them as linguistic sentences whose comprehension by the individuals who take the ROSs result in cognitive genera [18, 19]. The comprehension of sentences depends directly not only on the takers’ possession, retrieval and activation of their constituting words representing species in isolation but also in the combination with each other in the context of sentences comprising the ROSs, i.e., genera [15].

The subsumption of cognitive genera represented by the items comprising ROSs under cognitive families [20] reveals the last difference between the MACAST and MICAST. While the advocates of the former consider their ROS as a HACIS, the latter treat it as a HACOS whose species and genera depend on the takers of ROSs who develop their own families represented by the factors extracted from their responses. The cognitive species, genera and families of takers’ religious orientation will, therefore, not only differ from those of the designer of ROSs but also from the takers who differ from them in their cultures as reflected in the languages they speak or religions they practice [21, 22].

MICAST-Based Definition of Religious Orientation

Microstructurally, the phrase “religious orientation” consistsof the two species “religious” and “orientation”. The latter signifies “a fundamental mental function that processes the relations between the behaving self to space (places), time (events), and person (people)” [23]. The former has, however, escaped an empirical or objective definition for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the definers have resorted to their own personal views of religion leading scholars such as Idinopulos [24] to conclude that “no single definition of religion seems possible”, Secondly, they have confined themselves to abnormal individuals and defined it as a “symptomof a psychiatric disorder” [25]. And finally, none has resorted to any Holy Scripture to address the religious orientation of believers who are normal or mentally healthy.

To fill the gap, the present researchers have adopted the Quran, the Holy Scripture of Islam, as the main objective source to define religious orientation from both MACAST and MICAST perspectives.As a HACIS it requires living in this world and hereafter by seeking and following God as the best model and supporter. The species “living” employed in the definition accommodates “orientation” in its Quranic sense because it requires each individual to tackle not only the variables of space, time and person (i.e., himself and others as characterized bythe Quran) here in this world but also extend them to the hereafter as an undeniable truth. In other words, the culture reflected in the space and time in which individuals live must be adapted to the Quran and thus all words and sentences of ROS developed on the Quran will contribute to one domain.

The Quranic Orientation will, however, measure religious orientation as a HACOS if the believers of the Quran adapt it to their culture. The very adaptation of the Quranic Orientation to the culture of its readers will change it from a single-factor HACIS to a multi-factor HACOS whose constituting words and sentences will be fewer than those of the Quran. In other words, instead of representing a single-family

domain, it will be subsumed under various families by pre-university students because of a number of cultural variables such as their living in Iran, speaking Persian as a first or second language and following Shia Ithna Ashari school of Islamas stipulated by the Iranian constitution.

Quranic Orientation Scale

The Quranic Orientation Scale (QOS) developed in this study is based exclusively on the Quran. While it is still not known how many words, phrases, clauses, and sentences constitute the Quran, an analysis of its printed Arabic version in this study showed that it contains 114 chapters or surahs and 6334 ayat, including the first ayeh of the first surah repeated at the beginning of all surahs except the ninth. Since developing the QOS on all ayat was not feasible, the present researchers focused only on theayat in which God instructs His believers directly as regards living in this world and hereafter by seeking and following Him as the best model and supporter.

Confining the sentences of the QOS to the ayat in which God addresses believers directly proved instrumental because out of 6222 it singled out 86 ayat contributing to 19 surahs (i.e., Q 2:104, 2:153, 2:172, 2:178, 2:183, 2:208, 2:254, 2:264, 2:267, 2:278, 2:282, 3:100, 3:103, 3:118, 3:130, 3:149, 3:156, 3:200, 4:19, 4:29, 4:43, 4:59, 4:71, 4:94, 4:135, 4:136, 4:146, 5:1, 5:2, 5:6, 5:8, 5:11, 5:35, 5:51, 5:54, 5:57, 5:87, 5:90, 5:94, 5:95, 5:101, 5:105, 5:106, 8:15, 8:29, 8:20, 8:24, 8:27, 8:29, 8:45, 9:23, 9:28, 9:34, 9:38, 9:119, 9:123, 22:77, 24:21, 24:27, 24:58, 33:9, 33:41, 33:49, 33:56, 33:69, 33:70, 47:7, 47:33, 49:1, 49:2, 49:6, 49:7, 57:28, 58:9, 58:11, 58:12, 59:18, 60:1, 60:10, 61:2, 61:10, 61:14, 63:9, 64:14, 66:6, and 66:8).

The MICAST-based analysis of 86 ayat addressing believers directly also showed that 29 contained species which were not relevant to pre-university students, for a number of reasons (i.e., Q 2:104, 3:130, 3:149, 4:19, 4:59, 5:101, 5:106, 5:11, 5:51, 5:54, 5:94, 5:95, 8:15, 8:20, 8:24, 8:45, 9:123, 9:28, 9:38, 24:58, 33:49, 33:69, 33:9, 49:2, 57:28,

58:11, 58:12, 60:10 and 61:14). First, some ayat such as Q 2:104 required earlyMuslims rather than the students to avoid uttering the Arabic schema “Ra'ina” and employ "Unzurna," instead whenever they talked to their prophet,Muhammad, in person: According to Ali [26], the former ‘meant "please look at us, attend to us". It was, however, twisted by Muhammad’s enemies to suggest some insulting meaning. So the unambiguous species "Unzurna" with the same meaning was suggested by the Quran to be used by Muslims when they addressedMuhammad.

Secondly, some species were brought up in more than one ayah in order to describe it from various perspectives. “Usury” is, for example, addressed in Q 3:130: “O you who believe! Devour not usury, doubled and multiplied; but fear Allah that you may prosper”. It is also brought up in Q 2:278: “O you who believe! Follow Allah, and give up what remains of your demand for usury, if you are indeed believers”. Since these ayat dealt with the same species (i.e., usury), they were combined to construct one single genus, i.e., “I don’t give my money in usury nor earn any money in usury.”

And finally, some ayat dealt with particular believers such as Christians (e.g., Q 57:28) or certain conditions such as marital status (e.g., Q 4:19) and did not, therefore, involve pre-university students to whom the QOS was to be administered (i.e., they were neither Christians nor married). For example, Q 4:19 reads: “O you who believe! You are forbidden to inherit women against their will. Nor should you treat them with harshness, that you may take away part of the dower you have given them- except where they have been guilty of open lewdness; on the contrary live with them on a footing of kindness and equity. If ye take a dislike to them it may be that you dislike a thing, and Allah brings about through it a great deal of good.”

After excluding 29 ayat because of their addressing believers other than pre-university students and developing 60 sentences on the remaining 57 ayat, Dastgahian [27] was followed and the sentenceswere subjected to Khodadady Readability Ease Score (KRES). To this end, all species tokens comprising the QOS were analyzed linguistically and assigned to semantic (n=311), syntactic (n=387) and parasyntactic (n=75) kingdoms (Table 2). After reducing the tokens to their types, the syntactic (n=68) and parasyntactic (n=16) types were added (i.e., 68+16) and then divided by semantic types to obtain the KRES ranging from .99

(extremely easy) to .01 (extremely difficult). The results showed that the KRES of 60-sentence QOS (i.e., .36) was slightly higher than that of “Learning to Read English for Pre-University Students” [28] obtained by Khodadady and Ghergloo [29] [i.e., (209+195)÷ 1174 = .34], indicating that the QOS enjoyed an acceptable level of readability for pre-university students.

Upon developing the QOS, it was administered to a representative sample of pre-university students in Iran to address four research questions. 1) Which items of the QOS represent the cognitive genera of pre-university students’ religious orientation? 2) How many factors represent the students’ families of religious orientation? 3) Do the families of religious orientation correlate significantly with pre-university students’ domain of religious orientation? 4) Do pre-university students’ families of religious orientation correlate significantly with each other?Table 1: Frequency (F) and Percent (%) of Linguistic Kingdoms and Genera Tokens and Types Comprising 60-Item QOS

Table 1: Frequency (F) and Percent (%) of Linguistic Kingdoms and Genera  Tokens and Types Comprising 60-Item QOS

Table 2: Descriptive Statistics of Participants

Method

Participants

A total number of 1123 Iranian pre-university students, 732 female (65.2%) and 391 male (34.8%), took part in the studyvoluntarily. (Participants under the age of 18 were required to get their parents’ formal approval before they took the QOS). They had registered as full time students in three top senior high schools (SHS) called nemouneh mardomi, and 13 state and three private SHS in Fariman (n=16, 1.4%) and Mashhad (n= 1107, 98.6%), two cities of Khorasan-e-Razavi province in Iran. Their age ranged between 15 and 20 (mean=17.51, SD=.595). While the majority spoke Persian (98.6%) as their mother tongue a few conversed in languages such as Arabic and Turkish. The participant profile is given in Table 2.

Data Analysis

Two instruments were developed in Persian in this study: a demographic scale and Quranic Orientation Scale (QOS). The former consisted of several short answer questions to elicit the information related to the participants’ gender, age, mother language, and gradepoint average in school. Based on 57 verses of 19 surahs in the Quran, the latter was developed in sixty sentences. Each sentence on the Persian QOS represents a genus taken from a particular ayah, e.g., “I fulfill all my obligations” (Q 5:1). The QOS measures the relevance and application of each genus to pre-university students’ life on a 5-point Likert scale anchored by disagree strongly (1) and agree strongly (5).The range of scores on the QOS is from 60 (strongly irreligious) to 300 (strongly religious), if factor analysis validates it.

Procedures

After securing the content validity and readability level of the QOS, it was printed and copied along with the demographic scale. The scales were them administered in the senior high schools specified in the Participants’ section in a single session. The researchers along with some male teachers attended all the schools and distributed the scales in person. During the process, the participants were encouraged to read each andall items carefully and ask for elaboration and examples if they could not understand them. And finally, the completed scales were collected one by one and ensured that the participants had provided them with their demographic information and chosen their responses to each and all items comprising the QOS along with another scale to be reported in aseparate study.

Since Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) is “preferable to principal components analysis” [30] and provides a true factor analysis [31-39], it was utilized to extract the factors underlying the QOS. The factors were then rotated to render them more interpretable by simplifying their structure [40, 41]. To this end, the oblique rotation of Promax with Kaiser Normalization (PKN) was employed as suggested by Gorsuch [42]. Cronbach’s [43] alpha reliability coefficient was also employed because it provides “the most important and pervasive statistics” [44] of the internal consistency of the QOS and its underlying factors. For exploring the association between the QOS and its underlying factors the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were estimated because they are “the most frequently used measure of association” [45]. All descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were run via IBM SPSS Statistics 23.

Results

The descriptive statistics as well as communalities of items comprising the QOS were obtained to scrutinize their functioning (Table 3). More than 50% of pre-university students agreed with all items except item five representing the genus “I follow the law of equality in retaliation or Qisas, e.g., if someone kills my brother on purpose, his brother must be killed”. Since only 30% of participants had agreed with the item its extraction communality proved to be the lowest (.078). It did not, therefore, load acceptably on any of the seven factors extracted from the QOS.

Table 3: Descriptive Statistics and Communalities of Sentences (Ss) Comprising QOS

Before running factor analysis, the Kaiser-Myer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling accuracy [46] was estimated yielding the value of 0
.97, indicating that applying a common-factor model to the data collected in this study was appropriate. Since it was in 0.90s the measure, according to Kaiser [47], provided a “marvelous” index for the factors extracted from the QOS. Running Bartlett's [48-49] test of sphericity yielded a significant chi-square, i.e., χ2= 31181.118, df =1770, p<.0001, showing that the correlation matrix was not “an identity matrix” [50], and thus there existed “patterned relationships amongst the variables” [51] explored by the QOS.
The PAF and PKN were then run and nine factors were initially extracted whose eigenvalues were 1 and higher (Table 4). The adoption of loadings higher than 0.32 as the minimum magnitude [45], however, showed that out of 60 items eight had not loaded acceptably on any of nine factors extracted (i.e., items 1, 5, 32, 37, 38, 44, 47 and 54). Among the 52 acceptably loading items, four had, nonetheless, cross loaded on another factor (i.e., items 22, 31, 43, and 49). They were, therefore, removed from the structure of factors because “items which cross-load are not desirable, as they have been designed as indicators of one particular capacity rather than many” [52].

Extraction Method: Principal Axis Factoring. Rotation Method: Promax with Kaiser Normalization.

a. When factors are correlated, sums of squared loadings cannot be added to obtain a total variance.

Note. Total = T, V= % of Variance, C = Cumulative %       

Table 4: Total Variance Explained

The removal of items which loaded acceptably on more than one factor reduced their number from 52 to 48 and thus responded the first research question. Furthermore, the removal of cross loading items reduced the number of factors from nine to seven and answered the second research question raised in the study, i.e., pre-university students’ 48 genera constitute seven families of their religious orientation (Table 5).

Note. I = Item, BHS = Believing the Holy Scriptures, RSA = Remembering and Seeking Allah, FQO = Fulfilling Quranic Obligations, FAC = Following Allah Confidently, FQI = Following Quranic Instructions, NBD = Not Befriending Disbelievers, IQS = Informed Quranic Struggle

Table 5: Principal Axis Factor Loadings Rotated via Promax with Kaiser Normalization

Upon specifying the families of pre-university students’ religious orientation they were named Believing in Holy Scriptures (BHS), Remembering and Seeking Allah (RSA), Fulfilling Quranic Obligations (FQO), Following Allah Confidently (FAC), Following Quranic Instructions (FQI), Not Befriending Disbelievers (NBD), and Informed Quranic Struggle (IQS). Cronbach alpha reliability analysis showed that the internal consistency of not only the QOS but also three of its underlying factors (i.e., RSA, BHS, and FAC) were “high” [53] because their coefficients were greater than 0.80 (i.e., 0.95, 0.93, 0.87, and 0.84, respectively) as shown in Table 6. The remaining four factors underlying the QOS, (i.e., FQO, NBD, FQI, and IQS) enjoyed “moderate” reliability because their alphas fell between 0.50 and 0.80 (i.e., 0.76, 0.71, 0.66, and 0.66, respectively).

Table 6: Descriptive Statistics and Reliability Estimates of QOS and Its Constituting Factors

As the first family, BHS comprises 12 genera showing that pre-university students 1) believe in the Holy Scriptures, Allah’s angels and the day of judgment, 2) perform ablution and/or Ghusl when they prepare for prayer,  3) obey Allah and his messenger Muhammad, 4) observe fasting, 5) eat of the halal things Allah has given them and thank Him, 6) don’t like Allah’s enemies and don’t befriend them, 7) don’t give their money in usury nor earn any money in usury, 8) do not follow the people of book (e.g., Jews and Christians) who want to rob them off their beliefs, 9) avoid wine and gambling because they are some of Satan’s work, 10) do not befriend the people who take their religion for a mockery or sport, 11) do not violate the sanctity of the rites of Allah, holy months and places and 12) believe that Satan bids humans to indecency and dishonor.
Compared to the first 12-genera BHS, the second 13-species family of RSA require G4SHS students 1) to remember Allah frequently and repeatedly, 2) to seek the means to approach Allah [by saying or doing what he wants] and strive in His cause,  3) to prepare themselves for the hereafter by doing what Allah wants them to do, 4)  to turn to Allah with sincere repentance, 5) to collect their whole mind and approach Allah in a spirit of reverence when they pray, 6) to struggle in the way of Allah with their possessions and life, 7)  not to fight in Allah’s way without undertaking proper preparations and precautions, 8) to bow down, prostrate themselves, serve Allah and do good, 9) to guard their own soul without judging the actions of those who have gone stray, 10) follow Allah because they are afraid they may say or do something He does not like, 11) to accept Islam wholeheartedly and not to follow the footsteps of Satan, 12) seek Allah’s help in patience and prayers, and 13) to save themselves and their families from a fire whose fuel is men and stones.
In comparison to the second 13-genera family of RSA, the eight genera comprising the family of FQO requires pre-university students 1) not to betray their trusts, 2) to fulfill all their obligations, 3) not to eat their property in vanity, i.e., waste it or earn money by hurting or destroying others, 4) to do whatever they say, 5) to ascertain the truth before accepting the news reported by a sinner, 6) to be just because that is next to piety, 7) to have transactions in which the goods are taken now and the payment is promised in future written and signed, and 8) not to cancel their charity by showing off.
The fourth family of FAC is fewer in species than the third family, i.e., 4 vs 8, requiring pre-university students to believe that if they follow Allah, He will 1) forgive them, 2) remove all evil deeds from them, 3) give them the criterion to judge between right and wrong, and 4) help them and plant their feet firmly if they help Him. The fifth family of four-genus FQI, however, requires the students 1) to give [to the needy] of the good things which they have (honourably) earned, 2) not to let anyone laugh at another one, 3) to spend some from whatever Allah has given them in charity or help others and society, and 4) to avoid suspicion as much as possible because it is a sin in some cases.
Similar to FAC and FQI, the sixth family of NBD consists of four genera requiring pre-university students 1) not to take disbelievers as their intimate friends, 2) not to take the disbelievers as friends instead of the believers, 3) not to defame nor be sarcastic to anyone and 4) not to discourage anyone who embarks on dangerous tasks for the sake of Allah. As the last and seventh family of Quranic orientation, however, the three-genus IQS requires the students 1) not to take their parents, family and relatives for protectors if they prefer disbelief to belief, 2) not to yield to their family members if their demands conflict with their religious convictions and 3) not to accuse anyone of disbelief without proper investigation when they do something in the cause of Allah.
In addition to enjoying content validity and being reliable, the seven factors underlying pre-university students’ Quranic orientation (i.e., BHS, RSA, FQO, FAC, FQI, NBD, and IQS) had strong convergent validity as attested by their “high” correlations with the QOS ranging from “.50 to 1.0” [54], i.e., .86, .93, .71, .66, .62, .78, and .72, all significant at p<.01, respectively (Table 7). These results answered the third research question showing that the students’ seven families correlate significantly with their domain of religious orientation.

** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)         
 

Note. QOS = Quranic Orientation Scale, BHS = Believing in Holy Scriptures, RSA = Remembering and Seeking Allah, FQO = Fulfilling Quranic Obligations, FAC = Following Allah Confidently, FQI = Following Quranic Instructions, NBD = Not Befriending Disbelievers, IQS = Informed Quranic Struggle

Table 7: Correlations between QOS and Its Underlying Factors

Not only did the families of G4SHS students’ Quranic orientation correlate significantly with the domain of religious orientation they also correlated significantly with each other and thus answered the last research question of this study (Table 7). The highest and lowest correlations were obtained between the BHS and the RSA (i.e., r= 75, p<.01) and the FQI and FAC (i.e., r= 31, p<.01), respectively. These results do challenge approaching religion from a personal perspective and treats it as a cognitive domain whose constituting families and genera depend on species rather than an either//or orientation as discussed in the next section.
Discussion

            Allport and Ross [1] did not quote any Holy Scriptures to establish the content validity of their ROS. They did, however, cite the findings of scholars such as Kirkpatrick [55] and Rokeach [56] who found “religious people in general to be slightly less humanitarian than nonreligious people” and “nonbelievers to be consistently less dogmatic, less authoritarian, and less ethnocentric than believers,” (p. 432) respectively. Following these scholars Allport and Ross as well as Abu Raiya et al., [8] defined religious orientation in terms of some indicators such as attending churches and mosques. The MICAST-based analysis of the scales such as ROS and Psychological Measure of Islamic Religiousness (PMIR) show that these indicators have little to do with religion when they are analyzed in terms of species, genera and families which constitute the domain of religious orientation in Holy Scriptures.
Species Comprising the QOS Are Religious in Type and Token
 All the species comprising the QOS are religious in type and token because they are used in the Quran. While the advocates of MACAST have not provided any Holy Scriptures based upon which the content validity of their ROSs can be established, the followers of MICAST define the Quran as an “authentic text” [57] which deals specifically with religion as do the Torah and Bible. The content of these texts are considered authentic in this study for two reasons. Firstly, they are accepted as the words of God by their believers and secondly they can be objectively analysed in terms of their constituting species and matched with those of the ROSs. Matching the species of the Bible with those of the ROS developed by Allport and Ross [1], for example, challenges its content validity as a measure if Christian religious orientation.
The present researchers’ analysis of King James Version of the Bible, for example, showed that the species “God” and “Jesus” occupy the first and second positions in Christianity because they have a token of 4508 and 1166, respectively. “God” has, however, a token of one in the ROS whereas “Jesus” has not been mentioned even once. Compared to the Bible in which the species “church” occurs only 83 times, it occupies the first position in the Christianity measured by the ROS because it has the highest token of five.. In other words, according to the ROS, it is the church first and foremost which shapes and maintains the religious orientation of Christians. The same holds true for the MACAST-based ROSs developed to measure the religious orientation of Muslims.
Similar to Allport and Ross [1], Abu Raiya et al. [8], for example, considered mosque attendance as an indicator of religious orientation because they employed the transliterated Arabic species “masjid” (i.e., mosque) four times in their PMIR. Although the species “Allah” has the highest token among the names used in the PMIR (i.e., 26) as it does in the Quran, i.e., “2697” [58], the species “Islam” and “Lord” occupy the second position in the PMIR whereas they have the tokens of 16 and “969” in the Quran, respectively. Through replacing the species such as “Lord” with “mosque” Abu Raiya et al. have composed genera which contradict the teachings of the Quran.
Each Species of the QOS is Religious in Its Semantic Features
None of the 320 species comprising the QOS has any semantic features other than those brought up in the Quran. The schema “mosque”, for example, in the Quran has only two features. It is a place where believers prostrate and “worship [58]. It has nothing to do with “going to mosques “because others would disapprove of me if I did not [8].  Similarly, the schema “church” in the New Testament of King James Version of the Bible, according to Achtemeier [59], ‘always denotes a group of people, either all the Christians in a city (Acts 14:23; 1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1) or those gathered for worship in a particular house (Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19) or all Christians in all the churches, the whole church (Matt. 16:18; Eph. 1:22). It never signifies a building or a "denomination”’.
 Since the species “church” does not provide any explanation of the Christians other than gathering for worship, it has been either shunned away or idealized as a utopian community in various schools of Christianity. Protestants, for example, “can be expected to be more inclined to establish their religion as individual belief, rather than to seek comfort in religion. The antithesis of this is to be found in institutional religion, where grace, salvation, and sacraments are mediated exclusively through the Church as institution, which represents a ‘perfect society’. This is to be found in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine of Church” [60].
Genera Constituting the QOS Are Religious in Species
The sixty genera comprising the QOS are religious because their species not only have religious features by themselves but also expand and/or elaborate those features in combination with each other. The species “I spend some from whatever Allah has given me in charity or help others and society”, for example, contains the species “Allah” as the main semantic feature of the Quran. It is He who  asks His “believers” (i.e., I)  to “give” “something of what they have in charity” or “help others and society”. The species also furnishes unique semantic features for the species “believers” which are exclusive to the Quran, i.e., individuals who “believe whatever they have belongs to Allah” and “give some of it” to “others” and “society” voluntarily simply because Allah exhorts them to do so.
Unscriptural MACAST-based ROSs, however, render religious species irreligious by stripping them from their religious semantic features. Allport and Ross’ [1] species “occasionally I find it necessary to compromise my religious beliefs in order to protect my social and economic well-being”, for example, implies that religious beliefs are in conflict with social and economic well-being and their holders have no choice but to compromise them. The Quran, however, challenges such an implication categorically. Marrying and trading, for example, help secure social and economic well-being, respectively. For this very reason, the Quran exhorts it believers to marry (e.g., Q 24:32) and embark on economic activities such as trading (e.g., Q 4:29).
Furthermore, upon securing social and economic well-beings, Holy Scriptures not only specify irreligious practices but also tell their believers explicitly how to protect themselves by avoiding those practices as sins. The Bible, for example, condemns “adultery” as a sin whose indulgence threatens the social well-being of the members of a family. It also condemns “stealing”, “bearing false witness” and “defraud” as sins (e.g., Mark 10:19), Jesus, according to “The Gospel of Barnabas”, for example, “called Peter close to him, and said unto him: 'If thy brother shall sin against thee, go and correct him. If he amend, rejoice, for thou hast gained thy brother; but if he shall not amend, go and call afresh two witnesses and correct him afresh; and if he shall not amend, go and tell it to the church; and if he shall not then amend, count him for an unbeliever, and therefore thou shalt not dwell under the same roof whereunder he dwelleth, thou shalt not eat at the same table whereat he sitteth, and thou shalt not speak with him; insomuch that if thou know where he setteth his foot in walking thou shalt not set thy foot there [61].
Genera Constituting the QOS Have no Families
The 60 genera comprising the QOS contribute to the domain of religious orientation equally because they all elaborate divine species represented by “His most beautiful names” (Q 7:180). The genus “I obey Allah and his messenger Muhammad”, for example, contains the species “obey”. It has the irreligious semantic feature of “to do what one is commanded by (a person) [emphasis added]” [62]. It does, however, become divine when Muslims accept that “the command rests with none but Allah” (Q 6:57) who has issued it as the truth in the Quran (Q 6:73). If they do what God commands them to do, they should do what Muhammad commands them, too, because he “has brought the truth” (Q 23:70) and complied with it as “an excellent exemplar” (Q 33:21).
If Muslims wish to live in this world and hereafter by seeking and following God as the best model and supporter they should obey Him and completely agree with whatever He says in the Quran. If they face any difficulty in understanding it they should follow Muhammad as an excellent exemplar. In a separate statistical analysis, the present researchers, therefore, changed the pre-university students’ responses to completely agree and subjected them to factor analysis to find out what factorial structure the QOS would have if they obeyed Allah completely. The results showed that all the genera constituted a single taxon representing the domain of Quranic orientation. The findings presented in the Results section of the present study, however, show that the students consider 12 genera irrelevant to their religious orientation and subsume the remaining 48 under seven families because they do not obey Allah and Muhammad completely.
Believers Create Their Own Families of Religious Orientation
Quranically, the 320 species and 60 genera developed in this study should be practiced as the only two taxa constituting the domain of religious orientation. Pre-university students have, however, interpreted the species and genera by following other than God and thus subsumed the domain into families through reducing the species and genera to 259 and 48, respectively. For example, 22 and six percent of students have accepted that they had no idea and disagreed, respectively, regarding “not letting anything (e.g., riches and opportunities) or anyone (e.g., parents and family) divert them from the remembrance of Allah”. Factor analysis of their responses has, therefore, shown that this Quranic genus has no relationship to their religious orientation.
However, 28 and nine percent of pre-university students have had no idea and disagreed, respectively with the genus “not yielding to family members if their demands conflict with their religious convictions”. The factor analysis of their responses has related this genus not to all genera of religious orientation but to two other genera forming the seventh genus of Informed Quranic Struggle (IQS). In other words, the students do not believe that all genera of the religious orientation taught by the Quran require IQS but three. They do, therefore, follow mostly other than God.
Families Constituting Religious Orientation as a HACOS Validate Each Other
While the correlations between the families of MACAST-based ROSs are not usually reported [1, 8] they are emphasised in the MICAST-based studies because they are indispensable taxa of religious orientation domain as some scholars exploring other domains maintain. Gardner [63], Mayer, Caruso and Salovey [64] and Sternberg [65], for example, believed that intelligence as a domain should consist of moderately interrelated families. For validating his Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory-24 (SISRI-24) King [52], therefore, correlated the four factors extracted from SISRI-24 and reported correlation coefficients ranging from .61 to .42 (all significant at .01) between the genera represented by the factors (i.e., Critical Existential Thinking; Personal Meaning Production; Transcendental Awareness; and Conscious State Expansion).
Similar to King’s [52] findings, the seven families of pre-university students religious orientation measured by the QOS correlate significantly with each other (see Table 7). The relationship between families, however, depends on what their constituting genera require the students to do rather than their sheer number. While the first highest correlation, for example, occurs between BHS and RSA (r= .75, p<.01), consisting of 12 and 13 genera, respectively, NBD consisting of four genera correlates the second and third highest with the RSA (r= .69, p<.01) and BHS (r= .63, p<.01), respectively. These findings challenge the development and empirical validity of families with the same or similar number of genera (e.g., nine and 10 genera for intrinsic and extrinsic families of religious orientation measured by ROS, respectively).
Limitations
The findings of the present study cannot be generalized to believers of all ages and educational levels as few cultural variables because they are confined to Iranian pre-university students living in a single province. Furthermore, the QOS does not assess the religious orientation as comprehensively as brought up in the Quran. More comprehensive QOSs, therefore, need to be developed either on the entire Quran or on one of its long surahs to identify and validate unknown genera of religious orientation.
Conclusion
While the 319 species and 60 genera developed in this study on the basis of 57 ayat of the Quran define pre-university students’ religious orientation as a HACIS or global domain of religious orientation the students themselves render it a HACOS or culture-specific domain by reducing the species and genera to 259 and 48, respectively. Through reducing the members of these taxa they develop not only a narrower 48-genus domain but also assign the genera to seven families of religious orientation, i.e., believing in holy scriptures,, remembering and seeking Allah, fulfilling Quranic obligations, following Allah confidently, following Quranic instructions, not befriending disbelievers, and informed Quranic struggle. Future research needs to be conducted to find out whether the administration of the 60-item QOS to students of other cultures would render their religious orientation different from those of pre-university students.
Acknowledgments
We wish to express out deep gratitude to the pre-university students in senior high schools of Mashhad and Fariman, their teachers, principals and vice-principals who participated in this study voluntarily and supported us in whatever ways they could. We dedicate our findings to these wonderful people.  We also announce that we have had no financial relationships with commercial interests with anyone and any organization.
Declarations
Ethical approval
There are no conflicts of interest. The aims and procedures of this study were approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.