As with American Christians who lie about how often they go to church, Muslims don't tell the truth about praying five times a day.
From the story here:
[T]he research comes to us via Phillip Brenner. He's a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He's conducted several studies that explore this contrast between what people say about themselves and their actual behavior.
One technique he uses is to track what people tell their diaries. ...
What he finds ... is that people tend to be reporting that they pray more than they actually do. And this finding is very similar to the finding that Brenner made a couple of years ago when it comes to church attendance in the United States. And people in the United States say they go to church but large numbers actually don't.
And what's interesting is in both places the people who are over-reporting their religious behavior have something in common. Here's Brenner[:]
The similarity between these two places is that it is the people who think that religion is important, it's important in their daily lives. Those are the people who are over-reporting. And those are the people who are over-reporting church attendance in the U.S. and those are the people who are over-reporting prayer in Turkey, Palestine and Pakistan.
