Poll Controversy
The poll results showing alleged mass support for violence and extremism among the world's Muslims is an internet meme or "copypasta" (internet slang for any block of text that gets copied and pasted over and over again, typically disseminated by individuals through online discussion) that is continuously circulated by people who are enamored of numbers without questioning the veracity of such interpretations.
For example, the now (in)famous Pew poll from April 2013 entitled, "THE WORLD’S MUSLIMS: RELIGION, POLITICS AND SOCIETY"
http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf
Or the November 2015 poll by Pew about Muslim views of ISIS.
We see a similar pattern with all such copypastas:
First, the actual conclusions and interpretations of the organization conducting the poll are completely discarded or ignored. That poll on Muslim views on ISIS is entitled: "In nations with significant Muslim populations, much disdain for ISIS". Even the image of the bar graph is titled "Views of ISIS Overwhelmingly Negative".
None of that makes it into the final copy-paste.
Especially in longer texts, like the April 2013 poll, where there's a lot of information such as footnotes which disclaim points like the fact that justification for honor killing cannot be found in the Qur'an or Sunnah. All of that is ignored.
Secondly, by taking the numbers out of context one is free to assign any meaning to them.
What usually happens is you see a majority of the polled on one side, like condemning or disapproving of terrorism for example. And the majority number will usually be around the 70s on average. The number given, mentioned, and discussed by the polling organization is this number.
This number is ignored. It is then subtracted from 100 and then that resultant number is assumed to be the opposite side of the question (ignoring what the poll actually says about the people who were not part of the original 70%).
The question is then illegitimately re-framed to portray a sharper contrast. Though 70% may harbor "negative views of ISIS", that is reframed in a more definitive manner as "70% do not support ISIS". Then the flip side, the new thoroughly invented 30% number, is taken to indicate actual support for ISIS. The entire discussion of the poll is now about a number and a position that is not in the original poll at all.
Then those who like the conclusion accept the circulation at face value. After all, it's a number. Numbers don't lie, right?
Thirdly, the most important lack of context is the lack of polling results of non-Muslim groups in the discussion, even though they may have been polled. Without this, and with a general lack of understanding of how polls work and what their numbers mean (since the actual conclusions of those who conducted the poll are ignored/discarded), a minority is trumped up to appear as the opposite.
The minority figure is usually amplified by multiplying by the total number of Muslims in a country or on the planet. That's 1.6 billion, or nearly 1 in 4 people (nevermind that the April 2013 Pew poll ignored more than half a billion Muslims in countries they did not poll). So, the meme continues, if 30% of Muslims (again, a completely made up number because it's not a polling result, it's calculated by manipulating polling results) "support" ISIS, that's almost half a billion ISIS supporters!!11!1 We're doomed! Well, to be fair, if we were actually being rational, with that large of a force we should have already been doomed years ago. None of us should be here right now. But I digress.
I think my favorite thing is when negative results of small numbers of Muslims are applied to the whole, but any positive result from a small group is discounted because it's a small group and therefore isn't representative of the whole. So in a list of Muslim countries which overwhelmingly denounce a certain thing, the country with the lowest response is picked out and those numbers are going to be used in the aforementioned twisting.
Let's then go through some of these polls:
The Pew Organization:
The article states:
Pew Research’s global survey of Muslims is part of a larger effort, the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Recent studies produced under the Pew-Templeton initiative, jointly funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, include “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010” (December 2012), “Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion” (September 2012), “Faith on the Move: The Religious Affiliation of International Migrants” (March 2012), “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population” (December 2011) and “The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010- 2030” (January 2011).
The Wikipedia article for the Templeton Foundation mentions:
The current president of the Templeton Foundation is Heather Templeton Dill, daughter of the late John M. Templeton, Jr. and granddaughter of Sir John Templeton.[55]
Templeton, Jr. was an evangelical Christian and an independently wealthy person who was active in philanthropy outside of the mandate of the Templeton Foundation itself. This includes personal support to various conservative causes.[56]
Templeton, Jr. always maintained that his own personal religious beliefs do not affect his ability to administer the Foundation in accordance with the wishes of his father. The Templeton Foundation has also gone to great lengths to stress that it is non-political with no bias towards any one faith.[57]
[...]
Broadly, controversial aspects of the Templeton Foundation fall into three categories.
- The Foundation is seen by some as having a conservative bias.
- The Foundation receives criticism from some members in the scientific community who are concerned with its linking of scientific and religious questions.
- The Foundation stands accused of using its financial clout to encourage researchers and reporters to produce material favourable to its position linking religion to science etc.
Accusations of conservative orientation
Like all 501(c)(3) organizations, the Templeton Foundation is prohibited from engaging directly in political activity. However, a number of journalists have highlighted connections with conservative causes. A 1997 article in Slate Magazine said the Templeton Foundation had given a significant amount of financial support to groups, causes and individuals considered conservative, including gifts to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Milton Friedman, Walter E. Williams, Julian Lincoln Simon and Mary Lefkowitz, and referred to John Templeton, Jr., as a "conservative sugar daddy".[62] The Foundation also has a history of supporting the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, as well as projects at major research centers and universities that explore themes related to free market economics, such as Hernando de Soto's Instituto Libertad Y Democracia and the X Prize Foundation.
In a 2007 article in The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich drew attention to the Foundation's president Dr. John M. Templeton Jr. funding of the conservative group Freedom's Watch, and referred to the Foundation as a "right wing venture".[63] Pamela Thompson of the Templeton Foundation, responding to Ehrenreich's allegations, asserted that "the Foundation is, and always has been, run in accordance with the wishes of Sir John Templeton Sr, who laid very strict criteria for its mission and approach", that it is "a non-political entity with no religious bias" and it "is totally independent of any other organisation and therefore neither endorses, nor contributes to political candidates, campaigns, or movements of any kind".[64]
Now, the polls themselves:
Violence and Terrorism:
Pew, April 2013
Extremism Widely Rejected
Muslims around the world strongly reject violence in the name of Islam. Asked specifically about suicide bombing, clear majorities in most countries say such acts are rarely or never justified as a means of defending Islam from its enemies.
That's the conclusion of the poll's organizers based on the data they gathered.
Here's the graphic from the poll on suicide bombings:
Note the question says: "suicide bombing in defense of Islam". The full question from the poll is:
Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies... Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is
The numbers are extremely lopsided against bombing civilians even with the added condition that it is to protect Islam from its enemies, whatever that means (to most it would imply a military invasion and occupation of the kind routinely experienced by the Muslim world for the past few centuries). A better question might have been whether it's justified in pursuit of political goals (separatism, nationalism, overthrow a government, install an Islamic government, etc) not directly related to an existential threat on their religion. One can imagine the response would have been even more one-sided against if that were the case.
The only places in favor, aside from the oddity of Bangladesh (which happens, it's just a poll of a few hundred people and Bangladesh is a country of 180 million), are actual warzones: Palestine, where suicide bombing by Muslims was made famous, and Afghanistan. Interestingly Iraq stayed against, which probably reflects that the concern in 2010 was a civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites being stoked by sectarian suicide bombings perpetrated by the forerunner to ISIS, Al-Qaeda in Iraq... not keeping out foreign invaders, which is the sentiment in Palestine and Afghanistan.
To be more clear, the actual response choice of "Often Justified" hit double digits only in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Palestine (where it was 18%, 11%, and 18% respectively). It was 9% in Bangladesh, 3% in Turkey, 3% in Malaysia, and 4% in Pakistan.
These majorities may not be overwhelming enough for some. Let's add some context to such a poll:
Gallup 2011 poll of Muslim Americans
That's for militaries of established states. Understandably, Muslim Americans would not be fans of such an option. American drones are not being sent after Mormons or Baptists, obviously.
But in the question for individuals or small groups (which contrasted with the above question means organized or lone wolf terrorists):
Muslims still have the highest negative response rate.
One might argue that Muslim Americans are not representative of the world's Muslims since they are a tiny fraction thereof. But why wouldn't American Christians be representative of the world's Christians? There are hundreds of millions of Christians in the US. And the US has one of the largest populations of Jews in the world. There's no reason to think American Atheists wouldn't also be representative of Western Atheists in general. And all these groups would be stuck in the dreaded "70s". If we applied the same troll-like logic to them as is being used on Muslim respondents, one would come up with the claim that over 20% of all these groups support terrorism.
Hey, it's technically true, right? (No. No, it isn't.)
That's just the way polling works. You're not going to get 100% response rates usually (although as we'll see with the poll on ISIS, the numbers almost reach there). 89% with a generous margin of error is as close to a complete consensus as you're usually going to get.
The reason why so many people blindly believe, or are even eager to believe these circulating memes arguing that your local Muslim community are sleeper cells hiding in the shadows ready to strike out at any moment is made evident in the third question:
American Christians are significantly more likely to believe that American Muslims are sympathetic to terrorists. Whereas the reality is that 92% of American Muslims don't think so.
People are more likely to believe those things on their news and social media feeds which confirm their existing view of the world or personal biases.
It's worth quoting an exchange that occurred on reddit, in the comments section of the video where someone refuted a 9/11 conspiracy theory:
I really wish he had just lied and said he heated the steel to 1500, as I just know there will be people who claim that extra 300 degrees is what did it.
It wouldn't matter, you could just as easily claim that he isn't using the kind of steel he claims to be, or that the one in the furnace isn't the same steel as the first one he used, or that half inch steel isn't representational of I-Beam steel... basically it's really hard to prove something to someone if they don't want to believe it.
Oh and for what it's worth, here are American views on drone strikes which mostly kill civilians:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drones-strikes-target-rescuers-pakistan
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/us-drone-strikes-are-said-to-target-rescuers.html?_r=0
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/u_s_drones_targeting_rescuers_and_mourners/
(Also, around December of 2015, some Republican candidates for President were seriously endorsing the idea of killing the innocent family members of terrorists... which is itself, by definition, terrorism)
Gallup: Views on Violence
A nice write-up on their conclusions from polling can be found here:
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, social scientists and counterterrorism experts have been struggling to understand what provokes someone to deliberately take the lives of innocent people. The religious veneer of al Qaeda's public posture led many analysts to search for answers in Islam's teachings. Some analysts have even argued that a wholesale revision of Muslim theology is the only way to defeat violent extremism.
Empirical evidence paints a different picture. Gallup analysis suggests that one's religious identity and level of devotion have little to do with one's views about targeting civilians. According to the largest global study of its kind, covering 131 countries, it is human development and governance - not piety or culture - that are the strongest factors in explaining differences in how the public perceives this type of violence.
The implications of these findings on public policy are far-reaching. The research suggests that to increase the public's rejection of targeting civilians, leaders would do well to focus far more on education and government accountability, and far less on religious ideology.
[...]
Since 9/11, voices arguing that Islam encourages violence more than other religions have grown louder - most recently in the manifesto penned by Anders Breivik before he gunned down more than 70 people in Norway. In his manifesto, Breivik argues that Islam is intrinsically violent and peaceful Muslims are simply ignoring their faith's injunctions to kill. He cites dozens of European and American pundits to support this assertion. If this popular claim were true, it would logically follow that Islam's adherents would be more likely than others to condone violence, even if most find it easier not to follow through on their beliefs, as Breivik contends.
The evidence refutes this argument. Residents of the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states are slightly less likely than residents of non-member states to view military attacks on civilians as sometimes justified, and about as likely as those of non-member states to say the same about individual attacks.
[...]
In addition to those who single Islam out, some pundits, most notably the "New Atheists," have accused religion in general of encouraging violence. Though the motivations of actual terrorists are beyond the scope of this brief, the evidence regarding public support for targeting civilians challenges this notion.
An analysis of public opinion from more than 130 countries, conducted as part of the Gallup World Poll, finds that public acceptance of violence against non-combatants is not linked to religious devotion. In Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, those who reject attacks on civilians are as likely as those who see them as sometimes justified to hold religion in high esteem. Though there appears to be a difference linking religiosity and sympathy for attacks on civilians among the residents of the U.S. and Canada, this difference is not statistically significant. In Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), those who reject military and individual attacks on civilians are more likely to say religion is an important part of their daily lives.
While the importance of religion has a neutral to positive effect on the likelihood of rejecting violence, inter-religious intolerance, as measured by the Gallup Religious Tolerance Index, has a negative effect in many regions.
[...]
Placing high importance on religion generally relates positively with rejecting violence. Religious intolerance - a function of less, not more, religion - is generally associated with greater sympathy for attacks on civilians. Contrary to popular perceptions, less interfaith acceptance is commonly more prevalent among the less faithful. In the MENA region, for example, though the importance of religion is uniformly high, it is highest among those considered integrated, the most developed level of inter-religious tolerance, and lowest among those classified as isolated.
[...]
In contrast, regionally, residents of the U.S. and Canada are most likely to say that military attacks against civilians are sometimes justified. Americans are the most likely population in the world (49%) to believe military attacks targeting civilians is sometimes justified, followed by residents of Haiti and Israel (43%).
[...]
The identity of the attacker makes a difference to some people when weighing the justification of targeting civilians. When attacks are committed by a military, Americans and Canadians find them more acceptable (47% sometimes justified) than when they are committed by an individual (21% sometimes justified). Europeans, too, make a distinction, and are more likely to reject individual attacks than military attacks by eight percentage points.
On the other hand, populations in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, former Soviet countries, and MENA are more likely to view violence targeting civilians as uniformly unacceptable.
[...]
It is important to note that public perceptions of civilian attacks do not necessarily predict violence against non-combatants, nor are terrorist activities or war crimes necessarily the result of public support. For example, one of the masterminds of the 9/11 terrorist attack, Mohamed Atta, and the current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were both from middle-class Egyptian families. Yet, Egypt ties Finland as the country with the highest level of unequivocal rejection of individual attacks against civilians. Furthermore, Egypt ranks as one of the top countries in the world for rejecting military attacks against civilians. Norwegians are among the most likely to say individual attacks against civilians are never justified, though a Norwegian this year carried out one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history. This suggests that terrorist activity is largely on the periphery, carried out despite community rejection and not with its tacit support.
November 2015 Pew Poll about ISIS
While Pew themselves conclude that this data means there is an overwhelmingly negative response to ISIS, those who need an out from such a conclusion have it in the form of some minor "apparent" support for ISIS.
Except the poll isn't measuring support for ISIS. The question is:
Please tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of [ISIS]?
Keeping in mind that many people in these countries are not getting their news or information from the same sources as we are. And though, like us, many are "unplugging" from traditional network television and moving to social media, guess who's waiting for them on social media? If you answered "people who have no idea what they're talking about and spread rumor, gossip, and conspiracy theories along with propagandists of all flavors" then, well, youre right. That includes ISIS supporters.
This is why, unsurprisingly, all the countries geographically closer to ISIS (like Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, etc) are approaching 100% condemnation. They already know about ISIS. The further away you get, the more confused the results become, reflecting the lack of familiarity of these populations with the subject matter.
Nonetheless, a few things need to be noted:
Firstly, the numbers responding "very favorable" are actually:
| Country | Very Favorable |
|---|---|
| Turkey | 1% |
| Palestine | 1% |
| Indonesia | 1% |
| Malaysia | 2% |
| Pakistan | 1% |
| Burkina Faso | 3% |
| Nigeria | 7% |
| Senegal | 4% |
Any country not listed above had 0% for "very favorable".
The difference is the "somewhat favorable" category which could represent just about anything, like the mixed messages these populations receive about ISIS from a variety of media sources.
Secondly, here's the breakdown from within a few countries:
This shows you how "clear" these polls actually are. In a poll where otherwise we were getting near 100% responses (a rarity), there's also the result that apparently 7% of Nigerian Christians hold favorable opinions of ISIS! And 6% of Malaysian Buddhists. Lebanon overall had a stronger negative response to ISIS than Israel where 2% of Jews responded with "Don't Know". 29% of Christians in Burkina Faso and 22% in Nigeria along with 29% of Buddhists in Malaysia answered "Don't Know".
And lastly, with regards to Pakistan's 62% "Don't Know" response, this could reflect any number of factors. Primarily, a poll's own shortcomings. On top of that, it could reflect confusion within Pakistan due to lack of familiarity with ISIS (they're more concerned with the war in Afghanistan than the war in Iraq). A recent piece in a Pakistani online newspaper about this poll mentioned:
As Pakistani/Canadian writer Ali A Rizvi pointed out, in a recent PEW survey, nine per cent of Pakistanis approve of ISIS, while 62 per cent said they ‘don’t know’. I spoke to PEW directly, and was told that such a large percentage of ‘don’t knows’ indicate a lack of familiarity with the issue.
While causing fear in the populace, the Pakistani Taliban (the main Islamist militant group active in the country and who has started to develop ties to ISIS) gets little to no sympathy from Pakistanis in general since they have declared war on the Pakistani state and all Pakistani civilians. After the slaughter of over 100 schoolchildren in Peshawer last year, Pakistanis are not likely to have any fondness for these groups.
For instance, see this recent article:
But for Islamophobes (who usually aren't that irrationally afraid of Islam themselves but seek to spread such hysteria in everyone else), Pew's own interpretation matters little. Their view is that Pakistanis responding to the poll were caught with their pants down and didn't want to betray their sentiments for ISIS just yet, they want to wait a little longer until they can enact some conspiratorial plan to destroy the West before they come out and laugh in our face. Obviously. That this is a borderline insane belief to hold doesn't change the fact that it's been spread to otherwise normal, but ignorant, people. More than a few people reading this right here, otherwise young politically liberal Americans who just may not have interacted much if at all with Muslims in the real world, will see that belief as something that could be true. That's how loud the din and cacophony of anti-Islamic hysteria in Western political discourse has become.
Conservatism and Extremism
The last refuge of the Islamophobe when the violence connection fails is to fall back on the claim that the Muslim world is intolerant to the point of being impossible to coexist with. Which should mean violence.
How that works, when the polls show Muslims are not violent to begin with, I'm not exactly sure. But it works on the level that it demonizes the religion and causes mistrust of people who are Muslim which is a cornerstone, by definition, of Islamophobia.
The poll used for this is predominantly the April 2013 Pew one.
Pew, April 2013
Let's begin with Pew's own conclusions.
Women's Rights
A global median of 85% of Muslims think wives should always obey their husbands.
(South Asia - 88%), (MidEast + N-Africa - 87%), (Southeast Asia - 93%), (Central Asia - 70%), (S-E Europe - 43%)
The trend here is not surprising as most of these cultures are very traditional in their views of gender roles. We see a varying trend, however. Muslims in Europe are less likely to agree with other Muslims on this issue. The significance of these variances will be discussed later.
However, many Muslims say women should have the right to decide whether a veil in public.
A global median of 53% say veiling should be a woman's decision.
This is surprising for a number of reasons. For one thing, this is coming out of a poll of predominantly Muslim countries, especially those in "the Muslim world" (Middle East, Africa, and Asia). Secondly, the head covering and veiling is often seen as a crucial part of Islamic culture and identity. The narrative sold in the West (as discussed elsewhere in this wiki) is that women are forced to veil. Yet more than half of Muslims disagree.
Religious Freedom
Global median percentage of Muslims who say...
Muslims in their country are very free to practice their faith - 78%
Members of other religions are very free to practice their faith - 73%
Most also think that non-Muslims in their country are very free to practice their faith.
Among Muslims who say people of other faiths can practice their religion very freely, a global median of 93% call this religious freedom "a good thing."
Nevermind alleged misperceptions about the religious freedom of minorities (although it is hard to generalize on a group which contains both Turkey and Afghanistan), the global median is 93% in regarding religious freedom as "a good thing."
Shari'ah Law
Support for Sharia varies
Muslims' attitudes toward Islamic law vary around the world. Support for making shariah the "law of the land" is lower in Southern and Eastern Europe and in Central Asia than in the other regions surveyed.
The survey finds support for sharia is often higher in countries where the constitution or basic laws already favor Islam over other religions.
Many more Muslims support the application of sharia in situations involving family and property matters than favor severe punishments in criminal cases.
Median percentage of sharia supporters in each region who favor...
Religious judges deciding matters of family law (such as divorce or inheritance)
Country Percent Global Median 73% South Asia 78% MidEast + N-Africa 78% Southeast Asia 84% Central Asia 62% S-E Europe 41% Severe corporal punishments for criminals such as cutting off the hands of thieves
Country Percent Global Median 48% South Asia 81% MidEast + N-Africa 57% Southeast Asia 46% Central Asia 38% S-E Europe 36% Executing those who leave Islam
Country Percent Global Median 28% South Asia 76% MidEast + N-Africa 56% Southeast Asia 27% Central Asia 16% S-E Europe 13%
First, let's note that India, Saudi-Arabia, Iran, Libya, and Algeria were among those countries not polled. South Asia, usually synonymous with India, here means Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh only. India which is projected to become home to the world's second largest Muslim population after Indonesia later this century is also a multicultural democracy, the world's largest.
Secondly, this immediately refutes the meme's narrative that Islam is some kind of monolithic entity. That anyone who subscribes to Islam is part of a fundamentalist sleeper cell, waiting to strike. The very fact that views vary, and vary predictably according to discernible, measurable, sociopolitical factors shows that these results are not dependent on religious affiliation above all.
You've probably seen these polls referenced before. Usually in the format of: "88% of Egyptians want to kill apostates..." which then tries to connect that 88% to all Muslims and also ignores the fact the question is actually: "Do you favor or oppose the following: the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion?". So even those in favor, whomever and wherever they may be, are responding on the assumption that this is a question about a law the government enacts and enforces and not simply Muslims running around killing anyone they suspect of "not being Muslim enough", which is the way it's portrayed as in these circulating memes (whose intention is to get Westerners to be suspicious of the Western Muslims living next door to them, even though there is a clear downward trend in Western countries in response to this question).
There is, however, a bit of confusion in how Pew portrays these results. Here's the graph everyone sees:
It references two questions, 79a and 92b. It says "Among Muslims who say sharia should be the law of the land, % who favor the death penalty...".
And here are the results for 79a:
And 92b:
Now compare these two with the actual bar graph in the released poll. They don't quite match up. The discrepancy is small for most, but the factor by which they're off becomes startling for the European and Central Asian countries. Those in favor of the death penalty in Albania is actually 2%. In Bosnia, 4%. In Kosovo, 3%. In the Russian Republics, 12%. In Central Asian countries (not sure why Turkey is counted here), it stays in single digits.
We can figure out why they did this. Obviously, you can't enact a piece of legislation from sharia law without making sharia the "law of the land" to begin with. So they seem to have used the number of people who wanted the death penalty for apostasy out of the number of people who wanted sharia, or so they've said.
But that's not mentioned in the copypastas which circulate these numbers, nor is the distinction clearly made for people viewing the poll. The consequence of this adjustment has been to balloon the percentages for Europe and Central Asia while hardly affecting the numbers from the other parts of the world. The end result is going to be more shocked Europeans who are thinking ten times as many Muslims in these Balkan countries want this law than actually do.
It also explains why the global median is just 28% despite rampant popularity in some countries in these results. We're not seeing the raw data here.
There can be no accusations of deceptive intent here, since what they did makes logical sense.
But a mistake can still be pointed out since their poll's respondents might not have been logical to begin with. It's easily apparent that some respondents could have counterintuitively voted for certain sharia laws while voting against sharia law itself or vice-versa. How is this the case? Spend more than thirty seconds in this subreddit filled with educated Western Muslims and you'll realize few know anything at all about Islamic law. As many Muslims are aware, Muslims in Muslim countries often know just as little, if anything about sharia, what it means, or its contents. Most Muslims aren't even aware that it varies by denomination. They have the same opinion of it that people who have no interaction with Islam do. That's because sharia is not taught in schools. One may argue that sharia law itself is advocated strongly, to the point of brainwashing in some religious schools, but the details regarding what sharia is and how it works are actually not discussed unless one enrolls in seminaries which produce actual religious jurists (an extremely tiny proportion of the population). This is also the prime enabler of fundamentalist sects claiming to be bringing sharia to the masses. Nobody in their vicinity knows enough to question them on their claims and digital condemnations from actual historians and religious scholars made from half a world away don't matter on the ground where these groups are.
Results from poll questions not shared in the final released PDF are available here and should also be looked at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/wiki/pewapril2013 (If you are interested in this poll specifically, you must also read this link, the discussion of this Pew poll from April 2013 continues there)
(Note the discrepancies that are scattered throughout... such as most people saying they do not use the internet, but also saying they use social media like Facebook... Or how many of the Muslims being cited as wanting extreme examples of Shari'ah law themselves are not religious nor do they understand the basic definitions of Shari'ah or even the basic articles of faith of the religion)
This leads us to the main point to consider when assessing why so much of the Muslim world wants Shari'ah despite not being that religious or even religiously literate.
From our older article on this:
Attitudes to Shari'ah
Polls on Muslim opinion on Shari'ah need to be taken with the caveat that Shari'ah, for many Muslims, means both the Islamic law which governs the daily aspect of their worship (how to pray, how to perform wudhu or ablution, etc) as well as the historical Shari'ah. The historical Shari'ah referring to the politico-legal framework of religious law in the Muslim world throughout Islam's history. For a Muslim the first thing they think of when they hear Shari'ah is usually the laws on prayer, inheritance, marriage, divorce, and finances. When a person whose only exposure to Islam or Muslims has been through the internet and American television hears the term they think of beheadings and stonings.
If one asks a Muslim what the punishment for apostasy is in Shari'ah law most Muslims, and even most non-Muslim historians, will acknowledge it was (and as far as most are concerned, still is) death. Because that's what it actually was. As for whether it still "should be" that, that's a separate question entirely and not the question most poll respondents are being asked or think they're being asked. Most Muslims are totally ignorant of Islamic history, like the fact that the Caliphate suspended this punishment in the mid-19th century. They are aware of the limitations of their own knowledge so they'd rather err on the side of caution on what they see as a question about Islamic history. For a Muslim it's totally inappropriate to issue fatawa or legal rulings in religious law without having authorization (ijazat) to do so. Being questioned on whether Shari'ah should be altered in any way falls under that. In that context the vast majority of Muslims will readily acknowledge that apostasy in Shari'ah was associated with the death penalty because this is as far as their sure knowledge goes. The history of Shari'ah beyond that knowledge of a few events more than a thousand years ago is pretty much totally unknown by most Muslims. They are unaware of the developments and decisions that took place in the academic discourse of 'ulema in, for example, the 19th century by the Ottoman Caliphate. Their knowledge extends to the history of the Prophet and the years following immediately after and no further.
A poll which asked Muslims "are you willing to execute all people who no longer believe in Islam including all your family members who have left the religion and probably a huge proportion of your country's population" without invoking mention of Shari'ah would be met with a resounding "No".
At the end of the day an apostasy punishment in a Shari'ah-based government today cannot resemble the historical Shari'ah law against apostasy if for no other reason than the extreme sectarianism present today. For example, according to half of Pakistan's Sunnis (who are most of its population), the other half are apostates and vice-versa (Deobandi vs. Barelwi). Does anyone seriously believe Pakistanis are ready to execute half of their country? Because there's no way Shari'ah itself would allow such a thing. For instance, during times of drought or famine there was legal precedent to suspend the hadd punishment for stealing (which is amputation). The intention of Shari'ah precludes mass punishments or convictions. The hadd punishments, as many Muslims are increasingly becoming cognizant of, are deterrents. The threat of them is what keeps people in line and that's why the burden of evidence is so high that they can only really be applied upon confession or in extreme circumstances which have at minimum multiple witnesses of high standing (the laws on that alone preclude the majority of today's 1.6 billion Muslims from qualifying as acceptable witnesses in a Shari'ah court). If applying a hadd punishment en masse results in mass harm coming to people and no change in the society, the conditions for the institution of that law do not exist in that place and time and they can not be instituted until that changes. A "fully Shari'ah" society is one which reaches the cultural stage where it not only makes sense to use Shari'ah but it's actually possible to implement it without violating other tenets within the principles of Islamic jurisprudence. When it is not possible to implement Shari'ah without violating Shari'ah (which includes pretty much most of the Muslim world today), then that's a time for rectifying the condition of the people and culture through teaching, education, and preaching. That's the unpleasant truth that Islamist extremists do not want to confront. They want their idea of Shari'ah now, not later, and are willing to commit mass slaughter and genocide in order to make that possible (by killing off the problematic people who don't neatly fit into their simplistic and juvenile worldview, anyone who doesn't agree 100% with them). This is also the image of Islam that Islamophobes want to present so they prefer media or "facts" which show Muslims acknowledging that apostasy was associated with capital punishment in Islamic law. This is made all the more easier by ambiguous polls some of which are run by very competent and established poll organizations in English speaking countries who, unfortunately, aren't as well established in the countries or languages where these polls are being conducted. At the end of the day actually knowing and talking to Muslims is the best way to see for yourself what Muslims actually believe.
For example, here's how to get an "extremist" result from any Muslim majority of almost any Muslim country which does not actually represent their true views:
Question 1) How is apostasy treated in Shari'ah?
Question 2) Do you agree with Shari'ah?
Question 3) How should apostasy be punished in law?
By Question 3, few Muslims who don't know that there is another position than their basic knowledge of ancient history will actually say anything other than the first position. They might even realize they are being forced into answering something they personally do not like but do not want to anger God by contradicting what they believe is His law. In my own life as a Muslim out of the thousands of individuals I've met probably no more than a dozen or two actually knew the historical fact about how apostasy was treated in actual Islamic law by actual Islamic scholars after the 9th century. It was only those who pursued some education in history who knew (and even non-Muslim historians would know that).
But a poll conducted by asking the following will come upon a completely different result:
Question 1) Do you want a law that executes anyone who is no longer a Muslim?
The same people would overwhelmingly say 'No'. The Muslim masses (ironically unlike the extremist minority) treat the legal institutions of their religion very seriously and that includes recognizing the bounds which they, as laypersons, may not overstep. Asking "do you want Islamic scholars to revisit the idea of whether apostasy in our day and age should be punished by death" would be met with a resounding Yes from all corners of the Muslim community. Even moreso if it was added as a "Question 4" to the first hypothetical poll above.
Coming on the heels of the previous question, if anyone's wondering how to get past the hubbub surrounding the issue of polling Muslims about whether they want Shari'ah law and understand what's really happening, then it's worth reading this important New York Times article written by Noah Feldman (a law professor at Harvard University and a senior adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16Shariah-t.html?_r=0
Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown writes in Misquoting Muhammad:
In the West, calls for the Shariah are viewed with confusion and fear, accompanied by media flashes of bearded rage and reviving receded memories of medieval inquisitions. Polls demonstrate that for Egyptians, conversely, the ‘Shariah’ is associated with notions of political, social and gender justice. In 2011, 80 to 87 percent of Egyptians polled wanted the Shariah to be a source of law in the country. Even amid the political chaos in early 2013, a full 58 percent of Egyptians still said that the country’s laws should strictly follow the Qur’an. Few Egyptians, even Islamist politicians, could explain exactly what that would mean. The place of the Shariah in their consciousness seems oddly similar to the Constitution for Americans; all venerate it, but few have read it in its entirety. No one knows what applying it always means.
Calls for the Shariah in Egypt and other Muslim countries emanate from a deep recess in people’s souls. The cry for the Shariah is a surrogate expression for a longing for dignity, independence, justice and control over one’s destiny in a world seemingly controlled by outsiders and outside agendas. It goes far back.
The politics of apostasy
[This section will later go into the section on apostasy in Islamic law]
In addition there are many Muslims who are intelligent enough to realize that when being asked a question in a poll such as this there is no immediacy or weight to their answer (it is meaningless in actuality, it has no consequences) so regardless of what they actually want or would actually do, will answer what they believe is the "right" answer. Even those Muslims who have no intention of supporting an apostasy law or would even protest against such a law were it ever actually applied (even if were mandated in current Islamic law) would support it in a poll because that's a bridge they'd rather cross when they come to it and they know they are not going to be coming to that bridge anytime soon so it's "safe" to just go with the general position that the unadulterated Islamic law of the first generations is the unequivocal model for all times. As they see it, it's their job to blindly uphold their allegiance to that model when questioned, and it is the job of scholars or 'ulema, of which they are not a part, to debate how to implement or whether to implement at all such laws. Even more telling would be a poll of actual Islamic scholars which asks whether the punishment for apostasy is enforceable right now. Either way the fact that the punishment actually is unenforceable today as it existed in the early era of Islam is something most Muslims can sense and which makes them feel free to pay lip service to it, because they know it's not actually possible today nor is it "coming" anytime soon to any mainstream interpretation of Shari'ah (or even to most extremist ones, since it's the fringe of the fringe, like ISIS, who actually try it). This can extend to even passing laws on apostasy but not enforcing them (i.e, Pakistan).
Even among the extremist fringes of the Muslim community the subject of anti-apostasy laws has become a famous red herring. It's a distraction, a political tactic. It's something you invoke to display your religiosity since it's seen as an extremely conservative opinion, but one that has no actual consequences nor can it (remember, even other extremist groups like Al-Qaeda have ostracized ISIS/ISIL... the majority of extremists and fundamentalists want to actually win people to their cause, destabilizing countries and promoting political conflicts helps this goal but killing the people you want to win over does not). The conservative self-styled preacher who wants to make a name for himself will start by preaching loudly on substanceless issues like this because they know it's not possible to institute or enforce this law (and it's comically absurd to talk about it in a non-Muslim country, it's even irrational in a Muslim country with despotic governments over which they have no influence). It's also why countries will even rush to discuss laws against apostasy (laws which they never intend to implement except for political reasons, in which case it becomes a convenient method of American-like legalized socio-political and literal/physical assassination of your own citizens while at the same time appearing to legitimize that country's "Islamicness" due to their upholding of what is seen as the most hardcore conservative "loyalist" law in Shari'ah) but will stay conspicuously silent on laws against usury, a far greater and more practical concern in the history of Islamic law. Blasphemy is the same way. These self-styled "fundamentalists" will ignore inconvenient issues which will impact their daily lives (such as financial issues, corruption, etc) and talk about political issues like blasphemy and apostasy since painting an "us versus them" picture of the world is a basic tactic of politics everywhere you go. Extremists such as these (which include most extremists among Western Muslims) are pretty much fake extremists who pose no danger in and of themselves (thus Western governments' letting them do whatever they want) but only to the extent that they radicalize others to potentially commit acts they themselves have no intention of doing. ISIS/ISIL for example, along with other "Salafi Jihadist" movements, are "real" extremists very motivated to institute laws against corruption, usury, and the like since these are seen as basic signs of being Islamically legitimate. Their ideological doctrines are quite easy to confront head-on, they won't take the weaseling, shape-shifting positions and arguments of the fake extremists. As far as Islamophobes are concerned, anyone who can be used to paint a negative picture of Islam is useful, real or fake. If fake, then they desperately want to believe they are real and portray them as such by giving them lots of media attention. The casual observer is going to be confronted by this variety of voices speaking on Islam and be confused.
Are 20% of Muslims "Islamists"?
Here is a good article on the Huffington Post which rebukes such claims and the dubious use of polls that attempt to justify them.
An excerpt:
On what basis can he say that 20% of Muslims are jihadis and Islamists? In a recent conversation with Zakaria, Harris explained that he arrived at this number as a "conservative estimate" after examining, among other things, a UNC Chapel Hill study conducted by Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi, which shows that between 1969 and 2009, Islamists won 15% of the vote in parliamentary elections throughout the Islamic world. As it turns out, the story Harris tells is astonishingly simplistic and incomplete and thus throws the 20% figure into doubt.
It's true that the UNC Chapel Hill study shows that the median Islamic-party performance over forty years came out to 15% of seats in parliamentary elections. But Harris leaves out all the other key findings of the study which explode the idea that supporters of Islamist parties are essentially hostile to human rights. For example, Kurzman and Naqvi argue that in the Muslim-majority countries where these parliamentary elections took place, voters had little enthusiasm for Islamic parties, and increased voter participation didn't increase the share of seats those parties secured.
Further, the majority of these parties captured less than 8% of the vote, and even where they rose to power as a promising alternative to secular tyranny, they were seldom able to hold on to that power. So Islamic parties that ran for elections in Yemen in 1993, Indonesia in 1999, and Tajikistan in 2000 achieved a short-lived breakthrough before declining in popularity. The authors assure us that "the more routine elections become, the worse Islamic parties do in them." Put another way, the freer the elections the worse the Islamists' performance.
Finally, Kurzman and Naqvi suggest, religiously oriented political parties in predominantly Muslim countries have gradually taken more and more liberal positions on democracy and human rights. And just because a Muslim has voted for an Islamic party, that doesn't mean she embraces the things which Harris associates with Islamism--martyrdom for Paradise, forcing the world to surrender to the authority of an Islamic state, or turning democracy against itself. For instance, in the 2005 parliamentary elections in Iraq, in which a majority of Shias voted for an alliance composed of Islamic parties, less than 25% of Shias said they favored a theocracy.
Why should a neutral observer of Muslim voters conclude that 20% of them are against human rights when so many of them have refused to give Islamist parties more than a small fraction of their vote, pushed them to the margins as their societies became more open, and resisted their illiberal policies even when they did vote Islamist? Harris' analysis of this study is rather disingenuous.
He also tries to buttress the claim that 20% of Muslims are Islamists by referencing irrelevant data. At one point during the Maher-Affleck showdown, he says that the 20% figure is conservative because a whopping 78% of British Muslims think that the Danish cartoonists should have been prosecuted. It's fine to note that this is an illiberal stance, but Harris doesn't stop at that. He uses the statistic to try to diagnose a frightening strain of Islamism in seemingly well-integrated Muslims. If 15% of them were already skating on thin ice by voting for Islamic parties or giving the wrong reply to a survey question, he suggests, Muslims with supposedly Islamist tendencies have become enemies of civilization by favoring consequences for those who insult religious sentiment.
But this brings us right back to the task of obtaining a complete picture of a person's political and religious convictions. In India, the world's largest secular democracy, it's a violation of the penal code to deliberately "outrage the religious feelings" of any group of citizens. It goes without saying that this law is incompatible with the principle of free speech.
But consider, as an example, a devout Hindu in India who loves democracy, applauds religious freedom, and abhors violence in the name of religion. Suppose he also believes that anybody who outrages the religious feelings of his particular Hindu community should be prosecuted under the law. Given that most of his political and religious convictions are likely to be admirable, we can't label him a right-wing Hindu nationalist, or judge him to be anti-liberal or averse to human rights just because some of his views are unpalatable. The same treatment should be applied to British Muslims, the majority of whom also see Britain as their country, oppose living apart from non-Muslims, prefer living under British law to living under shari'a, advocate the removal of religious leaders who support terrorism, and adore the Queen.
As for the relationship between religion and violence, as in the case of Muslim terrorists, one needs to keep in mind that "being religious" isn't necessarily what the violent people are so much as what they wish to be seen as. In the same way a politician in the United States is pretty much required to express a public belief in God and make his practice of religion very public (e.g, show they go to Church on Sundays with the family in photo ops) and how even Democrats have to engage in this, religion holds a similar lofty moral status in the heartlands of various nations across the planet. Terrorism, being a political act by definition, would therefore necessarily see fit to drape itself in the cloak of religion in an effort to motivate more people to its cause. Religion is an extremely powerful political tool because of its ability to inspire and motivate people and terrorists, like any other political group, are keen enough to note this and use it where necessary. Keep in mind many of the tactics used today (including suicide bombing with vests of explosives) by Islamist militants and terrorists were pioneered by atheistic Leftist revolutionary groups. The political violence in the Muslim world that has an anti-Israel and anti-Western flavor started off in the mid-20th century as Leftist and wearing the flag of Pan-Arabism or Arab Nationalism. This political ideology collapsed and one cloak was replaced with another and we saw the rise of Islamism in the 1970s (though its origins were much earlier in the 20th century, it didn't begin to gain a following among numerous different groups until then). All of these factors flatly contradict the simple "religious narrative" peddled by pundits like Harris and Maher.
What about the poll Donald Trump cited which claimed 25% of Muslims support violence?
revision by Logical1ty— ソースを見る