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COMMENTARY
July 16, 2005
Polling Islam
Pew Research have just published a 17-country poll of public attitudes touching on Islamic extremism. The survey included six predominantly Muslim countries (Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia). It repeated questions from another survey done two years ago, from which we deduce that the popularity of Osama bin Laden among Muslims is receding.This, at least, is the media headline: “Support for Terror Wanes Among Muslim Publics.” In fact, the survey shows support for Osama has grown in Pakistan and Jordan, fallen elsewhere. The question why is left unanswered. Is it because Muslims are repelled by Osama’s behaviour? (In which case why did his popularity spike after 9/11?) Or, is it because he is now widely perceived as a loser? Support, in principle, for suicide bombing has also declined in the surveyed Muslim world -- say the news headlines. But from a very high level. And again we must ask, are the Muslims against suicide bombing because it has proved tactically counter-productive, or because they are morally opposed to blowing up civilians? Do they genuinely sympathize with the victims? Since the chief targets of suicide bombings have continued to be Jews, it is noteworthy that overwhelming majorities in the Muslim countries continue to hold what the pollsters call “unfavourable” views of Jews. The “favourables” reach a high of 18 per cent in semi-Westernized Turkey; zeroes were scored in Jordan and Lebanon. The Pew survey shows that Muslims take a better view of Christians, but not by much. Only in Lebanon were those “favourables” very high, and that country is nearly half Christian. Contrast this with Western attitudes towards Muslims. Only in the Netherlands did more than half the respondents say they took an “unfavourable” view of them (51 per cent). The United States and the English-speaking countries continue well-disposed to Muslims, and France, too, remained strongly “favourable”. But across continental Europe, their image seems to be sinking, for one reason or another. In the main, it would be fair to generalize, that “we like them a whole lot more than they like us”. Depending on the observer, we may attribute this either to cynicism on their side, or naivete on ours, but the fact itself should be assimilated: that our idea of “tolerance” is -- our idea. And while support for suicide bombings is happily declining (the media emphasis), the truth is that, overall, something like one-third of all the Muslims surveyed continued to approve of such tactics, if they advanced Islamic interests, including a big majority in Pakistan. While it is impossible to abstract numbers for Muslim respondents living in the West, other polls have consistently shown they tend to take more radical positions than Muslims in Islamic countries. The standard “liberal” view is that perhaps one per cent of Muslims are fanatics, and therefore potential terrorists. I do think the proportion likely to become suicide bombers is quite low: for regardless of religion, most human beings instinctively avoid getting killed. But it is clear enough that the proportion of Muslims who do, in principle, support terrorism against the West, is not low. The Pew Research questions were fairly coy; I should like to see responses to more direct questions. Yet it would be hard to ask them directly, for even the question, “Do you think terrorism is morally wrong?” can be fielded coyly, and usually is. There would have to be many supplementary questions to close all the “depends what you mean by terrorism” escape routes. And I doubt any polling firm would ask such questions, because we don’t want to know the answers. Now, a disclaimer is always necessary, for any poll that is conducted across national, linguistic, cultural, and especially religious frontiers. The same question may take on a much different flavour, if asked in English or in Arabic; in a city or a village; before or after a major news event; if to a Christian or a Muslim, etc. But this is the whole point. We assume, glibly (the way President Bush does sometimes), that people from non-Western cultures share our “basic values” -- life, liberty, happiness, and so forth. We forget that these (mostly unexamined) attitudes were implanted in the West through two millennia of Christian teaching; and would take centuries to root out. Our values were once common currency in the Middle East, too, for most of that region was once Christian. But in the 14 centuries since the Islamic conquest, what we take for granted was in fact rooted out. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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