What Muslims Think

Gallup has recently finished the most complete survey of Muslim public opinion that has ever been conducted. The poll took six years (from 2001-2007), and involved thousands of interviews with Muslims from more than 40 different countries. The results are a vindication of what many observers have been saying for a long time:

About 93 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews. In majority Muslim countries, overwhelming majorities said religion was a very important part of their lives — 99 percent in Indonesia, 98 percent in Egypt, 95 percent in Pakistan.

But only seven percent of the billion Muslims surveyed — the radicals — condoned the attacks on the United States in 2001, the poll showed. Moderate Muslims interviewed for the poll condemned the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington because innocent lives were lost and civilians killed. (AFP)

Unfortunately, some papers have tried to manipulate the findings with headlines like, “Seven percent of Muslims condoned 9/11 attacks: poll.” Obviously, that’s not the point. That such an overwhelming majority of Muslims have flatly rejected terrorism is what’s worth highlighting — not the other way around. It’s also interesting to note the poll’s findings of broad Muslim desire for democracy. Although this fact is often obscured in the haze of Islam paranoia, previous polls have similarly shown that Muslims crave representative government and that they admire many Western freedoms — although they certainly don’t want them imposed through the barrel of a gun. None of this should be particularly surprising, but the comprehensiveness of the study nicely puts to rest many of the falsehoods about Muslims that we’ve heard repeatedly over the past few years.