Science Talk

Ramabriga · Guest

Billion Muslims and West Want Dialogue, Coexistence
Dalia Mogahed & Ahmed Younis

The Gallup Organization — a world leader in global opinion research — has recently self-funded
a World Poll which gathers opinion data in the areas of leadership, law and order,
food/shelter, work, economics, health, well-being, citizen engagement from the peoples of 130
countries.

The World Poll gathers opinions around the world annually following Gallup’s guiding principles
of independence and integrity.

The Coexist Foundation, a UK-registered charity, has a mission to promote better understanding
between members of the Abrahamic faiths and also their relations with other religions and the
secular world through education, dialogue and research.

As part of the World Poll, Gallup gathers data from the Muslim World and the West about
people’s beliefs about education, religion, culture and democracy.

The Coexist Foundation has developed a not-for-profit relationship with the Gallup
Organization. Together, these two entities share the belief that the accurate collection and
dissemination of this data to key opinion leaders will lead to a better understanding between
people of different faiths and cultures and consequently better relations.

Gallup and the Coexist Foundation will be pursuing collaborating partners in order to advance
the facilitation and dissemination of this information. The first of these collaborating
partners is the Coexistence Trust, a UK-based organization of parliamentarians, whose mission
is to provide senior Muslim and Jewish political leaders with information to combat
Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, worldwide.

Can Conflict Be Avoided?

How do Muslims around the world view relations between the West and the Muslim world? Do they
see cooperation or conflict? Where there are problems, who do they think is at fault? Are they
optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Though majority of Muslim populations around the world have a great deal of pessimism about the
state of the relationship, they also believe that violent conflict between the West and the
Muslim world can be avoided. Though many Muslims believe the West does not respect them, they
still believe greater interaction with the West is more a benefit than a threat. Americans and
Canadians also believe greater interaction with the Muslim world is a benefit. Though both
sides wish for better relations, both sides lack trust in the other’s good intentions.

Palestinians are among the most likely to say Muslim-West relations are worsening, reflecting
the acute conflicts currently raging in the Palestinian territories and underscoring the
importance of their resolution to the state of the dialogue.

With tensions between Iran and the United States intensifying, one might expect the Iranian
public to be among the most pessimistic about the future of Muslim-West relations. It is
therefore worth noting the relative ambivalence among the Iranian public on this question.
Iranians may be drawing a distinction between disliked US policies directed at their country
and the overall state of the Muslim-West relationship, especially because some US actions in
the region are considered positive by many Iranians. Hostile to Saddam Hussein’s regime,
Iranians have held less negative opinions of the invasion of Iraq than have residents of other
Muslim majority countries, for example.

Moreover, Iran’s relatively favorable trade relationship with some European nations may make
Iranians less prone to regarding the United States as a proxy for the West. The majority of
Iranians also believe that tension between the West and the Muslim world is due to political,
not underlying cultural or religious factors, which may make them less pessimistic than one
might expect about Muslim-West relations as a whole.

The Reality-Perception Gap

Among both Muslim majority and non-Muslim majority nations, the proportion that say they think
the “other side” is committed to better relations rarely rises above a minority. However,
majority of residents in nations around the world say that better interaction between the
Muslim and Western worlds is important to them.

Three in four US residents say the Muslim world is not committed to improving relations with
the West; an identical percentage of Palestinians attribute the same apathy to the West. At
least half of respondents in Italy (58 percent), Denmark (52 percent) and Spain (50 percent)
agree that the Muslim world is not committed to improving relations.

Israelis represent a notable exception; almost two-thirds (64 percent) believe the Muslim world
is committed to improvement.

Among the majority-Muslim nations surveyed, we see roughly the same pattern; majorities in
every Middle Eastern country studied believe the West is not committed to better relations with
the Muslim world, while respondents in majority-Muslim Asian countries are about evenly split.

Despite low levels of confidence in the commitment of those on the “other side,” majority in
most nations surveyed in both the Muslim and Western worlds say that the quality of
interactions between the two is important to them. In some Western countries, including
Denmark, the United States, Belgium, Italy, Canada and Spain, and Israel, the percentage who
say the issue is important to them is even higher than the percentage who give the Western
world credit for commitment to improved relations.

In other words, some respondents believe their personal level of concern is higher than that of
their own leadership, not to mention the leadership of the “other side.”

In the Middle East, Iranians are most likely to say the interaction between the West and the
Muslim world is important, at 70 percent, followed by Turks at 64 percent. The US-imposed
sanctions, as well as the threat of a US-led attack, make better relations with the West a
vital priority for Iranians. Turkey’s geographic and economic ties with Europe, as well as its
bid for EU membership, make improving relations an imperative there as well.

The implication is that residents in these countries are most likely to see potential for
positive or negative change in their individual and regional realities stemming from the
actions and policies of the West.

Respect

Though most Muslims say the Muslim world respects the West, many of them feel that the West
does not respect the Muslim world.

In 2005, Gallup asked residents of several Muslim majority countries to explain in their own
words what the West could do to improve relations with the Muslim world. The most frequent
response, from countries as different as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, can be summed up with this
statement: “Show greater respect for Islam and stop regarding Muslims as inferior.”

Many Muslim populations believe that the Western world lacks respect for the Muslim world. The
vast majority of Palestinians (84 percent) and Egyptians (80 percent) say this is the case,
while the numbers from Turkey (68 percent), Saudi Arabia (67 percent) and Iran (62 percent) are
only somewhat lower.

These findings illustrate a consistent sense of being disrespected across nations that have
very different economic, political and geostrategic relationships with the West.

In contrast, most residents in all but one majority-Muslim nation believe that the Muslim world
respects the Western world. Two-thirds of respondents in Indonesia (65 percent), the country
with the world’s largest Muslim population, believe that the Muslim world respects the West;
similar numbers are seen in Saudi Arabia (72 percent), the Palestinian Territories (69 percent)
and Egypt (62 percent). On this question, as on others within the index, non-Arab nations of
the Middle East diverge from their Arab neighbors. In Iran the percentage who say the Muslim
world respects the West is somewhat lower at 52 percent, while Turkey is the only country in
which this figure represents less than a majority, at 45 percent.

However, while most respondents in almost all Muslim-majority countries say the Muslim world
respects the Western world, majorities of those in Western countries (and Israel) disagree.
Eighty-two percent of Americans and 73 percent of Israelis believe that the Muslim world does
not respect the West. Similarly high figures are seen in Spain (63 percent), site of the Madrid
terrorist bombing of 2004, Denmark (69 percent), where the international firestorm over the
cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) originated in 2005, and the Netherlands (55
percent), where the 2004 killing of a Dutch filmmaker by a young Muslim has sparked controversy.

However, the index reveals that even in the nations studied with no obvious conflicts or
significant dysfunction with local Muslim minority communities — such as Italy (70 percent),
Canada (67 percent) and Sweden (54 percent) — high percentages of respondents feel the West is
disrespected.

If residents of Muslim majority countries mostly say their society respects the West, why do
Westerners feel disrespected? A possible explanation is that Westerners may conflate negative
opinion of the United States common in the Muslim world with a rejection of the West and its
values as a whole.

This perception is intensified by cultural firestorms such as the Danish cartoon controversy,
which leave some Westerners feeling that Muslims do not respect “Western values” of free
speech, and therefore do not respect the West. For example, nearly 1 in 2 Danes say they
consider Islam to be incompatible with democracy, and a slight majority said in 2006 that they
believed the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was right to print the controversial cartoon as a
demonstration of free speech. While most Americans (61 percent) said they believed it was
irresponsible to print the cartoons, the same percentage blamed Muslims’ intolerance to other
points of view rather than Western disrespect for Islam for the controversy. In other words,
many Westerners regarded the reaction of some Muslims to the printing of the cartoon as
disrespectful to Western values, just as many Muslims saw the wide distribution of the
caricature as an assault on their tradition.

Data suggest, however, that Muslims’ unfavorable views of the United States are more often
driven by resentment of its perceived policies than by rejection of its values, and that the
diverse reactions to the Danish cartoons observed across the Muslim world were much more
complex than simply a rejection of free speech. Often incited by local factors and aggravated
by longstanding seemingly unrelated political grievances with Western powers, the actions of a
violent and vocal minority in response to the caricature do not represent populations who
oppose liberty.

In reality, the vast majority of Muslims support the value of free speech in principle.
Ninety-four percent of Egyptians and 92 percent of Iranians, for example, say they would
guarantee the right of free speech if they were asked to draft a constitution for a new
country. Many Muslim-world respondents also cite freedom of expression as among the qualities
of the West that they most admire.

And yet, the Danish cartoon was clearly offensive to many Muslims who felt it violated the
boundaries of free speech. Some Europeans agreed; 30 percent of the German public, 45 percent
French and a majority (57 percent) of the British public said in 2007 that printing the cartoon
was not protected by freedom of speech.

Though Europeans were split about the acceptability of printing the Danish cartoon, there was
broad consensus rejecting other expressions; strong majorities said that newspapers should not
be allowed to print racial slurs, child pornography or jokes about the holocaust. For example,
more than 8 out of 10 of the German public said that racial slurs and jokes about the holocaust
were not protected by free speech.

These trends suggest that while Western and Muslim communities both claim free speech as a
value, each society creates what it considers are appropriate limits to this freedom —
sometimes differing even among societies who share a common faith.

Discriminating between a more manageable difference in cultural definitions on the one hand and
an insurmountable clash of basic values on the other is essential to moving the dialogue forward.

Greater Interaction

Though some might expect the United States, Israel and the Middle East to be more likely than
Europe to feel threatened by the “other”, the opposite is the case. In the United States (70
percent), Canada (72 percent) and Israel (56 percent) majorities say that greater interaction
is a benefit. Similarly, residents of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Palestinian Territories,
Malaysia, Turkey and Iran were more likely to feel that greater interaction between Muslim and
Western worlds is a benefit than a threat.

These findings are supported by a 2005-2006 Gallup World Poll which found that Americans
favored greater cultural interaction as a way to improve relations with the Muslim world. The
same study revealed that the two statements that Muslim-world residents most frequently
associate with the Muslim world were: 1) “Attachment to their spiritual and moral values is
crucial to progress” and 2) “Eager to have better relations with the West” suggesting that many
Muslims do not regard religious devotion and cross-cultural cooperation as mutually exclusive.

(Dalia Mogahed and Ahmed Younis are respectively executive director of and senior analyst at
the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. With John L. Esposito, Mogahed co-authored “Who Speaks
for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think”)

** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

Dave Smith · Guest

Some of them probably do, but for too many of them that means the rest of us adapting to them.
Perhaps they should convince the more radical elements within their religion. It has been more than
500 years since Christians in western Europe rid their lands of Moslems and even longer since they
battled them in the middle east.

Ramabriga wrote: