Here‘s a really interesting write up on a study carried out by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future.
Muslim Americans: Faith, Freedom, and the Future is based on a nationally representative study of Muslim American perceptions and the views of other major religious groups in the U.S. The report compares trends on Americans’ life evaluations over the past three years as well as probes Muslim and non-Muslim perceptions on issues of national identity, terrorism, foreign policy, religious discrimination, and political participation.
Its findings included that as a group Muslim Americans are the most opposed to military attacks on civilians, as well as individuals or small groups of people targeting and killing civilians. For both questions, Muslim Americans were the group who had the highest % saying that in both cases it was never justified.
I’m also impressed to see that the group comprising the areligious come second with regards to saying military attacks on civilians are never justified.
Perplexing enough here is the amount of Mormon swing voters, the majority of which voted that the military attacking and killing civilians was sometimes justified in the previous question. Whereas, when they were asked whether individuals or small groups were ever justified in targeting civilians they were the second highest group to vote that it was never justified. So it’s the majority of them believe it’s only ok to kill civilians if you’re doing it via the military….? Not to that the areligious group was again among the highest voting that such action was never justified.
I wonder though whether American Muslims, who are assumably relatively recent immigrants, are an appropriate sample of your average Muslim in the world. It would be interesting to see this same study repeated for different countries, as well as averaged over all countries surveyed. I have a feeling the results would be somewhat different, at least with regards to the religious groups involved. I don’t think I’d be drawing a long bow when believing that the areligious, no matter what their nationality or race, would overwhelmingly vote never justified for both these questions.
