More on Populus' Poll of Muslims
British people are more positive towards Islam than British Muslims think
Every time a pollster carries out a survey of the opinions of British Muslims and I report it here, someone in the comments section will inevitably look at a finding saying that x% of British Muslims sympathise with terrorism and ask how we can judge that without knowing what population of non-Muslims would condone terrorism in some shape of form. It's a good point. The full tables of Populus' poll of British Muslims, now up on their website , shows that actually they did do quite an extensive poll of the population as a whole alongside the survey of British Muslims. While sadly it didn't include the questions on whether there could ever be justification for suicide bombings, there were some other interesting findings about their attitudes to one another.
As one might expect, British people as a whole are more supportive of integration than British Muslims - 74% of the general population think that the Muslim community should do more to integrate, only 64% of Muslims do. On one particular issue of contention, school uniforms, there is a sharp contrast - 76% of British Muslims think pupils should have the right to wear religious dress regardless of uniform policy, only 42% of the wider population of Britain agree.
Also unsurprisingly, there is more support for specific measures to combat Islamic extremism amongst the general population than amongst British Muslims who would be affected by such measures. The infiltration of Islamic organisations by the intelligence services to gather information has a net approval rating of only +1 amongst Muslims, but +39 amongst the general population. Monitoring what clerics preach at Mosques has an approval rating of +1 amongst Muslims, but +28 amongst the wider population. On whether the police should view Muslims with more suspicion because the 7/7 bombers were Muslim, there is a net approval rating of -65 amongst Muslims (81% said it was unacceptable, 16% acceptable), and a net approval rating of -23 amongst the wider population.
Asked about attitudes towards public conduct, British Muslims were not vastly more puritanical than the population as a whole. 57% of Muslims thought that visible drunkeness in a public place was offensive, but then so did 54% of the general population. On questions about women wearing low cut tops and public displays of affection between couples, British Muslims were more likely to find them offensive, but not hugely so. The largest contrast was attitudes towards public displays of affection between people of the same sex - 44% of British Muslims said these were offensive, compared to 30% of the wider population.
The question I found most interesting was about what people thought of Islam.
31% of respondents in the survey of the wider population thought that Islam was a religion that encouraged more violence than other religions, 45% disagreed. Populus then asked Muslim respondents not whether they thought that Islam was a more violent religion, but whether they thought that non-Muslims in Britain thought that it was - 56% said they thought they did, 36% disagreed. In other words, the majority of British Muslims think that non-Muslims in Britain have a more negative opinion of Islam than the majority of people actually do.
