Pew Survey: US Muslims 'Mainstream?'
Tue, May 22, 2007 at 8:50:25 am PDT
A new Pew Research survey on Muslims in the United States is not all bad news: Report Summary: Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream.
Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live.
A large majority of Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off in this society. Fully 71% agree that most people who want to get ahead in the U.S. can make it if they are willing to work hard.
The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.
However, if you look at it the other way around, that last statistic isn’t very comforting at all; nearly a third of Muslim Americans do see a conflict with living in a modern society. In the context of other survey results (see below), it’s rather ominous.
One positive result of the survey is to thoroughly debunk the Islamic advocacy groups’ vastly inflated population claims; although CAIR is notorious for adding another million Muslims to their estimates every year, a realistic estimate is far less than CAIR’s current claim of 7 million:
Based on data from this survey, along with available Census Bureau data on immigrants’ nativity and nationality, the Pew Research Center estimates the total population of Muslims in the United States at 2.35 million.
And although Pew Research headlines their survey as showing Muslims are “middle class and mostly mainstream,” it’s that “mostly” part that’s a problem. Potentially a big problem.
Because there are also some highly disturbing results.
Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified. Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world.
A majority of Muslim Americans (53%) say it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most also believe that the government “singles out” Muslims for increased surveillance and monitoring.
Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism, and many doubt that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Just 40% of Muslim Americans say groups of Arabs carried out those attacks.
