The claim
“We’re above 800 million Muslims who are radicalised – more than half the Muslims on earth. That’s not a minority… the myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority is just that: it’s a myth.”
Ben Shapiro
A video by the conservative American political pundit and author Ben Shapiro has attracted hundreds of thousands of internet views.
It was first posted last year but has been shared widely in the wake of the recent attacks in France, thanks to its controversial claim that the majority of the world’s Muslims are “radicalised”.
Is there any truth to this?
The analysis
The idea behind the video is pretty straightforward. Mr Shapiro looks at various opinion polls that have been carried out in Muslim-majority countries in recent years and highlights examples of widespread beliefs that he defines as “radical”.
He then extrapolates from the survey to the whole population of the country. For example he takes a statistic that 10 per cent of 1,000 people in a survey say they want Islamic Sharia law to be the official law of their country.
Ben Shapiro argues that if there are 100 million Muslims in that country that the sample of people in the survey accurately reflects the views of the whole population, so that’s 10 million people he claims are radicalised.
Mr Shapiro repeats this process with a number of Muslim countries and claims to reach a figure of more than 600 million radicalised Muslims.
Then he adds that “it seems fair to assume” that a similar proportion of people in a long list of other largely Muslim countries hold similar views, thus bringing the estimate to more than 800 million people – or more than half the world’s Muslims.
There are a number of issues we can raise with this.
What is a radical?
The video defines people as “radicalised Muslims” if they agree with a number of different views set out in various opinion polls.
These include: believing that “honour killings” of women can be justified; blaming western powers for 9/11; wanting cartoonists who depict the prophet Mohammed to be prosecuted; approving of Hamas; supporting Sharia law; having positive feelings about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; tolerating suicide bombings or attacks on civilians.
It’s debatable whether some of these attitudes, though unpalatable, are strictly evidence of a belief in radical Islam. We know, for example, that “honour killings” take place in other cultures, and that 9/11 conspiracism is not a purely Muslim phenomenon.
The reference to the cartoonists come from this 2006 NOP poll for Channel 4, in which 78 per cent of British Muslims thought that the publishers of Danish cartoons of the Islamic Prophet should be prosecuted.
Note that the word was “prosecuted” not beheaded. This appeared to indicate a wider belief among British Muslims that free speech should be curbed if it offends religious groups. Again – controversial, but not necessarily proof of “radicalisation”.
The reference to Hamas comes from the fact that the Palestinian Islamic group enjoys unusually high approval ratings in Jordan, where about half the population is of Palestinian descent.
Whether everyone who approves of the group pushing for Palestinian statehood also signs up to an extreme form of Islam is a moot point. After all, some Christian Palestinians voted for Hamas in the 2006 elections, evidently for political not religious reasons.
Sharia law
It’s perfectly true that some surveys carried out in Muslim countries show widespread support for the implementation of traditional Islamic law or Sharia, although the concept evidently meant different things to people in different countries, and there are huge regional differences.
Mr Shapiro repeatedly quotes polling carried out by the Pew Research Center, a respected US-based think-tank.
Public support for making Sharia the official law of the country varied from 99 per cent of people polled in Afghanistan to 8 per cent in Azerbaijan.
Of those Muslims who backed Sharia, support for extreme punishments like executing those who leave Islam ranged from 76 per cent in South Asia to 13 per cent in southern and eastern Europe.
Of course the Shapiro video only cites Muslim countries with very high support for the introduction of Islamic law, not those where most people oppose it.
On the other hand, while the Pew surveys covered 39 Muslim countries in 38,000 face-to-face interviews, do not include some countries where variations of Sharia are already incorporated into the legal system – notably Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Support for terrorism
A striking number of polls carried out in Muslim countries or immigrant populations after the 9/11 attacks did indeed show that significant minorities were prepared to express support for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
But an overview of Pew polls from 2003 shows how confidence in bin Laden was in decline across the Muslim world before his death in 2012.
And an opinion poll carried out in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and Lebanon. a year after the al-Qaeda leader’s death showed that generally negative feelings towards the terror network.
In any event, the way people say they feel about bin Laden and terrorism in these polls is often contradicted by their responses to other questions.
A poll carried out in Saudi Arabia in 2007 by the American NGO Terror Free Tomorrow found that 15 per cent of Saudis had a favourable view of Osama bin Laden.
But confusingly, only 4 per cent opposed the view that “the Saudi military should pursue al-Qaeda fighters”.
The group explained this by saying: “For most people, their professed support of terrorism/bin Laden can be more accurately characterized as a kind of ‘protest vote’ against current US foreign policies, not as a deeply held religious conviction or even an inherently anti-American or anti-Western view.”
The same poll found that attitudes to the US and terrorism were not fixed. In fact, the proportion of Saudis who were favourable to the US more than trebled in less than two years. There was evidence of a similarly dramatic change of heart in Indonesia in the mid-200s.
Support for violence
Most Muslims polled by Pew last year said that suicide bombings could “rarely” or “never” be justified against civilian targets “in order to defend Islam from its enemies”.
The detail is pretty interesting. Perhaps not surprisingly given the violent history of the region, Muslims in the Palestinian Territories were most likely to sanction the use of suicide bombings.
Some of the percentages here seem worrying, but of we would want to compare Muslim attitudes to violence to those of non-Muslims to put these beliefs in context.
In 2011 pollsters Gallup looked at global attitudes to violence and found that people who lived in Organisation of the Islamic Co-operation member states (that’s most Muslim-majority countries) were less likely than people in non-member states to say that attacks on civilians were sometimes justified.
Who were most likely to say that military attacks against civilians are sometimes justified? That would be residents of the United States, closely followed by Haiti and Israel.
The verdict
The first thing we have to decide is whether we trust surveys of perhaps a few thousand people to represent the views of tens of millions.
Opinion polls can never be completely accurate, though of course journalists, governments and social scientists use them all the time to take the temperature of public opinion.
What Ben Shapiro appears to have done is to take a selection of opinion poll findings that when put together represent a negative view of Muslims.
This is not to gloss over the fact that some polls do show that very illiberal values and concepts can be prevalent in some Muslim countries. Pew surveys show that intolerant attitudes to homosexuality, women’s rights and other religions – among other things – are widespread in some parts of the Islamic world.
They also show that there is a huge diversity of views among different Muslim countries and that people’s beliefs can change dramatically in a few years. A fact that is not seemingly reflected in the Ben Shapiro video.
“intolerant attitudes to homosexuality, women’s rights and other religions – among other things – are widespread in some parts of the” USA / UK
But those in the U.S. don’t advocate their death.
You clearly haven’t read youtube comments.
I’ll keep this shorter than it needs to be because I doubt this’ll get published – this article has been up 18 hours, no comments yet. Prove me wrong.
I’d love to buy Patrick a copy of Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” or “More Complicated than That”, or perhaps a couple of the Freakonomics books.
In the rush to prove Ben Shapiro wrong, a number of fallacies and strawmen have been built in this article.
Let’s start with something simpler;
Quote: “Pew surveys show that intolerant attitudes to homosexuality, women’s rights and other religions – among other things – are widespread in some parts of the Islamic world”
How about closer to home – I’ve got 20 or bookmarks of large UK Muslim attitudes surveys by “proper” polling organizations like Gallup, ICM etc, all reported by news outlets like you and The Guardian. I won’t post them all, but what do we make of the 2009 Gallup survey of over 1000 that showed that NOT ONE of those Muslims surveyed thought homosexuality was acceptable?
Then there’s the odd questioning of the word “radical”. Is slicing off the genitalia of baby girls not “radical”?
Quote: “The first thing we have to decide is whether we trust surveys of perhaps a few thousand people to represent the views of tens of millions.”
C’mon, you know full well if this was a UKIP attitudes survey showing 2% of council candidates held racist views, you’d be all over this like a rash.
And it would be totally disingenuous to pretend there’s such a thing as “Sharia Light”, but you’ve managed it.
Then there are the weird non-sequiturs: you explain how the “support” for Bin Laden was indeed high, but then note that “confidence” in him had followed. Apple, meet pear.
Quote: “there is a huge diversity of views among different Muslim countries and that people’s beliefs can change dramatically in a few years”.
OK, let’s have 10 polls in 10 countries and find out how those beliefs have changed since, say 2010.
I don’t think you’d like what you’d find…
Acts like Paris, 7/7, 9/11, Bali, Glasgow, Mumbai, Peshawar, Chechnya and so on don’t happen in a vacuum.
Quote: “Opinion polls can never be completely accurate”.
Indeed. But I don’t need opinion polls to tell me about attitudes.
“A protest by 10,000 Muslims outside the offices of Google in London is just the first in an orchestrated attempt to force the company to remove an anti-Islamic film from website YouTube in Britain.Thousands had travelled from as far afield as Glasgow to take part in the demonstration, ahead of a planned million-strong march in Hyde Park in coming weeks.”
How many Muslims rallied against the shooting of Malala Yousafzai?
And yes, we had a few boilerplate statements from UK Imams condemning the Paris attacks, but again, where is the outrage for these evils done in the name of Islam?
And you really don’t need to look very far at all on Twitter and Facebook to find overt support for the Paris attacks.
These facts alone tell me more about current attitudes than any surveys from 2006 can do.
Thanks for the comment Alan. Just two things: the point about female genital mutilation is not that it isn’t “radical” but that it isn’t necessarily Islamic – we know that it takes place in many Christian and animist cultures. I entirely accept your point that “if this was a UKIP attitudes survey showing 2% of council candidates held racist views, you’d be all over this like a rash”. That’s why I wrote: “of course journalists, governments and social scientists use them all the time to take the temperature of public opinion”.
Very well put Alan, I would have been far less eloquent. The C4 article is nothing more than the usual apologists approach to Islam, no doubt the BBC would say the same.
Well with they logic,we must persecute the Christians for mass genocide aswell. Your logic that islammis responsible for terrorism created by American war profiteer interests,miss not only ignorant but it is Venemous
Myou are blaming a society and telling them “it’s your fault” for us coming in and murdering millions of innocent men women and children, that is terrorist apologist scum. ISIS is as Islamic as Hitler is Christian, and blaming all muslimsmfor a small percentage of Muslims who condone terrorism,mid ignoring the millions that cry out against it, for every terrorist that does.
Your logic would make Christianity evil, since we funded these terrorists, and before American militarization and imperialism, Islam was much more peaceful, not perfect, but not in complete havok. Now look at it. There is a war between several terrorist groups, including American imperialistic ideas to replace the Kings Jewels. Don’t be as ignorant and cowardly as to excuse evil under some ignorant mentality of “well if we can’t hear you, your not loud enough”. Your hipocrisy is overwhelming.
Again, lots of passionate argument against views that were never expressed.
“ISIS is as Islamic as Hitler is Christian”. Well, setting aside the fact that Hitler was raised a catholic and was happy to present himself as a believer to support his ends, why do you think ISIS isn’t Islamic?
I’ve asked former muslims about this and they tell me that ISIS does represent a perfectly viable interpretation of Islam. Of course there are other interpretations of Islam, but to claim that ISIS’s interpretation is entirely incorrect is at best ignorant and at worst deceitful. It is certainly highly selective of the facts. It is the sort of thing that religious faith would drive a person to do in defence of the indefensible.
Opinion polls are a matter of opinion – not fact.
I’m with the new Pope. If you insult someone’s mother, it’s understandable that they may react angrily. It’s a useful illustration of human reactions.
Insulting other people’s deeply held religious or cultural beliefs may also make those victims angry – and even make aggressive threats. But that doesn’t mean they’ll take out their anger in violent attacks.
It’s good practice to be respectful of other peoples’ beliefs. Isn’t it?
“Opinion polls are a matter of opinion – not fact.”
The article is about people’s opinions, so what is your point? Are you saying opinions don’t matter? In many muslims’ opinions, women are subordinate to men. I consider those opinions important and worrying.
“It’s good practice to be respectful of other peoples’ beliefs. Isn’t it?”
It may be a reasonable starting principle, but it would be foolish to consider it inviolate. If people’s religion leads them to act in ways we consider harmful, should we not challenge those beliefs? Should we say to a potential murderer of abortion doctors in the USA ‘we respect your religious beliefs, but please don’t act on them’? Should we say to a muslim in the UK ‘we respect your beliefs about the Prophet, but please don’t send your 13-year old daughter to be married to a stranger in Pakistan’?
Matt, you don’t have to “respect” anyone’s beliefs. You don’t have to tell them you “respect” their beliefs when you don’t. There’s nothing you can do about people’s beliefs. Their actions, however, are another story.
If those beliefs lead them to harm others, then yes, I think we have a right to speak up and/or take action ourselves.
In 1850 Karl Marx spoke of “the rule of the bourgeois democrats” carrying within it “the seeds of its own destruction”. He was speaking of a post-revolutionary situation, but I get the feeling that since the end of World War II the UK has drifted into something very similar.
So what constitutes the seeds of destruction for our own collection of borgeois democrats? It’s called ‘Political Correctness’.
Oh don’t argue with me, or tell me I’m wrong. I may very well be wrong. Or I may be right. But this is one issue that can’t be settled by any kind of debate. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens. All the same, if I were a younger man I’d be straight down to William Hill’s to see what odds I could get on the Islamic Republic of Great Britain becoming a reality within the next 30 years.
Matthew, great name. Have you ever read Private Eye’s ‘From The Noticeboards’? I thoroughly recommend it.
On purchase of said slurpy, the douchebag ragheads at our local chevron were happy as hell watching the destruction iñ Belgium… Should we kill them?I wouldn’t want to commit a hate crime… I hate this pollitics, some day the correct pollitics will be under attack …the one with the most bullets wins
“What Ben Shapiro appears to have done is to take a selection of opinion poll findings that when put together represent a negative view of Muslims.”
“They also show that there is a huge diversity of views among different Muslim countries and that people’s beliefs can change dramatically in a few years. A fact that is not seemingly reflected in the Ben Shapiro video.”
o.k lets widen it out a bit here’s a lot more polls on the issue.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/opinion-polls.htm
No doubt “fact checker” would have come across this much more extensive list of polls on the subject as they are on the same google search page for Ben Shapiros ,
but for some reason they chose not to , why ? given their assessment of Ben’s polls being cherry picked. .
channel 4 seem to be more concerned with social engineering/conditioning than actual news or for that matter reality
the very reason large demographics are migrating away from this type of heavy handed reactionary media.
I’m still waiting for the answer to the question – How many radicalized Muslims are there in the world?
Typical flanking of the issues when someone doesn’t want to answer the question. Tear down the other sides argument but don’t bring one of your own.
Thanks for playing!
Read the article again. It answers the question much more comprehensively and sensibly than the Daily Mail would. But it remains difficult for Ch 4 and other intelligent media outlets to admit that muslim attitudes are generally awful. You’ll find it difficult to find a muslim who will admit that gays should have equal rights or that its OK to wipe your arse with your right hand, or that dogs are wonderful creatures. But the the opinions of Daily Mail readers are hardly any more palatable. It’s, to a large extent, relative.
If the question is effectively how many Muslims believe that gays or cartoonists should be punished for doing what comes naturally, I think the answer is…
“a very large minority”. But it is probably a minority.
Does that answer your question?
Listen wikepedia never really does me wrong: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_attitudes_towards_terrorism
This article is trying very hard to undo facts. i try my best to educate myself however I always keep finding that there are truth to alot we hear about
Just more apologist propaganda. The surveys show that attitudes do not concur with our relatively liberal society but no one wants to deal with that, like this article they excuse it away. Maybe honour killings aren’t a sign of radical Islam per se but they are born from the same patriarchal beliefs engendered by it. For anyone who is against FGM and has stood up for LGBT rights, it’s time for some honesty, it’s just a pity that has to come from the conservative right since once powerful liberal critical thinking is now so flaccid.
It’s not apologist propoganda, it’s evidence and facts, that disprove the biased statistics demonizing a religion for terrorists created by a Christian entity. I’m a Christian and I shouldn’t take accountability for Hitlers genocide in the name of Catholicism or the native genocide in the name of Christianity, and innocent Muslims shouldn’t for being bombed and murdered by American troops, and the mercenaries we fund that create mass terrorist organizations. That’s a cowardly thing to do, and blaming a religion for entities created out of our imperialism is not only ignorant, but it’s wrong. I would never say someone is “collateral damage” that type of logic is “well hey your dad shouldn’t have gone to work on the day of 9/11”, no you don’t justify evil done by an imperialistic government and its war profiteers, simply by petty fogging and scapegoating. Come on man.
Crikey, that is lots of straw man arguments and responses to questions that weren’t asked. You should be a politician!
Your narrative is an incomplete one . please have a look at these figures and tell me
if it still fit’s ,sorry but 1-4 Turks and 50% of Indonesians supporting “honor” killing and the execution (religiously fascist murder)has
nothing to do with the war In Iraq no matter how much you may want it to.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/articles/opinion-polls.aspx
Yes the polls that suggest the followers of Vlad the impaler are “o.k” with
impaling his enemies have been wildly misrepresented
Pew Research (2013): Large majorities of Muslims favor Sharia. Among those who do, stoning women for adultery is favored by 89% in Pakistanis, 85% in Afghanistan, 81% in Egypt, 67% in Jordan, ~50% in ‘moderate’ Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, 58% in Iraq, 44% in Tunisia, 29% in Turkey, and 26% in Russia.
http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/Muslim/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf
Pew Research (2013): Honor killing the woman for sex outside of marriage is favored over honor killing the man in almost every Islamic country. Over half of Muslims surveyed believed that honor killings over sex were at least partially justified.
http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/Muslim/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf
yeh try and spin this
About 7% of Germans were Nazis in the 1940s. How’d that work out for 6 million Jews? The fact that there are actually about 5% of Muslims who are radicals is not the problem. The problem is that there are millions of Muslims and 5% means hundreds of thousands of radicalized people who want other people dead simply for living. If you don’t find that problematic, YOU are a problem as well.
Yep, this is the crux of it. I’m going to throw some numbers out. They will be guesstimates, so anyone can challenge them, but I defy anyone to demonstrate that they are wrong in a significant way:
50% of US christians believe abortion is a sin
90% of UK muslims believe drawing cartoons of Mohammed is a sin
30% of US christians believe the bible is the literal word of god
80% of UK muslims believe the quran is the literal word of god
30% of US christians believe homosexuality is a sin
80% of UK muslims believe homosexuality is a sin
25% of US christians believe abortion doctors should be punished
78% of UK muslims believe Mohammed cartoonists should be punished
10% of US christians believe ‘non-believers’ will burn in hell for eternity
50% of UK muslims believe ‘non-believers’ will burn in hell for eternity
0.000001% of US christians would personally kill an abortion doctor
0.001% of UK muslims would personally kill a Mohammed cartoonist
I would feel uncomfortable about living in the US, partly because there are a significant number of christian extremists who are prepared to commit murder for their beliefs. Is it wrong to be concerned that in the UK, by what I consider a very conservative estimate, muslims are 1,000 times more likely to do the same?
And note that I have deliberately chosen the abortion and cartoon examples. Disgusting as the pro-life extremists are, at least they can claim to be defending human life. The Islamic extremists I am referring to aren’t defending anything except a 1,400 year-old myth and its absolute right to rule everyone’s lives.
You are really throwing out percentages with no source whatsoever. That is just disappointing.
Yup, just as disappointing as the lazy liberals (and yes, I’m a liberal, and quite lazy, but not THAT lazy) who tell us that Islam is a religion of peace. I thought I’d redress the balance marginally.
But despite my laziness, there is a serious argument here for those who can be bothered to engage a modicum of intelligent enquiry. So didn’t you read my first paragraph, or was it just convenient to ignore it?
I said my numbers were broad estimates and invited anyone to challenge them. Which ones do you think we’re significantly wrong?
Purely looking at the Maths, if you believed that only 10% of Muslims were radical, that still meant 160 million radicals in the world who believed that infidels should die and despised Western values. A sobering thought, I think.
For what it’s worth, Ana, I think what you describe applies to only about 1%, so only around 10m people want to kill us all ?. However, I’d guesstimate that around 30% believe all gays should be killed, it is ok to ‘lightly’ beat women, and other “moderate” ? stuff like that. So a not insignificant 300 million people that don’t exactly share Western liberal values. And I deliberately use the words ‘liberal’ AND ‘Western’. I fully appreciate not all non-Muslims in the West are liberal minded, but in the 21st century a damn large majority are, even if some are confused by what the word ‘liberal’ means and mistakenly consider it perjorative.
Always worth watching (again and again!)
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-worlds-muslims-radicalised/19899