The tea leaves of scholarship

I wonder about the experts, sometimes.

I just stumbled across a Guardian column by Karen Armstrong, titled "An inability to tolerate Islam contradicts Western values."

Armstrong, according to Wikipedia, is a former nun and is now considered a religious scholar, anointed enough to participate in the Jesus Seminar experiment in truth by voting.

It's normal for editors to add the title to a column; after getting halfway through I suspected that maybe the editor had missed the point. Turns out, as revealed by the ninth paragraph, that Armstrong was referring to the objection Brits raised to the construction of a mosque in east London. To Armstrong, that constituted a repudiation of traditional Western values. The objections to the mosque, wrote Armstrong, sent a "grim message" to Muslims. Apparently the type of "grim message" that will exacerbate terrorism.

Gallup found there was as yet no blind hatred of the west in Muslim countries; only 8% of respondents condoned the 9/11 atrocities. But this could change if the extremists persuade the young that the west is bent on the destruction of their religion. When Gallup asked what the west could do to improve relations, most Muslims replied unhesitatingly that western countries must show greater respect for Islam, placing this ahead of economic aid and non-interference in their domestic affairs. Our inability to tolerate Islam not only contradicts our western values; it could also become a major security risk.
(the Guardian)

I'd like to respectfully disagree with Armstrong's analysis, except that the craziness of it bids me to offer it scant respect.

First, 8% of respondents condoning the 9/11 attacks is not "no blind hatred of the West." It's almost one out of 10 with some indication of blind hatred for the West. If one in ten Worshipers of the Almighty Pop-Up Toaster support barbaric acts of terrorism, you're right to be concerned if they want to put a Toasty Tabernacle in your neighborhood--with one caveat. If the WAPUTs in your town repudiate acts of terrorism and actively work to mend the damage that the extremists are wreaking on their reputation, then you'd be intolerant not to welcome them in your neighborhood.

Armstrong appears to buy into the notion that the poll result accurately reflects one of the principal root causes of terrorism--lack of respect for Islam. But the events of the past two weeks appear to undermine that thesis.

In Pakistan, as I've been noting in a series of posts, extremist Muslims were using a major mosque as a base of operations. When the nominally secular government (listed as a federal republic in the CIA World Fact Book) quashed the movement in the Red Mosque, extremist Muslim populations in the north of Pakistan began mounting suicide bombing attacks against their fellow Muslims. And that, unfortunately, is just the corner of the hole in Armstrong's thesis. Conflict between differing Islamic sects has been a dominant aspect of Islamic culture since the Sunni-Shia divide. And in Pakistan it's largely Sunni versus Sunni, though the radicals will abduct and kill Christians readily enough, as has apparently been the case with about 20 South Koreans in Pakistan this past week.

Would Armstrong have us believe that Muslims do not respect Islam?

As if Islam's own history of violence involving Muslim against Muslim weren't enough, there's another expansive genie that isn't going to get stuffed back into the bottle very easily: Cultural imperialism.

The West exports its culture. And we do a very good job of it. As it happens, the culture that we export is largely appalling to the Islamic mind. Let's face it: in a culture where women are expected to cover their bodies in an all-encompassing burka, even the 1970s version of "Charlie's Angels" is pretty shocking. Radical Islamists realize that open trade results in a type of war on their way of life. It is for that reason that Islamic leaders wish to restrict cultural interaction with the West, and part of the reason why radical Islamists want to bring the West down in smoking ruin.

The former we can work with, and most of us can respect it. The latter is a big problem.

Muslims who want respect for their religion will see the problem in their midst and do something about it. Those who tacitly approve do much to justify anti-Islamic skepticism.
***

About the Gallup poll cited by Armstrong

It's usually smart to put polls in their context. It helps in figuring out what the numbers mean (and what they don't).

The National Council on Public Polls listed four caveats with the Gallup poll (and the media coverage given the poll).

News stories based on the Gallup poll reported results in the aggregate without regard to the population of the countries they represent. Kuwait, with less than 2 million Muslims, was treated the same as Indonesia, which has over 200 million Muslims. The "aggregate" quoted in the media was actually the average for the countries surveyed regardless of the size of their populations.
(read the other three)

In other words, the results were not weighted in order to give a more accurate picture.
The NCPP also noted that Gallup did not randomize its poll in terms of choosing the countries in which the poll was conducted, and the survey did not exclude Muslims from answering the questions. Beyond that, the organization warned about additional problems stemming from the manner in which the media may have handled the data when presenting it to the general public.

In short, that 8 percent figure doesn't mean much. It could be much higher (or lower, FTM) worldwide.

The problem would be particularly worrisome if there were big differences in the results across the nine countries. And there were, at least on some key questions. For example, 36 percent of those interviewed in Kuwait said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were morally justifiable, compared to only 4 percent in Indonesia.
(the Washington Post)

Note: Armstrong may have referred to more than one Gallup poll in her column, but the recent poll was particular to U.K. Muslims, while any information extrapolated to apply to Islam generally was much more likely to have come from a 2002 Gallup poll. In the latter, there was a question regarding the justification of the 9/11 attacks. It isn't clear that any similar question occurred in the U.K. poll.