Author: Robert Satloff
Publication: The Weekly Standard
Date: May 12, 2008
URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/066chpzg.asp
Gallup says only 7 percent of the world's
Muslims are political radicals. Yet 36 percent think the 9/11 attacks were
in some way justified.
On the inside back cover of books published
by Gallup Press there is the following breathtaking statement:
Gallup Press exists to educate and inform
the people who govern, manage, teach and lead the world's six billion citizens.
Each book meets Gallup's requirements of integrity, trust and independence
and is based on a Gallup-approved science and research.
Don't be distracted by the bad grammar. Focus
instead on Gallup's "requirements of integrity, trust and independence."
Thanks to a remarkable admission by a coauthor of Gallup's new bestseller
Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, we are now able
to know precisely what Gallup's "requirements" really are.
Who Speaks for Islam? is written by John L.
Esposito, founding director of Georgetown University's Prince Alwaleed bin
Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and Dalia Mogahed, executive
director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. As the authors state at
the outset, the book's goal is to "democratize the debate" about
a potential clash between Western and Muslim civilizations by shedding light
on the "actual views of everyday Muslims"--especially the "silenced
majority" whose views Esposito and Mogahed argue are lost in the din
about terrorism, extremism, and Islamofascism.
This majority, they contend, are just like
us. They pray like Americans, dream of professional advancement like Americans,
delight in technology like Americans, celebrate democracy like Americans,
and cherish the ideal of women's equality like Americans. In fact, the authors
write, "everyday Muslims" are so similar to ordinary Americans that
"conflict between the Muslim and
Western communities is far from inevitable."
Similar arguments have been made before; some
of this is true, some is rubbish, much is irrelevant. The real debate about
the "clash of civilizations" is about whether a determined element
of radical Muslims could, like the Bolsheviks, take control of their societies
and lead them into conflict with the West. The question often revolves around
a disputed data point: Of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, how many are radicals?
If the number is relatively small, then the fear of a clash is inflated; if
the number is relatively large, then the nightmare might not be so outlandish
after all.
What gives Who Speaks for Islam? its aura
of credibility is that its answers are allegedly based on hard data, not taxi-driver
anecdotes from a quick visit to Cairo. The book draws on a mammoth, six-year
effort to poll and interview tens of thousands of Muslims in more than 35
countries with Muslim majorities or substantial minorities. The polling sample,
Esposito and Mogahed claim, represents "more than 90 percent of the world's
1.3 billion Muslims." To back up the claim, the book bears the name of
the gold-standard of American polling firms, Gallup.
The answer to that all-important question,
the authors say, is 7 percent. That is the percentage of Muslims who told
pollsters that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were "completely"
justified and who said they view the United States unfavorably--the double-barreled
litmus test devised by Esposito and Mogahed to determine who is radical and
who isn't.
The authors don't actually call even these
people "radicals," however; the term they use is "politically
radicalized," which implies that someone else is responsible for turning
these otherwise ordinary Muslims into bin Laden sympathizers. By contrast,
Muslims who said the 9/11 attacks were "not justified" they term
"moderates."
More than half the book is an effort to distinguish
the 7 percent of extremist Muslims from the "9 out of 10," as they
say, who are moderates and then to focus our collective efforts on reaching
out to the fringe element. With remarkable exactitude, they argue: "If
the 7 percent (91 million) of the politically radicalized continue to feel
politically dominated, occupied and disrespected, the West will have little,
if any, chance of changing their minds." There is no need to worry about
the 93 percent because, as Esposito and Mogahed have already argued, they
are just like us.
There is much here to criticize. The not-so-hidden
purpose of this book is to blur any difference between average Muslims around
the world and average Americans, and the authors rise to the occasion at every
turn. Take the very definition of "Islam." From Karen Armstrong
to Bernard Lewis--and that's a pretty broad range--virtually every scholar
of note (and many who aren't) has translated the term "Islam" as
"submission to God." But "submission" evidently sounds
off-putting to the American ear, so Esposito and Mogahed offer a different,
more melodious translation--"a strong commitment to God"--that has
a ring to it of everything but accuracy.
Or take the authors' cavalier attitude to
the word "many." How many is many? Thirty percent of the vote won't
get Hillary Clinton nominated for president, but it would be a lot if the
subject were how many Americans cheat on their taxes or beat their wives.
At the very least, one might expect a book based on polling data to be filled
with numbers. This one isn't. Instead, page after page of Who Speaks for Islam?
contains such useless and unsourced references as "many respondents cite"
this or "many Muslims see" that.
Or take the authors' apparent indifference
to facts. Twice, for example, they cite as convincing evidence for their argument
poll data from "the ten most populous majority Muslim countries,"
which they then list as including Jordan and Lebanon, tiny states that don't
even rank in the top 25 of Muslim majority countries. Twice they say their
10 specially polled countries collectively comprise 80 percent of the world
Muslim population; in fact, the figure is barely 60 percent.
These problems would not matter much if the
book gave readers the opportunity to review the poll data on which Esposito
and Mogahed base their judgments. Alas, that is not the case. Neither the
text nor the appendix includes the full data to a single question from any
survey taken by Gallup over the entire six-year period of its World Poll initiative.
We, the readers, either have to pay more than $20,000 to Gallup to gain access
to its proprietary research or have to rely on the good faith of the authors.
Or, more accurately, we have to rely on Gallup's good name--the "integrity,
trust and independence" cited above. Public comments by Mogahed at a
luncheon I hosted at the Washington Institute on April 17 show exactly what
that is worth.
Here's the context: As the event was about
to close, Mogahed was pressed to explain the book's central claim that radicals
constitute 7 percent of the world's Muslim population. A questioner focused
on the critical distinction between the 7 percent of respondents who said
the 9/11 attacks were "completely justified" and the other 93 percent.
How many of those 93 percent, Mogahed was asked, actually answered that the
attacks were "partly," "somewhat," or even "largely"
justified? Were those people truly moderates?
In her answer, transcribed below, Mogahed
refers in pollster code to numbers ascribed to the five possible answers to
the poll question about justifying 9/11. Although she and Esposito never discuss
the details of this question in their book, they did expound on them in a
2006 article in Foreign Policy magazine, which described a five-point scale
in which "Ones" are respondents who said 9/11 was "totally
unjustified" and "Fives" those who said the attacks were "completely
justified."
In that article, she and Esposito wrote: "Respondents
who said 9/11 was justified (4 or 5 on the same scale) are classified as radical."
In the book they wrote two years later, they redefined "radical"
to comprise a much smaller group--only the Fives. But in her luncheon remarks,
Mogahed admitted that many of the "moderates" she and Esposito celebrated
really aren't so moderate after all.
MOGAHED: I can't off the top of my head [recall
the data], but we are going to be putting some of those findings in our [updated]
book and our website.
To clarify a couple of things about the book--the
book is not a hard-covered polling report. The book is a book about the modern
Muslim world that used its polling to inform its analysis. So that's important:
It's meant for a general audience, and it's not meant to be a polling report.
One very important reason why is because Gallup is selling subscriptions to
its data. We are a for-profit company; we are not Pew. We are Gallup. So this
isn't about . . . it was not meant for the data to be free since we paid $20
million to collect [the data] . . . that we paid all on our own. So just to
clarify that . . .
So, how did we come up with the word "politically
radicalized" that we unfortunately used in the book? Here's why: because
people who were Fives, people who said 9/11 was justified, looked distinctly
different from the Fours . . . At first, before we had enough data to do sort
of a cluster analysis, we lumped the Fours and Fives together because that
was our best judgment.
QUESTIONER: And what percent was that?
MOGAHED: I seriously don't remember but I
think it was in the range of 7 to 8 percent [actually, 6.5 percent].
QUESTIONER: So it's seven Fours and seven
Fives?
MOGAHED: Yes, we lumped these two and did
our analysis. When we had enough data to really see when things broke away,
here's what we found: Fives looked very different from the Fours, and Ones
through Fours looked similar. [Mogahed then explained that, on another question,
concerning suicide bombing, respondents who said 9/11 was only partially justified
clustered with those who said it wasn't justified at all.] And so the Fives
looked very different; they broke, they clustered away, and Ones through Fours
clustered together. And that is how we decided to break them apart and decided
how we were to define "politically radicalized" for our research.
Yes, we can say that a Four is not that moderate
. . . I don't know. . . .You are writing a book, you are trying to come up
with terminology people can understand. . . . You know, maybe it wasn't the
most technically accurate way of doing this, but this is how we made our cluster-based
analysis.
So, there it is--the smoking gun. Mogahed
publicly admitted they knew certain people weren't moderates but they still
termed them so. She and Esposito cooked the books and dumbed down the text.
Apparently, by the authors' own test, there are not 91 million radicals in
Muslim societies but almost twice that number. They must have shrieked in
horror to find their original estimate on the high side of assessments made
by scholars, such as Daniel Pipes, whom Esposito routinely denounces as Islamophobes.
To paraphrase Mogahed, maybe it wasn't the most technically accurate way of
doing this, but their neat solution seems to have been to redefine 78 million
people off the rolls of radicals.
The cover-up is even worse. The full data
from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is
another 23.1 percent of respondents--300 million Muslims--who told pollsters
the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don't utter a
word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.
And then there is the more fundamental fraud
of using the 9/11 question as the measure of "who is a radical."
Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for
a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing,
and opposes equal rights for women but does not "completely" justify
9/11 is . . . "moderate."
Could the smart people at Gallup really believe
this? Regardless, they should immediately release all the data associated
with their world poll and open all the files and archives of their Center
for Muslim Studies to independent inspection. With a dose of transparency
and a dollop of humility, the data just might teach something useful to the
world's six billion citizens.
- Robert Satloff is the executive director
of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
