ONE in five British Muslims sympathises with jihadists, claimed a headline in the , a British tabloid. The number referred to a poll, taken in the wake of the attacks in Paris, which in fact suggested that 20% of Muslim respondents felt “some” or “a lot” of sympathy for “young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.” Critics of what they judged a deliberate misrepresentation of Muslim feelings towards Islamic State (IS) quickly set up a Twitter hashtag, #1in5Muslims, that generated a torrent of tweets attacking the Sun. A typical example: “#1in5Muslims have to hear this BS all the time.”
ONE in five British Muslims sympathises with jihadists, claimed a headline in the Sun, a British tabloid. The number referred to a poll, taken in the wake of the attacks in Paris, which in fact suggested that 20% of Muslim respondents felt “some” or “a lot” of sympathy for “young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.” Critics of what they judged a deliberate misrepresentation of Muslim feelings towards Islamic State (IS) quickly set up a Twitter hashtag, #1in5Muslims, that generated a torrent of tweets attacking the Sun. A typical example: “#1in5Muslims have to hear this BS all the time.”
So what do Muslims around the world really think of IS? The same poll showed that 71% of Muslim Britons have “no” sympathy for expatriate British fighters, a number not so different from the 77% of other Britons who felt that way in a survey conducted in March by the same polling firm, Survation. Other post-Paris polls of Muslims have yet to appear, but Pew, a research firm that publishes annual reports of attitudes in 10 Muslim-majority countries, concluded last spring that they were “overwhelmingly negative” towards IS. It found that 99% of Lebanese and 94% of Jordanians, for instance, held “very unfavourable” views of the group. Even in Saudi Arabia, a country whose Wahhabist creed is seen as a wellspring of jihadism, there is little indulgence: in a face-to-face poll in September sponsored by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think-tank, a scant 4% of Saudi respondents expressed any degree of support for the group.
Recent IS attacks in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and France are unlikely to have boosted the group’s popularity among Muslims. Like previous waves of jihadist terror they have provoked a bland chorus of condemnation and denial; government-salaried religious officials from Morocco to Indonesia say the group is a criminal gang and a blight on the Muslim faith. But this time deeper, introspective views are being aired more widely, and not only by secular critics of political Islam.
“Teachers and preachers and professors declare support for the bombings, and stay in their jobs, and then we wonder why youths go and join [IS],” laments a Twitter message from Ali al-Jifri, a popular Sufi leader in Abu Dhabi. Muhammad Habash, an exiled Syrian Islamic scholar, argues on the website All4Syria that IS is not a product of some conspiracy but the outcome of mainstream religious teaching: he notes that one of the group’s most effusive Facebook cheerleaders is a former professor at a Saudi university and the daughter of a noted Syrian preacher. Interviewed on SkyNews Arabia, Ibtihal al-Khatib, a Kuwaiti writer, contends that IS did not emerge from a void but from a heritage that Islamic thinkers refuse to re-examine: “We are paying a price for keeping silent for many years, but now that harm comes knocking on our doors we have to accept responsibility.”
Such anguished voices still fight an uphill battle. In Iran, the official media persist in asserting that IS is a Western fabrication. “They operate as a tool of the White House, the Élysée, Buckingham Palace, and Tel Aviv, with funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and their servants Turkey and Jordan, and carry out the plans of the US” trumpeted an editorial in the conservative Tehran daily Kayhan after the Paris attacks. The press in Egypt has espoused similar views. Pro-government outlets blamed the downing of a Russian airliner over Egypt, which was claimed by an IS affiliate, on a plot by the CIA and British intelligence in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. For its part, a Brotherhood website proposed a different theory: the culprit was Egyptian intelligence which, in consort with the Emirates, hoped to blow up the aircraft over Turkey so as to embarrass its pro-Islamist government.
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