What Muslims think

Do you have sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria? It’s a hard question to answer: perhaps you’d wonder who the ‘fighters’ were. Or whether the ‘young Muslims’ were 14-year-old girls, groomed by fanatics to be jihadi brides. But if you answer ‘yes’, you may be surprised to find yourself described as having ‘sympathy for jihadis’. Such are the perils awaiting British Muslims who respond to opinion poll questions.

The Sun this week found itself in a row about a front-page headline: 1 IN 5 BRIT MUSLIMS’ SYMPATHY FOR JIHADIS. The poll, by Survation, had asked a rather different question: what level of ‘sympathy’ the respondents had ‘with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria’. A small proportion — 5 per cent — had ‘a lot of sympathy’, and 15 per cent had ‘some sympathy’. But sympathy lay with the young Brits, not the Isis jihadis — and there is a difference.

It’s the latest of many polls since 9/11 which ask Muslims if they have sympathy for the devil. Typically, these polls declare that a significant minority does. Even if just 5 per cent are found to entertain crazy ideas, it’s then argued, that amounts to 130,000 people. But what is seldom asked is: what about the non-Muslims? Given that you’ll find a significant minority agreeing with any crazy proposition — Elvis still being alive, light sabers being real — how much weight should we attach to the polls which purport to identify embryonic British jihadism?

In fact, Survation put exactly the same question to non-Muslims in March — and found that one in six had ‘sympathy’ with young Brits going to join fighters in Syria. Not very different from the Muslims.