There has been an unspoken media consensus since 11 September that we must avoid inflaming anti-Muslim opinion. From the Guardian to the Sun to the Telegraph, it has been stressed time and again that there is no division between British Muslims and the rest of us.
On 4 November, the Sunday Times shattered all that. “Divided loyalties on the home front,” it declared on its front page. “The first big survey of Britain’s two million Muslims since the start of the bombing campaign” had uncovered some disturbing results. “As many as four out of ten Muslims believe Bin Laden had reason to mount a war against the US”, and “a similar proportion” believe that Britons who fight alongside the Taliban are justified.
Pretty incendiary claims, at a time when violent crimes against Muslims are rising dramatically. Since the attack on the twin towers, a 19-year-old Muslim has had his head bashed in with a baseball bat, an Afghan taxi driver has been left paralysed by thugs in Twickenham, and a mosque in Bolton has fallen prey to a suspected arson attack.
So how did the Sunday Times collate its information? Did it conduct a scientific survey through a reputable firm such as Gallup or MORI, carefully weighted to represent all Muslim opinion? Er, no. A handful of Sunday Times reporters stood outside a few mosques one Friday night.
At least one of these reporters now admits he is “ashamed” that this haphazard, almost random survey was blown up into a major story. And Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, condemns this “load of rubbish”: “Sunday Times journalists questioned worshippers as they entered mosques. But only 20 per cent of British Muslims go to mosque for prayer.” This fifth are the most devout and therefore the most likely to sympathise with fundamentalism. “So where the Sunday Times write that there are 20 per cent who sympathise with Bin Laden, it is, using their figures, really only 4 per cent.”
The Sunday Times protests in its defence that it did not “only” go to mosques: a few of its reporters went to “heavily Muslim” areas. Yet those Muslims who have chosen to live in Islamic areas might be expected to be equally unrepresentative of the more moderate Muslim people spread across Britain’s urban areas. According to Richard Caseby, managing editor of the Sunday Times, the findings were vindicated later when an ICM poll of 500 Muslims found that 70 per cent of respondents didn’t think the US was justified in blaming Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network for the attacks of 11 September. These results “tally very neatly with what we’ve found”, Caseby told the New Statesman. However, while the Sunday Times found 40 per cent of its respondents believed that there was some justification for Bin Laden’s war against the US, only 15 per cent of those interviewed by ICM agreed. “You can’t compare apples and oranges,” Caseby retorted.
Those who did take part in the Sunday Times survey were not saying quite what the paper says they were. The front-page splash claimed that the Muslims approached said they “believe Bin Laden was justified in launching terrorist attacks”. No, they didn’t. They were asked if they “believe there is any justification” for his actions. As an elderly Muslim gentleman outside one of the Sunday Times-targeted mosques told me: “Of course there is a justification. That doesn’t mean I agree with it. It’s disgusting and wrong. But if somebody asked me if there was any justification, of course I’d say yes. He’s not insane. He does have reasons.” How many of the respondents reacted in a similar way to the Sunday Times‘s ambiguous question?
Bob Worcester, head of the polling firm MORI, was equally critical of the poll: “E-mails ricocheted around the world community of opinion pollsters when this was published, because of its lack of representativeness. It implied that they had sampled Muslim opinion. That’s like taking a poll outside Anglican churches and implying it represents the views of the British public. You had to read the fine print.”
Respondents were asked: “Which is more important to you: a) to be Muslim, or b) to be British?” The third option was listed as “don’t know or the same”, a much less clear form of words than a possible option “c) both are equally important to me”, or even a possible “d) why do I have to choose?” The very question echoed Norman Tebbit’s notorious “cricket test”: we’re asking whose bombings “they” cheer.
Sadly, racist thugs across Britain who heard the Sunday Times poll results on radio shows and read about them in the tabloids didn’t listen to qualms about polling methodology. The only message they heard was: these Pakis aren’t like us, and they support Bin Laden.
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