American Muslims : A happy bunch (who “sometimes” like to blow stuff up?)

The Pew Research Center has just released it's findings from a survey of American Muslims. It's findings? Muslim Americans are

...largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.

It's an interesting survey and well worth the read. The findings shouldn't shock most Muslims brought up in the "West" (or South Africa) and are probably inline with a random sample of Muslims from Johannesburg (or from my wonderfully diverse team).

Some highlights:

• Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live.
• Large majority of Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off in this society....And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.
• Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims in the U.S. were born elsewhere... Among native-born Muslims, roughly half are African American (20% of U.S. Muslims overall), many of whom are converts to Islam.
• ...the Pew Research Center estimates the total population of Muslims in the United States at 2.35 million.
• Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries....
• A majority of Muslim Americans (53%) say it has become more difficult to be a Muslim in the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks....
• Relatively few Muslim Americans believe the U.S.-led war on terror is a sincere effort to reduce terrorism...

The answer to the question "Can suicide bombings of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?" seems to be causing a small stir since 13% of respondents aged 18-29 answered "sometimes". Marc Lync provides some well needed perspective to this question/answer and I'm enjoying the resulting comments. Glenn Greenwald also weighs in with a great piece on Salon.com (you may need to click through an annoying ad to get to it) where he argues that

The reality, though, is that it is almost impossible to conduct a poll and not have a sizable portion of the respondents agree to almost everything. And in particular, with regard to the specific question of whether it is justifiable to launch violent attacks aimed deliberately at civilians, the percentage of American Muslims who believe in such attacks pales in comparison to the percentage of Americans generally who believe that such attacks are justifiable.

He provides examples from other polls showing large numbers of Americans supporting attacks on civilians and that 2/3 of US troops support torture to extract information and that most of them would not report collegues who had mistreated civilians.

Of course, whenever quoting these sorts of numbers from polls/surveys, it's always worthwhile remembering the famous Disraeli quote..."There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".