Politics

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".

Mashable has a story about Israel-based Blue Security's new product Collactive.

Blue Security are best known for their aggressive anti-spam service which they had to shutdown after the spammers hit back at them and took out Six Apart's Typepad blogging platform as collateral damage.

They have now created a new web app called Collactive that allows users to easily "game" social news features by enabling you to co-ordinate large groups of friends/supports to skew online results. It does this by letting you send out "All Points Bulletins" to supporters urging them to take some sort of action on social sites like Digg, YouTube, Reddit, BBC News, etc. The action the end-user needs to take ranges from just viewing a story to voting on a story (or "burying it") or to e-mail it in order to promote it to the most e-mailed stories list.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a while - people have been e-mailing lists saying "Hey! BBC has a poll so please go and vote for side X" but a tool like Collactive makes it so much more "organised".

Interestingly, they offer an "enterprise version" as well...I can see lobby groups and net activists making heavy use of this sort of tool in order to promote their cause or to give "their side of the story" more prominence. This has serious trust implications - we somewhat trusted social media systems because our peers recommended what they thought was interesting or honest. This sort of organised gaming used to be the domain of SEO's out to make a buck. Now that politics is involved the stakes are so much higher than just a few clicks or back links.

So out goes the "wisdom of the crowd" and in comes "information warfare" Web 2.0 style...

Last week Turkey banned access to video sharing site YouTube because of a video..

...which has now been taken down, showing Greeks criticizing Turkey and insulting Turkey’s national flag and founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

As expected, some were quick to blame this block on "Muslims" which makes absolutely no sense as the ban was a response to an insult to the non other than Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk was the founder of "modern" Turkey and the man who tried to purge Turkey of its Ottoman and Islamic character by introducing a tradition which I call "Extremist Secularism". From replacing the Arabic script to abolishing religious law and education, Atatürk tried to wish away a long and rich period of history in which the Turks led the Islamic Empire. Given the character of Turkey and the extent to which Islam is ingrained in the fabric of the society, Atatürk's purge was the equivalent of a national lobotomy.

Trying to impose an ideology that is foreign to a nation can only be done by force, intimidation and coercion. And this is why the form of secularism in Turkey manifests itself in this sort of extremism and intolerance. Anything that remotely challenges the idea of secularism and the icons of secularism (in this case Atatürk himself) becomes a threat to the status quo and thus needs to be rooted out.

Take for example another ridiculous ban in Turkey - that of disallowing headscarfs in universities and in Parliament. To everyone (except possibly the French) this seems like a ridiculous measure - I mean, we're meant to embrace diversity aren't we?

Extremism in any form is bad news - even if the alternative to it is "not secularism". Trying to enforce "secularism above all other" will lead to something that looks uglier than fascism...