c. 2003 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ More and more Americans perceive Islam as a religion that encourages violence, according to a new study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
According to the survey, 44 percent of Americans feel Islam promotes violence among its followers _ up by 19 percentage points from March of last year.
These are “new concerns about Islam,” Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said Thursday (July 24) in releasing the poll. “Attitudes toward Islam are changing in light of world events and what people perceive to be problems in the world.” For example, he said, “we’ve just come out of a war in a Muslim country.”
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, said ongoing messages of what he called “Islamaphobic bigotry” sent by high-profile right-wing and evangelical leaders have ignited the change.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, individuals including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham have delivered a “constant drumbeat of anti-Muslim rhetoric,” Hooper said. “It’s a daily occurrence, unfortunately,” to which a minority of Americans are paying heed.
The rise in these negative attitudes regarding Muslims is occurring now, he said, because following Sept. 11, “I think we still had some reserves of tolerance that people were acting on.”
Those reserves have, for the most part, run dry, according to Hooper.
The Pew study found that most Americans hold favorable views of Muslim-Americans, but Hooper suggested that anti-Islamic actions abound in the United States.
“They (Pew researchers) should answer our phones,” he said.
Last week CAIR released an annual report on the status of Muslim civil rights, which stated that anti-Muslim incidents increased 15 percent last year.
Early Thursday morning, a cross was burned outside Al-Huda School in the Washington suburb of College Park, Md., a kindergarten through eighth-grade Islamic school with more than 300 students.
Rizwan Mowlana, executive director of CAIR’s Maryland chapter, who was serving as the school’s spokesman, said it was obvious that most Americans hold favorable views of Muslims, as proven by “the amount of people from other faiths who came together” for a Thursday news conference to denounce the cross burning.
“Obviously, most people are not hateful toward Islam,” Mowlana said. “The meaning of Islam is peace. If there are Muslims who think otherwise, they’re not Muslims. They’re just Muslims by name.”
The Pew study’s other findings included an apparent shift toward more liberal attitudes among Americans regarding such issues as gay marriage and the death penalty.
Since 1996 the number of Americans who are strongly opposed to gay marriage has dropped 11 percentage points, while there has been an increase in an equal number of points of those who favor gay marriage.
Likewise, over the same period of time, the number of Americans who strongly favor the death penalty has decreased 15 percentage points, while those opposed have gone up 11 percentage points.
E.J. Dionne Jr., co-chair of the Pew Forum and a Washington Post columnist, said “on questions of religion and morality, there’s a remarkable overlap on views between white evangelicals and African-Americans” despite the two groups’ generally opposite political views.
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