Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The University of Maryland issued a report this summer on a Critical Issues Poll that found an alarming rise in bigotry directed at Muslims and Muslim Americans during the past year, which seems certainly connected to the October 17 attack on Israel by Hamas in Gaza and the subsequent Israeli total war on Gaza’s civilians. Principal investigator Shibley Telhami explains the significance of the opinion poll at Brookings.
Here are my two cents. Americans generally know nothing to speak of about Islam. I mean, almost zero. But a majority of them know that they do not like the Islamic religion, at least in the post-Cold War period. Actually Islam and Muslims in general were quite popular with Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, when they were mainly fighting godless Communism and appreciated having allies. In all the Muslim world, only little South Yemen went Communist, whereas a lot of Christian-majority countries did. The Eisenhower administration hoped to build a Muslim bloc to oppose the Soviet Union and Ike funded better railway links with Mecca because he wanted to encourage Muslims to go on pilgrimage and be pious and reject dialectical materialism. That’s right, the US used to promote sharia law.
Nowadays a lot of Americans say that “Islam” is incompatible with American values. Personally, I think they say this because they like the idea of being the sole superpower and don’t approve of any group that is hard to dominate. There has been a lot of opposition to American dominance in Latin America, Africa, and Asia — even Europe — but somehow that flies under the radar. Muslims overthrowing the Shah in Iran, a close US ally, somehow really ticked them off. And of course the main guerrilla groups opposing the US in Iraq and Afghanistan were religiously-driven or at least -identified, though secular groups were more important in Iraq than was generally recognized.
This perception of Muslims as generally oppositional, however, doesn’t comport with reality. Muslim-majority countries account for one NATO ally pledged to defend the US (Turkey) and for 8 of the 18 formally designated major non-NATO allies of the US — Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, and Tunisia. Even without the designation, the US has close security ties to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. Of the non-NATO allies only one, Argentina, is in Latin America. The Muslims are more tightly allied to the US than is the Western Hemisphere!
Americans like Muslims slightly better than they like Islam. Go figure.
In 2015, at the height of ISIL, the so-called ‘Islamic State’ group, which had taken over northern Iraq and eastern Syria and blew up Paris, only 48% of Americans said they were favorable toward Muslims. Actually that wasn’t bad given the circumstances, of nearly a decade and a half of the Bush “War on Terror” and invasions of lots of Muslim countries, the citizens of some of which fought back.
Possibly because Donald J. Trump was so mean to them, Muslims rose in the opinions of Americans after 2017. In 2021 and 2022 they reached a 78% favorability rating. That’s actually fantastic. It means most Americans really thought well of Muslims by then.
“Muslim Americans,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024.
But by February of this year, Muslims had lost 11 points and were down to 67% favorability. Although 80% of Muslims in the world are not Arabs, and the majority of Arabs are not religious fundamentalists, Hamas seems to have managed to cast a large shadow on the community. As for Islam, it had gone up to 57% favorability in 2021, but plummeted back down to 48% this year (i.e. back down to what it was in 2015 at the height of ISIL). Although, remember, most Americans couldn’t tell you for the life of them what Islam is.
Telhami notes that Muslims especially lost favorability with Democrats this year, and implies that President Joe Biden’s rhetoric is likely to blame. Biden has shown not the least sympathy for the plight of millions of Palestinian civilians and has often repeated false propaganda against them, to the point that the State Department’s dissent channel slammed him roundly as a major source of disinformation on the Gaza situation.
But it isn’t only Muslims. Many Americans at least perceived that there was “a lot” more prejudice this year against Jewish Americans (29%). Presumably this is because Jewish Americans are seen to be unfairly tarred with the brush of the far right, extremist Israeli government and its total war on Gaza civilians.
Some 22% thought there was “a lot” more prejudice against Muslim Americans in 2024. The perception of a substantial increase in prejudice toward other minorities, including Blacks and Hispanics, was much lower, in the range of 13%- 16%.
Paradoxically, although Americans had a high opinion of Muslims in 2022, they didn’t think Muslim Americans were of much account. Only a little over a fourth of Americans thought Muslims strengthen the fabric of US society. That’s terrible. And very unfair, since Muslim Americans produce physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors and others who demonstrably strengthen US society. When Trump needed a czar to head up the joint US government-Moderna moonshot to produce a COVID vaccine, he turned to Moncef Slaoui, a Moroccan-born Muslim, one of the world’s top immunologists.
On the other hand, I wonder if Americans didn’t object to the tenor of the question, since only 41% thought white people strengthen the fabric of US society. I suspect a lot of the 58% didn’t so much disrespect white contributions to the country as they just didn’t think an ethnic approach to the problem of the American fabric was very useful. Still, the 28% figure for Muslim Americans is substantially lower.
Most Americans in 2022 were all right with a Protestant, Catholic or Jewish president, with only about 11% or 12% opposed. On the other hand, many had qualms about a Mormon, Buddhist, Hindu or Agnostic one, with over 20% opposed in each case. But about a third really did not want an atheist or Muslim president (32% opposed, rising to over 50% among Republicans).
Ironically, they may well get a Hindu-ish president, since Kamala Harris seems to practice a syncretic mix of her mother’s Hinduism and her father’s Jamaican Christianity.
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