By Bonnie James
ATTITUDES towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam in the US are troubling and have not been improving over the last few years, Arab-American academic Dr Samer S Shehata has stated, quoting results of a number of opinion polls conducted in the US. “A high percentage of Americans hold negative attitudes toward Islam, and many Americans believe that Islam - more than other religions - encourages violence,” he told Gulf Times.
An Assistant Professor of Arab Politics at the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies in the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Dr Shehata had given a presentation on Thursday at the inaugural symposium of SFS in Qatar.
“Americans are generally more willing to impose extra security measures on Arab and Muslim-Americans and limit Arab and Muslim immigration into the US,” he explained.
The academic pointed out that although survey data about American attitudes towards Arabs, Muslims and Islam before September 11, 2001, is not readily available, one could reasonably assume that there has been a significant increase in negative feelings toward these groups and religion since 9/11.
According to the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, attitudes toward Islam have been holding relatively stable during the last three years with about 33-36% of respondents saying they hold unfavourable attitudes towards Islam compared with 38-40% who hold favourable attitudes toward the religion. Pew is a highly respected and non-partisan research organisation that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
Other polling has produced slightly more troubling findings. According to the Washington Post/ABC News polls, the percentage of Americans who hold unfavourable views of Islam has risen over the last three years.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, 39% of those polled stated that they held unfavourable views of Islam. This figure dropped to a low of 24% by January 2002 but has been steadily increasing ever since.
In the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll released in March 2006, 46% of Americans said they held unfavourable views of Islam.
“Although the Pew and the Washington Post/ABC News polling data differs to some extent, we can say with confidence that around 40% of Americans have negative or unfavourable views of Islam,” Dr Shehata said.
There is less variation in the polling data regarding American opinion about Islam and violence. All of the various polling data confirm that a high percentage of Americans believe that Islam - more than other religions - encourages violence.
The Pew surveys, for example, indicate that the percentage of Americans who believe that Islam is more likely to encourage violence compared with other religions has increased from 25% in March 2002 to 36% in July 2005 (although this figure is below the high mark of 46% in July 2004).
A CBS News poll released at the end of February 2006 produced similar findings, with 39% of respondents believing that Islam encourages violence compared with other religions.
The Washington Post/ABC News polls also found that the number of Americans who believe that Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims has increased significantly over the last three years in the US from 14% in January 2002 to 32% as of March 2006.
The academic, regularly interviewed by popular TV channels and newspapers in the US and in the Arab world, recalled that the recent ABC News/Washington Post survey asked Americans about prejudice toward Muslims and Arabs.
The poll asked: “If you honestly assessed yourself, would you say that you have at least some feelings of prejudice against Muslims, or not?” The same question was asked about Arabs.
About 1/4 of the respondents admitted to feelings of prejudice. If 27% said they held prejudiced feelings against Muslims, 25% said they had prejudiced feelings against Arabs.
The poll also asked the following - possibly even more revealing — question: “Have you recently heard other people say prejudiced things against Muslims, or not?”
A total of 34% of respondents said yes, and 43% reported recently hearing prejudiced things against Arabs.
“Americans seem to have more positive attitudes toward Muslim-Americans than Muslims in general and more positive attitudes toward Muslim-Americans than toward Islam as a religion,” he stated.
According to the Pew polls, for example, 55% of Americans held favourable opinions of Muslim-Americans in July 2005, an increase from July 2004.
“An alarming number of Americans are quite willing to impose extra security measures on Muslim and Arab-Americans, such as carrying an extra form of government issued identification or increased security requirements at airports,” Dr Shehata revealed.
And many Americans also favour restricting immigration from Arab and Muslim countries. This trend began immediately after 9/11.
For example, after stating that there has been a “sharp shift towards increased wariness of Islam in post-9/11 America” and noting that “the proportion of the public calling Islamic fundamentalism a critical threat to vital US interests has jumped 23 points to 61%,” the Chicago Council on Foreign Relation’s Worldviews June 2002 report notes that “Suspicion and concern extends to Arabs and Muslim peoples.
By more than a three-to-one margin (76% to 22%), Americans say that based on the events of 9/11 US immigration laws should be tightened to restrict the number of immigrants from Arab or Muslim countries, and 77% favour restricting overall immigration into the US to combat terrorism.
A small majority, 54% to 43% also favour using racial profiling in airport security checks in order to combat international terrorism.
According to Dr Shehata, unfortunately, it is not clear that such feelings have changed considerably in the years since September 11, 2001.
A USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted last summer, for example, found that 53% of respondents favoured “requiring all Arabs, including US citizens, to undergo special, more intensive security checks before boarding airplanes in the US” and 46% favoured “requiring Arabs, including US citizens, to carry a special ID.”
However, 53% were opposed to the idea of requiring Arabs to carry special IDs. All of the polling data confirms that Americans, by self admission, do not know very much about Islam, its teachings or principles despite the fact that there has been a tremendous amount of Middle East and Islam-related coverage in the US media during the last several years.
According to the Pew surveys, for example, only 51% of those polled were able to identify the Qur’an as the holy book of Muslims and only 48% “correctly identified Allah as the name Muslims use to refer to God.”
An absolute majority of Americans (66%), the poll found, said they know “nothing at all” or “not very much” about Islam.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll asked Americans: “Do you feel you do or do not have a good basic understanding of the teachings and beliefs of Islam, the Muslim religion?” 59% of respondents answered “no.”
“What is possibly most fascinating in all of the polling data is the correlation between American’s views toward Islam and a number of other factors,” Dr Shehata observed.
Both the Pew and the Washington Post/ABC News polls establish a relationship between four variables and Americans’ attitudes toward Islam.
These factors are knowledge of the religion, one’s own religion, political views, and age. The existing polling data establishes a positive relationship between both knowledge of Islam and educational attainment, and attitudes toward the religion.
Those who are more knowledgeable about Islam are more likely to view the religion favourably. Similarly, educational attainment is positively correlated with favourable opinions of Islam.
A total of 53% of those with a four-year college degree had a favourable opinion of Islam compared with only 28% of those who had only obtained a high school education or less.
Both polls established a relationship between the religion of those polled and their views toward Islam with white evangelical Protestants more likely to have unfavourable views of Islam (including prejudiced thoughts) than other religious groups or “secularist.”
According to the Washington Post/ABC News poll, “While 46% of all Americans have an unfavourable opinion of Islam overall, among evangelical white Protestants it’s 61%.
And 36% of evangelical white Protestants admit to some feelings of prejudice against Muslims” (compared to 27% of the general population).
The Pew poll produced similar findings and added that, “Among religious groups, favourable attitudes toward Muslim-Americans are most prevalent among white Catholics (61%).
According to Dr Shehata, both polls also established that Republicans are more likely to hold negative views of Islam than Democrats.
The Pew poll determined that only 33% of conservative Republicans held favourable views of Islam compared with 56% of liberal Democrats, a 25% difference.
Both polls also determined a relationship between age (or generation) and views towards Islam with younger Americans tending to have more positive views of Islam and those 65 years or older more likely to hold negative views. The academic was of the view that it was partly because of ignorance that many Americans hold negative views of Islam, believe that Islam, more than other religions, is likely to encourage violence and hold prejudicial feelings against Arabs and Muslims.
“Americans know very little about Islam and the more they know about the religion along with increased familiarity with Muslims and Arabs (as neighbours, work colleagues or classmates), in addition to higher levels of educational attainment, the less likely they are to hold negative views of Islam or of Muslims and Arabs,” he maintained.
The speaker cites television news and popular culture as surely among the primary sources of “information” and exposure to Islam, Muslims and Arabs for many Americans.
“News, and particularly TV news, one could argue, is inherently biased against all good news, including news that would depict Arabs, Islam and Muslims in a generally more positive light,” he observed. The coverage of the Middle East and the Muslim World in the US is dominated by the Iraq war, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, terrorism and beheadings.
“This type of bad or negative news dominates coverage and Islam, in the process, becomes synonymous with jihad; jihad, of course, understood in a particular way: as irrational, unjustified, religiously based violence, usually against non-Muslims.”
There are far fewer stories in the US news about Ramadan, for example, or Islam and ethical values, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, or ordinary Muslim-Americans.
Dr Shehata quotes from his own experiences with the media to substantiate this point.
“Out of hundreds of times I have been called for interviews I can only recall two stories that were positive: a CNN story about the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ibadi receiving the Nobel Prize and an article about tourism in Libya for an obscure travel magazine,” he said.
The point is that when the Middle East, Arabs and Muslims make it into the news, it is usually in the context of negative (or unfavourable) events.
“When discussing representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US, we cannot neglect or underestimate the importance of popular culture,” Dr Shehata stated.
Popular culture’s portrayal of Arabs and Muslims exhibits even worse tendencies than those found in the ‘news media.’
More Americans spend more time watching TV serials than news, serious documentaries or educational television. “Well before 9/11, Arabs and Muslims were frequently depicted as terrorists and religious fanatics in American popular culture,” he recalled.
The situation has worsened considerably in the last few years, especially post 9/11. There has been a tremendous increase in television serials about terrorism, counter-terrorism, the CIA and similar agencies - on all of the networks.
Although a small number of these programmes deal with some of these issues more intelligently than others and from a number of perspectives the majority reproduce the standard stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, fanatically committed to killing innocents.
Understandably, the last few years have been a difficult time for Arabs and Muslims in the US.
“For even if one has not been subject to discrimination, prejudice, or hate crimes after 9/11, the general environment has become less welcoming and more threatening,” Dr Shehata pointed out.
Organisations also play an important role in shaping American public opinion about Arabs and Muslims and influencing US policy in the Middle East.
The most important Arab and Muslim American organisations in the US currently are the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American-Arab Institute, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, although there are a number of other groups who also work in these fields.
“Although these organisations have a come a long way in the last 20 years, and play a role in discussions of Arabs and Muslims in the US, they - and groups like them - have been less effective at influencing US foreign policy toward the Middle East,” the speaker said.
Dr Shehata asserts that it would be safe to say that pro-Israeli think tanks and lobbying organisations are very influential and play a major role in shaping American Middle East policy.
The academic infers that this is a particularly low point in US-Arab and US-Muslim relations, and multiple factors account for the rise of anti-Islamic and anti-Arab feelings in the US.
“Public opinion, however, is not static, fixed and permanent but changes over time depending on world events, politics, education and our own actions in the world,” he said.
Dr Shehata added that Education City, Georgetown University, SFS-Q and the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies play an essential role in promoting increased understanding, breaking down stereotypes, and promoting real exchange and genuine understanding among peoples.
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