02/16/15 – John L. Esposito – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line I have John L. Esposito.
He is the co-author of this book with Dahlia Mogahead.
It's called Who Speaks for Islam?
What a Billion Muslims Really Think.
And it's based on Gallup's World Poll.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
And I really should interview you once a year or something on this.
I don't know of any work that superseded it, certainly.
But this is such an important subject, and there is such an unrelenting propaganda campaign from so many different quarters now to keep everyone on such the highest alert that Islam makes people into homicidal maniacs and you don't need to know anything better about your enemies than what the name of their religion is.
And that's about it.
That's what we hear all day.
Well, I deliberately watch Fox News, so I get it worse than everyone else.
But everyone else, too.
We just suffer this all day long.
Islamic radicalism, etc., etc.
And I think that most Americans just have no honest picture of what Muslims really think whatsoever.
And so what you guys did in this is you didn't just collect some anecdotes.
You went and collected anecdotes from Morocco to the Philippines, if I remember it right.
I read it back in 08.
You went and interviewed as many Muslims and as many different Muslim societies as you could.
And you asked them as many questions as you could about what they really think.
And you really came up with a lot of surprising conclusions for people, huh?
I think so.
I mean, I think, you know, regrettably, you know, the extremist events and a lot of reactions overlook what, in fact, the vast majority of that, you know, of the global Muslim community think and believe.
And that continues to remain a significant problem.
All right.
And so now tell us a bit about the methodology because I'm pretty sure I summed it up inaccurately there.
Yeah.
Well, basically, Gallup developed the world, what they call the World Poll in 2001.
And it looked at 130 countries, looking at about 95 percent of the world's population.
Within that, you have polls 2001, 2005 and 2007.
Within those polls, they then brought out their focus on some 35 countries in the Muslim world, as you said, that span the Muslim world.
And what's important about the polls is this isn't polling by simply, you know, telephone, calling people up briefly, calling people in a certain region.
It's polling that takes place where interviewers went out to every strata of society, went from urban areas to towns, to villages, to the most rural areas, and had basically one-on-one interviews done in local languages, et cetera, and cut across from in terms of age, social class, educational background.
So at that time, it constituted the most systematic and comprehensive poll of Muslims.
And remember, this is occurring in that decade after 9-11, so a very critical time to take a look and see what do the vast majority out there think and get beyond what talking heads or academic experts like myself or terrorism experts say, which often can be informed, but did not have that kind of data available to be able to talk with any kind of authority about what a large group of Muslims and diverse groups of Muslims across the world really thought and believed on a lot of the issues that I think many Americans were concerned about, and many in the world.
All right, well, so now I don't want you to overgeneralize.
I wouldn't ask you to overgeneralize.
But the way I remember it, there actually were some pretty general truths about how Muslims perceived the United States of America, spanning all that geography and all those really different civilizations, if you're talking about from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, where they believe in Islam, but they're all very different from each other.
It seemed like you pretty much could generalize what Muslims really think about the United States, about the American people, and about American foreign policy.
Yeah, I think, you know, we noticed there in the data and subsequent studies, excuse me, by others like Pew, for example, you know, have also corroborated that in fact, Muslims do not view the West monolithically.
They distinguish among countries, and certainly back then, they distinguished very clearly between, if you will, the sort of Bush-Blair US-UK on the one hand, and other countries, other countries in Europe or Canada on the other.
And you could see very, very distinctive differences.
That is, very high negative views of the Bush-Blair administration, and particularly its foreign policies in the region, and a much more, you know, as it were, positive assessment.
You know, for example, even when you would look at, let's say, the view of Malaysians looking at the US and Canada, we tend to call Canada the US without US foreign policy.
And just, you know, a shocking disparity in terms of stats, a very low percentage of negative attitude towards Canada at the time, because, of course, Canada was not involved in invading and occupying Muslim lands.
And, you know, and other things also fed into it.
That, for example, Muslims admire Americans for the very thing that Americans in general admire about, that is, people in the Muslim world, what Americans admire about themselves, our education, our science and technology.
But a primary concern is the belief that both Islam and Arabs and Muslims are denigrated.
That, if you will, Arab and Muslim life is cheap.
And I think some of those conclusions get drawn off taking a look at the kinds of battle statistics that have taken place, you know, in the past decade.
Well, if I remember right, they even like our freedom, too, right?
Like the Bill of Rights as, in theory, they're afraid of our Guantanamo justice, our practice.
But the theory of the American-style fair trial, adversarial trial, and you get to face your accusers and all these things, they're all very much in favor of that, too, right?
Well, yeah.
I mean, what you have is majorities of Muslims across the world.
Now, clearly, there are, you know, minorities that would disagree.
But majorities, significant majorities of Muslims across the world admire the U.S. and want for themselves, which is a no-brainer.
You wouldn't even need to admire, as it were, the U.S. for wanting to have good governance, rule of law, freedoms, all of those things they see.
And they admire, you know, the work ethic of Americans.
But what they don't admire is their belief and perception and belief that America has a double standard, for example, when it promotes democracy.
So they're all for self-determination and democracy, that is, many in the Muslim world.
But when they look at American foreign policy and European foreign policy, of course, this has been corroborated with the extent to which both the U.S. and the EU did not really robustly condemn the coup in Egypt.
In fact, the U.S. refused to call it a coup, and the continued support for that.
That just reinforces the sense that there's a double standard when it comes to the promotion of democracy in the Muslim world, and instead a support for authoritarian regimes.
All right.
Now, I know it's very hard to say in very scientific terms in the context of a radio interview like this.
But can you tell us, can you discuss the most important causations and correlations between religious extremism and terrorism and what you think it's important for people to understand about that?
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, actually it's pretty kind of easy.
I don't even have to say the normal patter I would.
All you have to do is take a look at very recent reports coming out of France and in terms of what happened in Paris with the attacks.
But also now, you know, rather late, the French government recognizing that, in fact, a good deal of the problem that they have with extremists are people who are born in regions or, if you will, areas outside of Paris, who are born there, have very poor educational systems.
Often the educational systems receive almost half of what's poured into educational systems in mainstream Paris.
Are handicapped, therefore, in terms of employment, in terms of jobs.
Therefore, you wind up with areas that become high crime.
And you see both there as well as when they look at the recent assassins in Copenhagen.
They're basically described as people that have had problems, you know, with law enforcement, are thugs and then become vulnerable often very, very recently to these, you know, radical jihadist sort of preachers.
Many of them, for example, are really not very familiar with the religion of Islam itself.
Many of them have never even practiced the religion.
All right, I'm sorry that we have to stop there.
We're all out of time, but I hope we can talk again.
I really appreciate your work on this, John.
You take care.
All right, y'all, that's John L. Esposito.
Get this book.
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Who Speaks for Islam?
What a Billion Muslims Really Think, co-written with Dalia Mogahed.
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