Gallup has conducted world-wide polling of Muslims, described by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed as “six years of research and more than 50,000 interviews representing 1.3 billion Muslims who reside in more than 35 nations that are predominantly Muslim or have sizable Muslim populations. Representing more than 90% of the world’s Muslim community, this poll is the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind.” It should be noted that John Esposito is the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, which has received "$20 million of funding from Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal”, as noted in Martin Kramer’s Sandbox Blog.
Esposito and Mogahed report about Gallup’s findings in their book, Who Speaks for Islam?, which has the “not-so-hidden purpose” to “blur any difference between average Muslims around the world and average Americans”, as described in The Weekly Standard. Truth, it would seem, is not an insurmountable obstacle to that goal. (I highly recommend this article).
According to a review published by Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), Esposito’s and Mohaged’s book draws the following conclusion:
“It thus turns out that Muslims apparently want a different kind of ‘democracy,’ one which avoids moral and other kinds of risks. For example, although they would like freedom of speech, they would not like it to be unlimited, such that it might permit speech offensive to religious sensibilities. In other words, blasphemy laws should limit it.”
This means that they want freedom of speech only for themselves! Anyone who has views of Islam that are different from their own would be censored! What’s so great about that? Anyone can be in favor of freedom of speech for those who agree with them. Even in Communist countries, a person is free to express a pro-Communist viewpoint. Is that freedom of speech? A person is committed to freedom of speech only if they also want to protect this freedom for those who disagree with them.
In practice, blasphemy laws apply to any view deemed sufficiently unorthodox; for example, in Muslim countries, the peaceful Ahmadiyya sect is typically deemed heretical and is stifled, even in a “moderate” country like Indonesia. Other “heretical’ sects are persecuted elsewhere in the Muslim world, even in “secular” Turkey. And, of course, the views of Muslims can be considered heretical whether or not they belong to a heretical sect, as can the views of non-Muslims.
So, despite Esposito’s and Mogahed’s attempt to portray the world’s Muslims as “just like us”, even this one statement reveals a vast difference. Individual Muslims should be judged on their merits, and there are Muslim individuals who do indeed believe in free speech for all. However, it is a mistake of monumental proportions to portray the Muslim community as freedom-loving.
