New international survey shows broad Muslim support for harsh Sharia punishments

 Jihad Watch

"There's really no such thing as just Sharia, it's not one monolithic Continuum - Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it's understood in many different ways..." -- Reza Aslan
Not really. Tiny Minority of Extremists Update: in "Sharia Über Alles" at the American Thinker, May 4, Andrew Bostom summarizes a new international survey's findings about the broad support in Muslim countries for the harshest Sharia punishments.

Despite a number of (deliberately?) mitigating biases, both methodological and interpretative, the latest Pew Research Forum report, "The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society," released April 30, 2013, confirms the broad appeal of the totalitarian Sharia, Islam's religio-political "law," across Islamdom. The data were pooled from surveys conducted between 2008 and 2012, representing, as touted by Pew, "a total of 39 countries and territories on three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe." Collectively, the surveys included "more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews in 80-plus languages and dialects, covering every country that has more than 10 million Muslims." Pew did acknowledge this important caveat about Muslim populations not surveyed because, "political sensitivities or security concerns prevented opinion research among Muslims." Notably excluded countries were Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and Iran -- all Islamic states, governed by the Sharia, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan under Sunni Islam, the third, Iran, being the world's largest Shiite Muslim state.
Responses to four related questions on the Sharia, comprise the surveys' salient -- and pathognomonic -- findings. The questions were, "Do you favor or oppose making sharia law, or Islamic law, the official law of the land in our country?", and these three internally validating (and equally edifying) queries, "Do you favor or oppose the following: punishments like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery?", "Do you favor or oppose the following: punishments like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery?", "Do you favor or oppose the following: the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion?" Summary data from the nations with the five largest Muslim populations (as per 2010) surveyed, Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (178 million), Bengladesh (149 million), Egypt (80 million), and Nigeria (76 million), revealed:

• 72% of Indonesian Muslims, 84% of Pakistani Muslims, 82% of Bengladeshi Muslims, 74% of Egyptian Muslims, and 71% of Nigerian Muslims supported making Sharia the official state law of their respective societies. The population-weighted average from these 5 countries was 77% supportive. (Composite regional data confirmed these individual country trends -- 84% of South Asian Muslims, 77% of Southeast Asian Muslims, 74% of Middle Eastern/North African Muslims, and 64% of Sub-Saharan African Muslims favored application of the Sharia as official state law.) • 37% of Indonesian Muslims, 85% of Pakistani Muslims, 50% of Bengladeshi Muslims, 70% of Egyptian Muslims, and 45% of Nigerian Muslims favored Sharia-based mandatory ("hadd") punishments "like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery"
• 42% of Indonesian Muslims, 86% of Pakistani Muslims, 54% of Bengladeshi Muslims, 80% of Egyptian Muslims, and 37% of Nigerian Muslims favored the Sharia-based hadd punishment of stoning for adultery
• 16% of Indonesian Muslims, 75% of Pakistani Muslims, 43% of Bengladeshi Muslims, 88% of Egyptian Muslims, and 29% of Nigerian Muslims favored the Sharia-based hadd punishment of execution for "apostasy"

Furthermore, the Pew survey results confirm the abject failure of the U.S. midwifed Iraqi and Afghan "democracies" to fulfill the utopian aspirations of the much ballyhooed "(Bernard Lewis doctrine." Instead, the negative prognostications, epitomized by my colleague Diana West's evocative description "Making the world safe for Sharia," have been realized. Specifically, the Pew data indicated:

• 91% of Iraqi Muslims and 99% of Afghan Muslims supported making Sharia the official state law of their respective societies • 55% of Iraqi Muslims and 81% of Afghan Muslims favored Sharia-based hadd punishments "like whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery"
• 57% of Iraqi Muslims and 84% of Afghan Muslims favored the Sharia-based hadd punishment of stoning for adultery
• 42% of Iraqi Muslims and 79% of Afghan Muslims favored the Sharia-based hadd punishment of execution for "apostasy"

There is much more. Read it all.