"New Atheists are Wrong about Islam-- Here's How Data Proves it"-- Elias Isquith, Salon

[carolinayellowdog]

I just noticed this article which appeared Thursday on Salon.com. The title is regrettable for an OP here, and I'd have preferred to call it "Muslims are not as distinctive as many think, a new study shows." But DU doesn't allow us to change article titles, so I'll just ask that people engage the content of the article and not the title. These paras summarize the research findings:

I found that Muslims in general are less distinctive than many of us think. In many ways there is really very little difference between Muslims and everybody else. Sometimes I use “everybody else” as the reference category, and sometimes I use Christians in particular, because Christianity and Islam are by far the world’s biggest faith traditions…

Even in some areas in which we expect … I didn’t find a great deal of difference. For example, many people think that Muslims are really intent on fusing religious and political authority, that there’s really no room in Islamic thinking for independent civic sphere that is not run by religious authorities, and in which religious authority and doctrine predominate, meaning there’s little room for an independent civil society and public sphere. Well, I found in this survey data that … Muslims and Christians don’t differ very much on this question, and that most Muslims, once one controls for everything that needs to be controlled for in these statistical analyses, actually do not want to fuse religious and political authority…

Some, of course, do. Some absolutely do. But some Christians do as well … There are many American Christians who are skeptical about dividing church and state rigorously. That’s true for many Muslims as well. But a majority of both Christians and Muslims seem to embrace at least some separation of sacred and secular in politics. That’s one finding that was perhaps surprising and also showed that Muslims are less distinctive than we might think.