The rise of anti-Muslim prejudice

Abstract

The goal of this study is to determine the possible factors leading to increased anti-Muslim sentiment or Islamophobia in a comparative examination of public opinion in the United States and Europe. Secondary analyses of data from the 2008 Pew Global Attitude Project and the 2010 Pew News Interest Index, allow us to assess the role of religious practice, news interest and political affiliation in the attitudes toward Muslim minorities in several countries. Predictors of anti-Muslim attitudes include being politically more conservative and being older in all countries, and paying close attention to news coverage of the Park51 Islamic Community Center in the United States (which was proposed to be built near Ground Zero in New York). In France, but not in the other countries of the study, the importance of the respondents' religion was positively related to anti-Muslim attitudes.

Keywords

Islamophobia public opinion polls anti-Muslim attitudes anti-immigration attitudes media coverage secondary comparative analysis

Prejudice against Muslims in Western countries preceded the 9/11 attacks in the United States, but those events and other acts of violence by terrorists since that time have created a climate for increasing anti-Muslim attitudes in many countries (Amnesty International, 2012).

These anti-Muslim attitudes persist despite the low numbers of home-grown Islamic terrorists in Western countries (see Schanzer et al., 2010). Charles Kurzman’s analysis of acts of terrorism committed by Muslims finds that fewer than one percent of Muslims around the world have been involved in any militant movement in the last 25 years (2011). Yet at least two research reports document discriminatory attitudes (such as those targeting cultural or religious practices) and behaviors (for example, ones that limit employment or education) focused on Muslims in several European countries in recent years (Amnesty International, 2012; Zick et al., 2011). In surveys conducted by Gallup in the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany from 2008 to 2011 significant percentages of respondents (from 30% in France to 52% in the United States) have reported that Western societies do not respect Muslims (Gallup World, 2013).

A growing number of scholars have summarized this climate of anti-Muslim feelings in the United States and Europe under the label of Islamophobia (Mastnak, 2010; Rana, 2007). Historically, Islamophobia, or the fear or hatred of Muslims and Islam, has been used to describe the anti-Muslim feelings of a mostly Christian population in Europe since immigrants from Muslim countries began arriving there in the early 14th century. Current anti-Muslim attitudes in Europe have been revealed in the speeches of recently popular political parties that call for action against Muslim minorities in their countries, through policies that restrict the dress and activities of Muslims, by the building of what are perceived to be overly large mosques, and in public opinion polls across Europe (Zick et al., 2011).

A recent poll conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany, for example, found that between 27% and 61% of people in eight European countries believe there are too many Muslims in their countries. The same survey found that more than half of the people in these nations (except in Portugal) think that Muslims are too demanding, while a similar percentage say that Islam is a religion of intolerance (Zick et al., 2011: 61). The alleged intolerance of Islam is taken as a justification for Islamophobic attitudes that are a part of the European mainstream, according to Hockenos (2011). In 2010, the Council of Europe viewed the issue to be of such importance that its Parliamentary Assembly developed a series of recommendations to combat religious intolerance in its member states (Recommendation 27, 23 June 2010), but little change has so far been detected in public opinion.

Though the United States has relatively few Muslims—an estimated 6 million or .6% of respondents in a national survey (Pew, no date)—Islamophobia is as serious an issue there as in Europe. Public opinion polls that have tracked American attitudes toward Muslims since 2001 show that Americans’ favorable ratings of Islam have dropped from 47% in 2001 to 37% in 2010 (ABC News/Washington Post, 2010). Although many attribute the rise of anti-Islamic attitudes in the United States to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, others blame the U.S. media, which tend to employ Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations understanding of Islam when reporting stories about Muslims or their religion (Seib, 2004). Huntington’s controversial view of post cold war global conflict was that culture—largely based on religion, rather than ideology or geography—would be the cause.

Focus of study

Our study examines the factors that lead to the holding of Islamophobic attitudes in several European countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain) with large Muslim populations and the United States. As Muslim communities continue to grow in non-Muslim majority countries, and issues of identity and belonging only become more salient, it is imperative to understand more fully the intersection of demographics, media, and attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. Since media coverage of Muslims and Islam is likely to shape the opinions of those who have limited or no contact with this religion and its people, it is important to analyze the potential associations these media portrayals might have with people’s attitudes toward Islam in general and Muslims in particular.

We already know that media play a big role in framing the public discourse about Muslims and Islam in Europe and the United States. For example, a meta-analysis of research of European media content related to immigrants by Bennett et al. (2011), found that although variation in tone and balance occurred in the media of member states, Muslims were generally portrayed in stereotypical terms, and Islam was seen as a threat to security. In the United States, research by sociologist Christopher Bail (2012) finds that U.S. media coverage of the 9/11 events was dominated by messages of fear and anger originating in the press releases from anti-Muslim fringe organizations rather than more moderate messages emanating from mainstream civil society groups. He goes so far as to charge that such messages changed the mainstream discourse itself. However, instead of relying on an analysis of media coverage of Muslims and Islam in Europe and the United States, our study tries to determine the actual weight that media coverage might have in guiding public opinion relative to other possible influences, like political affiliation and religious beliefs or practices.

Another goal of this study is to determine whether the underlying predictors of Islamophobia are the same in Europe and the United States. Anti-Islamic attitudes and behaviors have eroded the tenets of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is important to check whether these trends have been fueled by the same basic factors such as political ideology or lack of education. According to Werbner (2005), democracy requires a “shared ethical convictions about the validity of cultural differences” and such ethical commonalities are difficult to maintain while the “globalized images of the Muslim religious fanatic” exist (9).

This study is based on a secondary analysis of representative public opinion polls conducted in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy in 2008 and 2010. We begin by examining first whether anti-Muslim attitudes have increased in the United States and in Europe in recent years and by checking the demographic predictors of Islamophobia. Special emphasis is placed on the interaction of political ideology and religiosity. We then analyze the potential relationship between exposure to negative news about Muslim-related issues and attitudes toward Muslims in the United States by analyzing public opinion data that have been collected during the intense public controversy that surrounded the planned building of an Islamic Community Center in New York City in late 2010.

Anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe

During the past four decades, the Muslim population in Europe has increased dramatically through migration and family reunification, creating tensions that, perhaps, should not be all that surprising. In Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Appadurai (2006) suggests that these tensions between majority and minority groups in Europe are not a result of what Samuel Huntington (1993) called a “clash of civilizations,” but instead the outcome of what is a globalized civilization of clashes.

…there is a growing tendency to see global moral enemies as being morally indistinguishable from local or internal enemies. This double logic—globalizing internal moral opponents and localizing faraway moral enemies—is the key to the logic of ideocide and civicide (118).

This clash between the local and the global is clearly being felt in Europe today. Across Western Europe, there are more than 17 million Muslims, located in 17 countries with the largest numbers living in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain (Pew, 2010c). In all of these nations, there has been an increase in Islamophobic discourse, perhaps most notably in the Netherlands where Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and leader of the nationalistic Freedom Party, has called for a complete halt to immigration to the Netherlands from all Muslim countries.

This shift in public discourse on immigration has also led to recent changes in public policy related to Muslim practices. Earlier in 2010, the Belgian parliament voted to ban niqabs (face-covering veils in Islam) in public places. However, the government fell before the Senate could vote it into law. In a similar move, the French legislature outlawed niqabs from being worn publicly. The law took effect in spring 2011 with a fine of 150 Euros for wearing a niqab in public. French Justice Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie explained the need for this law in terms of French integration and societal values, saying that to live with an open face “is a question of dignity and equality” (Davies, 2010).

There are other signs that more and more Europeans fear the growing number of Muslim immigrants. Bleich (2009), who compared responses to public opinion polls conducted between 1988 and 2008 to determine whether Islamic hatred had increased in Britain and France over a 20-year period, found that anti-Muslim attitudes in the two countries are higher today than in the late 1980s. In Switzerland, where a referendum was held in 2009 to determine whether mosques could attach minarets to their buildings, a Gallup poll found that about 4 in 10 citizens see an irresolvable contradiction between the values of liberal democracy and Islam (Manchin, 2009).

A trend toward stronger anti-immigration attitudes can also be observed in Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently said that multicultural approach has failed in Germany, noting that immigrants are not willing to adapt to German society (Siebold, 2010). The debate over foreigners in Germany also has gained much publicity since former central banker Thilo Sarrazin (2010) published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away With Itself), a book in which he accused Muslim immigrants of lowering the intelligence of German society.

Media content analyses document the rise of anti-Muslim stories in some European countries as well as a shift in the focus of these stories. In a study that examined nearly 1000 newspaper stories across Great Britain from 2000 to 2008 alongside an analysis of two years of visual images in articles, Moore et al. (2008) found that the bulk of coverage of British Muslims—around two-thirds—focuses on Muslims as a threat (in relation to terrorism), a problem (in terms of differences in values), or both (Muslim extremism in general). The number of such stories increased steadily from 2002 on. However, while terrorism was a consistent topic of these stories, the authors also found an increasing coverage of religious and cultural issues, alongside a very small number of stories related to immigration and asylum.

Islamophobia in the United States

Some researchers point to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as the starting point for Islamophobia in the United States. Gottschalk and Greenwald (2008), however, find Islamophobia present in the United States far earlier and argue that Americans were using the fear of Islam as a unifying concept in defining America. Similarly, Rana (2007) links America’s Islam connection to the transatlantic slave trade and ties American anti-Muslim sentiment with racism—noting that Islam figured as an important aspect of the early formation of U.S. racism. According to the author, this construction of an African-American Muslim “other” has been perpetuated by the media through its coverage of the arrests of African-American Muslims suspected of terrorist crimes (2007: 159).

In their study of the portrayal of Muslims in several U.S. newspapers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sheikh et al.(1995) found that Muslims were portrayed negatively in news reporting. However, most of the stories that mentioned Muslims were about wars or other types of conflicts; they did not find evidence of a more generalized negative bias. After 9/11, this negative media image of Muslims was compounded by reporting on Islam and Muslims that relied on Huntington’s (1993) idea of a “clash of civilizations” for its framework (Abrahamian, 2003). It was a framework, Seib (2004) writes, the American media were all too ready to embrace after the fall of Communism in the late 1990s.

Other studies of media coverage of Muslims or Muslim countries have shown that such coverage has been largely negative. Ali and Khalid (2008) examined coverage of three categories of Muslim countries (U.S. allies, U.S. enemies, and neutral countries) by Newsweek and Time Magazine from 1991 to 2001. Even before 9/11, their study found that overall coverage of Muslim countries in each group was largely negative. A 2009 Pew study of religion-related news in the U.S. press did not examine whether news during that year was positive or negative, but instead focused on the main stories of the year. In general, religion-related news took up a small part of the print, television or online news (1% or less in 2008 and 2009). However, the main stories for the year touched on Islam by focusing on negative stories such as the ban on minarets in Switzerland and the shooting at Fort Hood in Texas by Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan (Pew, 2010b).

Media Tenor (2010), which examined the coverage of Muslims and Islam on the U.S. major networks from January to August, 2010, concluded that “there are virtually no positive issues for Muslims within and outside of the US in the view of U.S. television news. International conflicts, terrorism and domestic security remain the top issues in 2010. References to Islamic religious life were critical as well.”

Media coverage of the Islamic community center in New York City

Anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States became highly visible in early 2010 during the controversy that surrounded the planned building of an Islamic Community Center a few blocks from Ground Zero in New York City (Hernandez, 2010). Those who say that these attitudes have been triggered by the media point to conservative politicians whose inflammatory speeches were cited in the press (for example, former Republican congressman Newt Gingrich calling supporters of the project “apologists for radical Islamist hypocrisy (see Hertzberg, 2010: 27), the blogger Pamela Geller (who insisted on calling the center the “Ground Zero mosque” despite its location two blocks from the World Trade Center site), and other commentary favoring the conservative political views that target Muslims.

Media organizations made speculations about what to call the building—a mosque, a cultural center or both. Many outlets could not even agree on the characteristics of a mosque. Supporters of the project refer to it as the “Islamic Community Center,” “Park51” (referencing the street address on Park Place), or simply “Islamic Cultural Center.” Those who oppose Park51 called it an “Islamic citadel,” “the 9/11 victory mosque,” or “Park51 mosque.”

The planned Islamic Community Center rapidly became national news. Many media outlets reported that should the plans for building the Center be canceled, many extremist organizations would take it as the trigger for hostile actions against Americans at home and abroad. The culmination of the discussion took place right before the 9/11 commemorations and was sparked by the threats made concerning the burning of the Quran by a minister from a Gainesville, Florida church. Negative publicity placed the minister at the center of the Park51 issue, even though both issues have nothing in common. David Gergen, CNN senior political analyst, supported the extensive media coverage of the minister and argued that “it was perfectly legitimate to cover him in terms of Islamophobia. I do think he is representative of a fever we see in the country that needs to be contained” (Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, 2010).

According to a Pew (2010d) study that examined the news coverage for the week of 6–12 September 2010, the second most covered topic during that week was anti-Muslim sentiment, filling 15% of the news hole. The fourth most covered topic that week was the Park51 Community Center, with 4% of the news hole. According to the research, coverage of the two controversies also illustrates the different news agendas of radio and television talk show hosts. While the conservative hosts dedicated slightly more coverage to the mosque story than their liberal counterparts, liberal talkers devoted about four times as much attention to the Koran burning saga as the conservative hosts.

American national and local media used multiple public opinion polls to bolster the reporting of Park51. A Daily News poll found that 48% of New York residents opposed the Center, with more women than men in opposition. In particular, 52% of women wanted to keep it out of lower Manhattan, compared to 41% of men (McShane, 2010). A Fox News poll revealed that 64% of respondents opposed, 30% were in favor, while 6% remained undecided (Blanton, 2010). Polls also found a difference in respondents’ opinions depending on the distance from the proposed construction; Manhattanites were more supportive of the project, while Staten Islanders are mostly against (Hertzberg, 2010).

The conservative Fox News tended to report news about the Islamic Community Center with public opinion polls that showed that almost 3 of 4 Americans were against building the Center (see Fox News: 13 August 2010; 20 August 2010; 8 September 2010; 9 September 2010). Fox News also linked President Obama’s supportive statements about the Center with a Pew poll on religion, which showed that nearly one in five Americans wrongly believed him to be a Muslim rather than a Christian (Fox News, 20 August 2010).

Although new media are not the focus of this research, it is important to note that social media such as Twitter and Facebook also became important tools of supporters and critics of the Center. In addition to the networking they provide, such sites also serve to help shape both identity and community (Baym, 2010; Gruzd et al., 2011; Miller, 2011) and they served that purpose in connection to Park51. Specifically, a number of Facebook groups targeting the issue of the Islamic Community Center in New York were created: Against the Mosque at Ground Zero, Stop The Ground Zero Mosque, Yes to the Mosque Near Ground Zero, New Yorkers Against the Mosque at Ground Zero, Cordoba Initiative, and 1,000,000 Against The Mosque at Ground Zero. Each group was joined by a large number of “followers”—creating an easily accessible community of “believers” who worked to shape the stories the mainstream media told of the controversy.

At the same time, the blogosphere became a source of intense public debate surrounding the Islamic Community Center. According to the Pew Research Center’s New Media Index (Pew, 2010a) that analyzes millions of blogs on a weekly basis, the Park51 issue was the second most popular subject for comment during the week of 9–13 August 2010. During that week, 18% of the news links from the blogs were about that topic and were dominated by anti-center opinions.

Increasingly, the blogosphere is impacting the types of stories told by mainstream journalists, as well as how they are telling those stories and the sorts of experts journalists interview (Barlow, 2008). Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim bloggers such as Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes have fashioned themselves into legitimate experts on Islam largely on the strength of their blog following—both were highly visible in the mainstream news media during the Park51 debate.

Research questions and hypotheses

As discussed in the previous sections, even before the attacks on 9/11, Muslims in the United States were linked to acts of terrorism, leading to an overall animosity toward all Muslims. The plan for the Islamic Community Center in New York simply served as another flash point for anti-Muslim feelings. In several European countries, on the other hand, right-wing conservative politicians who spout anti-Islamic rhetoric have gained a foothold and increasingly feel comfortable to speak out. In addition, new laws have been passed in various European countries such as Sweden and Denmark that constrict immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Our first research question therefore asks:

RQ1: Has the degree of Islamophobia increased both in Europe and the United States during the past years?

To answer this question, we will analyze public opinion data collected between 2004 and 2008 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (Pew, 2008). The surveys track the favorability of Muslims among representative samples of respondents from in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain with an identical 4-point question (very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, very unfavorable) that is asked once every year. Data from the 2008 survey will be analyzed to test whether personal demographic factors are associated with these attitudes.

There is also mounting evidence that anti-Muslim attitudes are linked to political party affiliation. In a recent survey study of American values, for example, 66% of the members of the conservative Tea Party said that Muslim values are not compatible with American values nor its way of life, while 63% of Republicans responded similarly (Jones et al., 2011: 10). In the same study, 68% of those who “most trust” the conservative Fox News for information about politics viewed Islamic and American values as incompatible (Jones et al., 2011: 11). We therefore expect that politically conservative Americans (Republicans and those affiliated with the Tea Party) will be more likely to express anti-Islamic attitudes (Jones et al., 2011). Across Europe too, researchers have found a relationship between right wing extremism and anti-Muslim attitudes (see Langenbacher and Schellenberg, 2011). Our first hypothesis therefore states that:

H1: More conservative respondents will hold stronger anti-Muslim attitudes in Europe and the United States.

In addition to the impact of political party affiliation on attitudes toward Muslims, religious beliefs may also factor into the rise of Islamophobia—at least in the United States. Based on an extensive analysis of public opinion data collected in the past four decades in the United States, Putnam and Campbell (2010), for example, argue that religiosity has become highly correlated with membership in the Republican Party. They document the beginning of this trend in the 1980s, when two issues, abortion and gay rights, became part of the political agenda. Since these two issues have been traditionally linked to religiosity, once they became an important part of the Republican’s party platform, the connection between church-going and being a Republican was forged. That trend has increased over time to the point where there was a 22% difference in support for McCain in the 2008 presidential election by those who said they attended church at least weekly (61%) and those who said they never go to church (39%) (Putnam and Campbell, 2010: 375). It is therefore possible that Islamophobia adds to the issues that link religion and party affiliation in the United States. Islamophobia has been linked to religion in Europe as well, but in a slightly different way. Europe has been imagined as an “exclusively Christian” space (European Commission and European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, 2003) in which Muslims, native born or immigrant, are seen as incompatible “other” who do not belong in a historically Christian Europe (Schiller, 2005). We therefore test the hypothesis that:

H2: Respondents with more frequent religious practice will hold stronger anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States—but not in Europe.

In addition to political party affiliation and religiosity, there might be other important demographic factors that correlate with more anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States and Europe. The surveys on which this study is based include a series of questions that probe respondents’ gender, age, education, marital status, employment status and income. Based on previous studies of anti-Muslim attitudes, we expect that especially lower levels of education and unemployment are associated with anti-Islamic attitudes (Jones et al., 2011). On the other hand, women and those who are younger are expected to be more accepting of Muslims (Jones et al., 2011; Saad, 2006). Our second research question therefore asks:

RQ2: What other demographic factors (other than political party affiliation and religiosity) predict attitudes towards Muslims in Europe and the United States.

As we note above, both the traditional news media and the blogosphere paid a great deal of attention to the Park51 story for at least two weeks in September 2010, and much of that coverage was negative. It is therefore reasonable to assume that this negative coverage might have had an effect on Americans who either did not know much about Muslims and Islam or already held negative attitudes toward one or both. Empirical evidence for such a possible interaction between media coverage and latent anti-Muslim feelings is mounting. One study that analyzed Fox News viewers’ anti-Muslim feelings reported, for example, that 60% of Republicans who most trusted Fox News also believe that Muslims were attempting to establish Shariah law in the United States (Jones et al., 2011: 19). And as we reported earlier, those trusting Fox News the most also tend to believe that Islamic values are incompatible with American values (68%). That percentage is lower for those who most trust CNN (37%) or public television new (37%) (Jones et al., 2011: 19). Given the mostly negative coverage of the Park51 issue in the American media in September 2010, we hypothesize that:

H3: Americans who paid more attention to news stories about Park51 will hold stronger anti-Muslim attitudes than those who paid less attention.

Methods

This study is based on a secondary analysis of two survey studies conducted in 2008 and 2010. The data of the first survey is part of the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes Project, which conducted telephone and face-to-face interviews in 20 nations. We chose to analyze the data from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany and Spain for this particular project. Interviews in the five selected nations were conducted by telephone with representative samples of adults in March and April of 2008. Sample sizes ranged from 752 respondents in Spain to 1000 respondents in the United States.¹ All surveys were based on identical questionnaires that probed (among other things) respondents’ attitudes toward Muslims, their perception of the economy, their perceived importance of religion, and their religious practice and demographic background.

Attitudes toward Muslims in the 2008 surveys were measured by asking respondents how favorable or unfavorable their opinions of Muslims are (1 = very unfavorable; 4 = very favorable). Perceptions of the economy were measured by asking respondents how they would describe (a) the current economic situation in the United States and (b) their personal economic situation (1 = very bad; 4 = very good). To assess religious attitudes, respondents were asked how important religion is in their life (1 = not important at all; 4 = very important) and how often they pray (1 = never; 5 = several times a day). The survey also included demographic control measures for gender, age, education, marital status, employment status, political ideology (1 = left; 6 = right), and income.²

The data of the second survey come from the 2010 Pew (2010a) survey that was conducted by telephone among a representative sample of 1003 adult Americans in August 2010. The survey included various measures of respondents’ attitudes toward Islam and Muslims in general and a specific question that assessed respondents’ attitudes toward the construction of the Islamic Community Center. In addition, the survey gauged respondents’ attention to news about the planned center, their self-perceived knowledge about Islam, and whether they personally know any Muslims.

Attitudes toward Muslims in the 2010 survey were assessed with four separate measures. Respondents were first asked whether they generally have favorable or unfavorable opinions of Islam (1 = very unfavorable; 4 = very favorable). Next, they were asked whether they believed that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers or not (coded as 3 = support, 2 = neutral, and 1 = oppose). Attitudes toward the Islamic Community Center itself were measured by asking whether they supported building the Center close to the 9/11 site and whether they believe that Muslims should have the same rights as other religious groups to build houses of worship in local communities (both coded as 3 = support, 2 = neutral, and 1 = oppose).

Attention to news about the controversy surrounding the Islamic Community Center was assessed by asking respondents how closely they followed the news stories about the Center (1 = not at all closely; 4 = very closely). The survey also included a measure of self-perceived knowledge about Islam, asking respondents how much they know about the Muslim religion and its practice (1 = nothing at all; 4 = a great deal). In addition, the 2010 poll included demographic control measures for respondents’ sex, age, education, employment status, income, race and political affiliation.³

In order to evaluate the potential impact of respondent’s economic and religious attitudes on perceptions of Muslims in 2008, a separate linear regression analysis was run for each of the five nations (United States, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Spain) controlling for demographic factors and political ideology. Similar regression analyses were run with the 2010 U.S. survey data to test the potential impact of respondents’ attention to news about the Islamic Community Center, their self-perceived knowledge of Islam, and their personal experience with Muslims on their perceptions of Muslims and Islam. The dependent perception measures used in these four regression analyses represented respondents’ (a) favorable or unfavorable opinions about Islam, (b) perceived rights of Muslims compared to other religious groups, (c) perceptions of Islam as a non-violent religion, and (d) support for building the Islamic Community Center.

Because the study is based on secondary analysis of survey data from 2008 and 2010, not all measures are completely identical or ideal to test the stated relationships. However, all surveys were conducted by the same research company and share a set of similar questions across nations and time. Moreover, all surveys are based on representative, national samples and are relatively comparable. We therefore believe that our analysis makes an important empirical contribution to the cross-national research on attitudes toward Muslims in the United States and Europe.

Findings

In order to evaluate public opinion trends toward Muslims before 2008, we relied on data collected in 2004 and 2008 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (Pew, 2008). As Figure 1 shows, unfavorable opinions toward Muslims have increased in the United States between 2004 and 2008. While in 2004 almost half (48%) of all Americans had unfavorable opinions of Muslims, this group increased to 56% in 2008. In Europe, on the other hand, anti-Muslim opinions generally declined between 2004 and 2008. In Spain, for example, negative opinions of Muslims declined from 46% in 2004 to 33% in 2008. Similarly, unfavorable opinions of Muslims in Great Britain decreased slightly from 67% in 2004 to 62% in 2008. Anti-Muslim sentiments in France and Germany, however, remained fairly stable at around 62% and 40%, respectively. Thus, while opinions of Muslims deteriorated significantly in the United States between 2004 and 2008, this trend was not observed in Europe.

Figure 1.

Unfavorable Opinions About Muslims in the United States 2004–2008 (in percent). Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project 2004–2008. Survey Question: On a different topic, please tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Muslims? (Pew, 2008). Somewhat and very unfavorable percentages were combined.

Fairly strong support was found for Hypothesis 1, which predicts that more conservative respondents in Europe and the United States will hold stronger anti-Muslim attitudes. Conservative respondents (measured in terms of political ideology) in the 2008 survey held more unfavorable opinions of Muslims in the United States (β = − .19, p < .001), France (β = −15, p < .001) and Germany (β = −.11, p < .01). Similarly, in 2010, Republicans were more likely than Democrats and Independents to (a) hold more unfavorable opinions of Islam (β = − .18, p < .001), (b) believe that Islam encourages violence (β = − .12, p < .001), (c) believe that Muslims do not have the same rights as other religious groups to build houses of worship in local communities (β = − .20, p < .001), and (d) oppose the construction of the Islamic Community Center (β = .24, p < .001). Overall, it seems fair to conclude that more conservative respondents in the United States, France and Germany were more likely to hold negative attitudes toward Muslims and Islam.

However, no support was found for our second hypothesis that religiosity is associated with stronger anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States in 2008. In fact, both the importance of religion and religious practice were unrelated to attitudes toward Muslims in all nations except in France, where respondents who considered religion more important actually had slightly more positive perceptions of Muslims (β = .11, p < .05).

In the next step, the analysis focuses on which other demographic factors might explain attitudes toward Muslims in Europe and the United States. To analyze the simultaneous effects of respondents’ demographic characteristics in each of the five nations, sex, age, education, marital status, employment status, political ideology and income were regressed on attitudes toward Muslims in 2008. As Table 1 shows, age, education, and political ideology were the strongest and most consistent predictors of attitudes toward Muslims in most nations. While older respondents were more likely to hold more unfavorable opinions of Muslims in the United States, France, Germany and Spain, the same was true for conservative respondents in the United States, France and Germany. Respondents with more education, on the other hand, were more likely to hold more positive attitudes toward Muslims in all five nations.

Table 1.

Predictors of attitudes toward Muslims in 2008 by country (Pew Global Attitudes Project).^a

	USA	France	Germany	Great Britain	Spain
Demographics
Female (1 = yes)	.13 (.07)^b	.01 (.06)	−.01 (.06)	.11 (.07)^b	−.03 (.07)
Age	−.22 (.01)^c	−.16 (.01)^b	−.19 (.01)^c	−.03 (.01)	−.10 (.01)^d
Education	.14 (.02)^c	.11 (.02)^b	.12 (.02)^b	.12 (.02)^b	.17 (.03)^c
Married (1 = yes)	−.03 (.08)	.01 (.06)	.05 (.06)	.05 (.08)	.07 (.08)
Unemployed (1 = yes)	.06 (.08)	−.06 (.09)	.06 (.09)	−.07 (.11)	−.07 (.13)
Ideology (left-right)	−.19 (.04)^c	−.15 (.03)^c	−.11 (.03)^b	−.07 (.03)	.01 (.03)
Income	.08 (.02)	−.04 (.02)	−.03 (.02)	−.01 (.03)	−.01 (.03)
Other predictors
Perceived economic situation of country	−.02 (.04)	.09 (.05)^d	.14 (.05)^c	.03 (.05)	.14 (.05)^b
Perceived economic situation of respondent	−.01 (.05)	.02 (.05)	.03 (.05)	.06 (.05)	.03 (.06)
Personal importance of religion	.10 (.05)	.11 (.04)^d	.02 (.04)	.04 (.05)	−.03 (.05)
Frequency of church attendance	−.05 (.03)	−.02 (.03)	.06 (.03)	.07 (.04)	.04 (.04)
Adj. R-square	.11	.08	.07	.05	.06
N	690	721	617	506	512

^aQuestion used for dependent variable: On a different topic, please tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of Muslims? Reverse coded. Cell entries are standardized OLS regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses.

^b p < 0.01.

^c p < 0.001 (two-tailed).

^d p < 0.05.

Table 1 also shows that German, French and Spanish respondents who judged the economic situation of their country more optimistically also were more likely to have more positive opinions of Muslims. The respondents’ personal economic situation, on the other hand, was not associated with their attitudes toward Muslims in any of the five nations.

Our third and final hypothesis predicts that respondents who paid more attention to news stories about the 2010 controversy surrounding the planned Islamic Community Center would hold stronger anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States. As Table 2 indicates, this hypothesis is supported in three of four cases. Respondents who paid more attention to the Park51 news stories not only were more likely to oppose the construction of the Center (β = −.16, p < .001), but also were more likely to oppose the idea that Muslims should have the same rights as other religious groups to build houses of worship and local communities (β = −.07, p < .05). More attention to news about Park51 also correlated positively with the belief that Islam encourages violence (β = −.12, p < .001). While these associations are relatively weak, they remain significant despite the strong associations observed for control variables such as age, education and party identification. Hypothesis 3 is therefore supported.

Table 2.

Predictors of attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic community center in 2010.^a

	Favorable opinion of Islam	Muslims should have same rights as other religious groups	Islam does not encourage violence	Center should be allowed to be built
Demographics
Female (1 = yes)	.02 (.05)	.04 (.06)	.14 (.06)^b	.02 (.06)
Age	−.11 (.01)^b	−.10 (.01)^b	−.12 (.01)^b	−.19 (.01)^b
Education	.20 (.02)^b	.13 (.02)^b	.08 (.02)^c	.10 (.02)^d
Unemployment (1 = yes)	−.05 (.08)	.02 (.08)	−.02 (.09)	−.01 (.08)
Income	.03 (.01)	.05 (.01)	.03 (.01)	−.04 (.01)
Minority (1 = yes)	−.01 (.07)	.01 (.07)	.01 (.08)	.06 (.07)
Republican (1 = yes)	−.18 (.06)^b	−.20 (.06)^b	−.12 (.07)^b	−.24 (.07)^b
Incr. R-square (%)	9.6^b	7.8^b	5.4^b	12.2^b
Media exposure
Attention to news about Islamic Community Center	−.04 (.02)	−.07 (.02)^c	−.12 (.03)^b	−.16 (.03)^b
Incr. R-square (%)	.10	.50^c	1.3^b	2.2^b
Experience with Islam
Knowledge about Islam	.02 (.03)	.06 (.03)	−.05 (.04)	.10 (.04)^d
Know Muslim (1 = yes)	.13 (.06)^b	.06 (.06)	.17 (.07)^b	.09 (.06)^d
Incr. R-square (%)	1.6^b	.70^c	2.3^b	1.7^b
Total R-square (%)	11.3	9.0	9.0	16.1
N	981	981	981	981

^aCell entries are standardized OLS regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses.

^b p < 0.001 (two-tailed).

^c p < 0.05.

^d p < 0.01.

It is also worthwhile to mention that respondents who claimed to know Muslims personally were more likely to hold positive attitudes toward Islam (β = .13, p < .001), think that Islam is not a violent religion (β =.17, p < .001), and support the construction of the Islamic Community Center (β = .09, p < .01). A higher level of self-perceived knowledge about Islam, on the other hand, only was associated with more support for the construction of the Center (β =.10, p < .01).

Conclusions

This paper focused on the rising Islamophobic climate in both the United States and in Europe. We explored the potentially interactive effects of religion, political ideology, and media attention on attitudes toward Muslims. Though ideally our data would have been collected over time with comparative measures, this was not possible. The Pew studies’ use in the testing of our research questions and hypotheses served as the next best source of data, however.

Our findings indicate that negative attitudes toward Muslims and Islam are most strongly and consistently associated with political conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. Politically conservatives in the United States, France, Germany and Spain generally saw Muslims in a more negative light than liberals—an indication that perceptions of Muslims are connected to political views in most of the here analyzed nations.

Following Putnam and Campbell (2010), we also thought that the connection between religiosity and political affiliation would be supported among American respondents in this study—but that was not the case. Perhaps it is too soon for an anti-Muslim stance to be adopted as a core issue for religious conservatives. Our findings also show that perceptions of Muslims and Islam are likely independent from religious beliefs and instead are driven much more by political viewpoints.

In all countries of the study, higher levels of education and actual contact with members of the Islamic faith correlate with more positive attitudes toward these people, a finding that matches results in previous studies (Ata et al., 2009; McClaren, 2003). This might indicate that policies directed toward increased education and social contact between majority populations and Muslim minorities could lead to holding more positive attitudes. We also found that older people were more likely to hold negative opinions in all countries, so increased education among older citizens and the airing of positive media stories about Muslims could contribute to changed attitudes toward Muslims in this group. Because older people tend to consume more news than younger audiences, positive media coverage might exert a positive influence especially among this group.

As predicted, our analysis found support for the hypothesis that media exposure to Muslim-related issues might have an impact on attitudes toward Muslims and Islam in general. Our analysis shows that U.S. respondents who paid more attention to media coverage of the Park51 issue were less likely to support the building of an Islamic Community Center in New York City, more likely to think that Islam is a religion of violence, and that Muslims should not have the same rights as other religious groups.

Since being Republican was also a predictor of these attitudes, we believe that respondents were more likely to be exposed to conservative media where stories about the Center were framed in a negative light. However, the fact that media coverage of the Islamic Community Center was predominantly negative means that no matter which news stories Americans consumed, they might come away with negative attitudes about Islam or Muslims. While providing fair and balanced coverage remains a guiding principle of U.S. journalism, on this issue, the U.S. media were clearly unbalanced. As a consequence, the U.S. media might have contributed to more negative perceptions of Muslims and Islam among American audiences in 2010.

While our research findings provide a detailed examination of American and European attitudes toward Muslims, media coverage of Muslims, and the Islamic Community Center, there are several limitations. One is our inability to predict the same patterns in the findings beyond the five countries we chose for this study. The choice was based on recent events that put Islam and Muslims at the forefront of public debate in the selected European countries and the United States, among which was the Islamic Community Center in New York City. Also, the large number of Muslims living in the United Sates, France, Germany, Great Britain and Spain (Pew, 2010c) made these five countries a research priority.

Another limitation stems from our use of the secondary survey data. As mentioned earlier, not all measures are identical in the 2008 and 2010 data to test the hypothesized relationships. However, the two surveys were conducted by the same research company and share a set of similar questions across nations and time.

Also, we have failed to mention the role of gender in this study so far. Though being female was not an across-the-board predictor of positive attitudes toward Muslims, in the 2008 study, that was the case in 2008 in the United States (β =.13, p < .01) and Great Britain (β =.11, p <.01). And in 2010, being female was a predictor of the attitude that Islam does not encourage violence in its religious teachings (β =.14, p < .001). This is in line with past research that’s shown women tend to hold less prejudiced attitudes toward minorities than men (Bierly 1985; Dustmann and Preston 2001). Thus, exploring the role of gender in perceptions of Muslims could prove to be a fruitful line of inquiry in future studies.

According to Putnam and Campbell (2010), the key to reducing hatred against Muslims may come through more inter-religious contact. Their study of religion and politics in the United States showed that the most negatively perceived religious groups, of which Muslims were one, are concentrated in particular geographic areas and this limits contact with people from other religions. “We would expect their image problem to disappear even more rapidly as more and more Americans count a Buddhist, a Muslim, or a Mormon among their friends and family,” the authors conclude (p. 534).

We believe that is also true of Europeans, and that Islamophobia only will decline when people choose to challenge their assumptions about the nature of Muslims and the Islamic religion. It appears from some scholars’ analysis of the problem, however, that Muslims have been racialized (Meer and Modood, 2010; Yilmaz, 2011). Though this may not be a new way to view the problem (Said, 1995), it does make it more difficult to address when Muslims are ascribed with not only a religious, but also a racial identity—the “other” in terms of their religious and cultural views and practices—but also in terms of a racial category. Since such views are not openly admitted in the media or elsewhere, deconstructing and then exposing the roots of Islamophobic ideas will not be easy.

Footnotes

Notes

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